Abstract

As the last chapter has explained, at the beginning of the 1970s the Probation Service held a respected but unwittingly vulnerable position within the criminal justice system. During the next 30 years, century-old assumptions and practice orthodoxies that had underpinned the criminal justice system would be swept aside (Garland 2001) and the Probation Service would change from a closely knit federation of semi-autonomous local services to an accountable, centrally driven criminal justice agency. As Garland (at the end of that period) put it ‘probation has had to struggle to maintain its credibility, as the ideals upon which it was based have been discredited and displaced’ (2001: 177).