This paper brings a close analysis to bear on tensions in the main discourses within probation and the wider criminal justice system, namely between punitive, target-driven approaches and the opposing gender-responsive, strengths-based, humanitarian, individualised ones. Drawing on a pilot study, which is an early part of the author's Ph.D., the article explores how probation practitioners atte...

Reliability in decision making about intervention plans is a necessary condition for evidence-based probation work and equal treatment of offenders. Structuring decision making can improve agreement between clinical decision makers. In a former study however, we found that in Dutch probation practice structured risk and needs assessment did not result in acceptable agreement about intervention ...

The origins of the probation service can be traced back to the late-Victorian era and the introduction of the so-called police court missionaries who super vised offenders on conditional release from the court. The service grew slowly, but mushroomed in the 1970s and 1980s when several major acts widened the scope of the service by introducing parole, after care of discharged prisoners, communi...

A weekly clinic was held for one year in a London probation office with 41 probation officers. Only 23 cases were referred but the clinic was found to be a valuable forum for discussion of problems with the officers, 10 per cent of whose clients were estimated to be receiving psychiatric treatment elsewhere. Suggestions are made to improve collaboration between psychiatrists and probation offic...

The Joan C Edwards School of Medicine (Marshall University, Huntington, WV, USA) was placed on probation by the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME) in June 2011. In the following 2 years, extensive changes were made to address the numerous citations that resulted in this probation. In October 2013, the LCME lifted probation. In this article, we detail the challenges and solutions iden...

Federal Probation (ISSN 0014-9128) is dedicated to informing its readers about current thought, research, and practice in corrections and criminal justice. The journal welcomes the contributions of persons who work with or study juvenile and adult offenders and invites authors to submit articles describing experience or significant findings regarding the prevention and control of delinquency an...

Research on social work in the criminal justice system was well represented in the social work literature until the 1990s. Since then, changes in the organisation, training and research base of probation practice, particularly in England and Wales, have all contributed to a separation between probation research and the mainstream social work research literature. However, recent probation resear...

This article illustrates how the physicality of a probation office can be considered both integral to, and representative of, several important changes in the probation service’s recent history through analysis of research conducted in a probation office. I suggest that the relationship between the ‘protected’ zone of the office and the ‘unprotected’ zone of the waiting area and interview rooms...

MOTIVATIONAL INTERVIEWING (Miller & Rollnick, 1991) is a way of talking with people about change that was first developed for the field of addictions but has broadened and become a favored approach for use with populations in a variety of settings (Burke, Arkowitz & Dunn, 2002). It has been introduced to criminal justice in general (Birgden, 2004; McMurran, 2002; Farrall, 2002) and probation ef...

Families of clients under the care of the probation service are at significantly higher risk of experiencing a cot death or a stillbirth than the general public. Pregnant women in the immediate families of clients under the care of the probation service should be identified to health service personnel involved in their antenatal and postnatal care in an effort to avert unnecessary deaths.