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At the 'conversation with Paul Senior' event in January 2016 at Kendal the group had to go back to first principles to test out a basic proposition - whether probation, however it is defined, has a place in 21st century responses to crime and any societal attempts to rehabilitate, reform, reintegrate and/or restore offenders back into communities. If we could agree the core principles of what constitutes 'probation' and also understand and articulate the boundary issues, would most societies driven by human rights and equality of opportunity for all its citizens inevitably seek to create some form of probation? This was the proposition. This has been seen to happen for instance in recent years in Eastern Europe where the limitations of a penal system based just on imprisonment has led to the creation of services in the community akin to probation. Or is an opposite proposition equally possible that there is nothing universal about probation and we are seeing its death knell in the UK? The changes wrought by Transforming Rehabilitation have suggested that the very future of probation is at risk. Commentators have talked about the death knell of probation (Senior, 2014); questions of legitimacy attendant upon privatisation (Deering & Feilzer, 2015); or the most radical change since it was introduced a little over a century ago (Newburn, 2013). This is the core question at the heart of this paper, is there a future for probation and, if so, what defines its essence? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the editor discusses an article on diversity and effectiveness in probation by Ian Hankinson, an article on promoting human dignity by Julia Palmer, and a speech by Jonathan Ledger on the prospects for probation under the coalition government.

Like most European countries, probation training and education in England and Wales has traditionally looked to social work to provide its knowledge base for practice. However, in the 1990s this relationship was threatened by successive governments. moves to toughen up the image of the probation service and in which an association with social work was seen as an obstacle to change. This paper examines developments since the introduction of a specific award for trainee probation officers and considers the implications of the new qualifications framework to be introduced in England and Wales in 2010. A key element of the discussion will be the extent to which the changes in training arrangements have resulted in a cultural change within the Probation Service of England and Wales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Classification with regard to their risk/needs has become an increasingly significant aspect of work with offenders generally. In England and Wales, the Offender Assessment System (OASys) used by the National Probation Service has a key role to play in effective practice. OASys is the latest in o series of such assessment tools, but despite considerable care taken over its development, users' views about its efficacy have not been explored. This article reports the results of the first national survey of Probation Officers' views about OASys. While a variety of concerns are noted -- especially the time-consuming nature of completing an OASys assessment -- and such concerns need to be addressed, on the whole, users are not opposed to OASys. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In January 2008, the latest organisational restructuring involving the Ministry of Justice saw NOMS split between 'delivery' and 'strategy', with responsibility for the former being assumed by the Director General of HMPS. The full implications of the latest restructuring are not yet clear, but there are concerns that the probation service as a distinctive 'voice' within the criminal justice system will be lost in the name of greater harmonisation with a much bigger and politically more powerful prison service. We have arrived at a critical moment in the history of the Probation Service but one that has been foreshadowed for some time by a range of politically driven imperatives. Among these, we consider that three have had and will continue to have a particular impact on probation. These are: moving centre stage, correctional drift, and modernisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]