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Imprisonment is the usual outcome when considering measures for correction and punishment for offenders. As this method is associated with a deterrence effect, it can promote the safety of the majority by isolating dangerous criminals. While incarceration is a custodial or non-community based treatment, community-based treatments may also be imposed in which offenders are able to receive supervision or participate in reparation activities while still living with their families and working or attending school. Such treatment is intended for more impulsive young offenders who are vulnerable to crime-committing situations. This chapter focuses on the issue of whether community-based treatments (CBTs)—Police Superintendent's Discretion Scheme (PSDS), Probation, and Community Service Orders(CSOs)—are indeed more humanitarian and effective.

This chapter turns from the normative to the practical case for more participatory democracy in criminal justice by examining the contemporary use of jury-like procedures in municipal policymaking and in restorative justice programs. Reformers such as Dienel and Fishkin have employed citizens’ juries and deliberative polls in complex urban planning and environmental management matters. Both procedures recruit representative groups of citizens, provide information, facilitate dialogue, and seek to obtain reflective opinions useful for policymaking. Restorative justice programs like Vermont Reparative Probation also incorporate lay citizen participation to spark thoughtful dialogue between offenders, victims, and supporters. Differing in scope and process from the traditional jury, these jury-like experiments consider a wider range of issues and involve all participants in a multifaceted conversation. These experiments, this chapter argues, underscore the jury’s contemporary relevance and potential, yet they also demonstrate the comparative advantages of the traditional jury. The jury trial has created a distinct, durable, and public role for citizens; though circumscribed, lay decision making on the jury makes a concrete impact on real lives and incrementally shapes criminal justice more broadly.

This chapter traces the origins of the most common outcome available to the children’s hearing – a supervision order in terms of which the child will remain in their own home. Social supervision grew out of the probation service developed at the turn of the 20^th century, and was extended to care and protection cases by the Children and Young Persons (Scotland) Act 1932. The nature and role of probation officers in the early 20^th century is looked at, supervising both child offenders and child victims, and the legislation governing probation is analysed. The formal shift from probation to supervision for all children subject to orders made by the children’s hearing came about with the Social Work (Scotland) Act 1968, under which the probation service came under local authority control, and supervision orders became the main outcome at children’s hearings. The nature of supervision in that Act and its 1995 and 2011 replacements is then examined.

This chapter focuses on the professional practices and skills employed by probation officers (PO) during first interviews with individuals serving probation orders. Its focus is comparative and it draws on the results of research conducted by the authors in two different jurisdictions, Belgium and Spain (Catalonia). The study employed an observation schedule to observe first interviews. The schedule was collaboratively developed by researchers from various European jurisdictions in the context of the COST Action Offender Supervision in Europe (Boxstaens et al., 2015). This chapter includes some methodological reflections on the strengths and limitations of using structured observation as a method for collecting comparable data and focuses on the actual results of employing the observation schedule and interviewing POs in the two jurisdictions. Data will be analysed comparatively to assess the skills the practitioners employed, and attention will also be paid to variations within jurisdictions and between individual practitioners. Results and implications are discussed in terms of the different cultural, legal, and institutional aims and settings existing in the two jurisdictions involved, and interpreted in terms of POs' dual role (support and control), and the working alliance between the professional and the sentenced individual.

This chapter shares personal experiences and perceptions as a probation officer in a Central London Probation Office, covering an area with the highest overall crime rates in the capital. An ever-increasing part of this chapter's author's caseload now contains those on Anti-Social Behaviour Orders. He refers to the current legal definition of anti-social behaviour (ASB) as that which is for present purposes framed within the wording at the outset of section 1(1)(a) of the Crime and Disorder Act of 1998, but with further refinements in ASB legislation enacted since that time, most recently via the amendments to the Police and Justice Act of 2006. The author describes the lessons he learned from his encounter with a client named John, who was awaiting sentence for breaking into his former demoted flat. He notes the recent pace of change, in organisational and legislative terms, facing the Probation Service. Not the least significant of these has been the creation of the National Offender Management Service, geared eventually to supersede Probation.

This chapter discusses the nature of probation values and the impact structural and organisational changes have had on the development of professional values and their relevance to contemporary probation practice. The impact of the different ‘sides’ that the person on supervision, practitioner and organisation might experience is considered, along with the impact of the ideological pressures of current penal policy. It argues that values remain of high value to practitioners regardless of the future shape of criminal justice provision, and that an inclusive debate about the nature of values and a statement of ethics for practice is necessary to ensure a professional rights based and anti-discriminatory practice in the future. It suggests that professional registration may be a consideration to achieve a professional identity within probation and the increasingly wide range of service providers likely in the future.

This chapter focus on the informal regulation of prostitution by examining the role of religious voluntary organisations in ‘rescuing fallen women’. Instead of punishing women who were caught soliciting by sending them to prison, the police and magistrates often turned to probation and voluntary organisations in an attempt to rehabilitate these women using a more penal welfare approach. The first half of this chapter will outline the ways in which probation sentences were used to police women who committed prostitution offences and examine the close links that existed between the new probation service and voluntary institutions. The second section will look more closely at the daily activities of these voluntary organisations, focusing particularly on the Magdalene Asylums, the Scottish National Vigilance Association (SNVA) and the Women Patrols. These case studies explore the ideologies, aims and methods of these organisation and how the daily routines and experiences of the ‘inmates ‘changed during the period. These case studies will allow us to examine how the collaborations that were established between these voluntary organisations, the police and the probation service influenced the regulation of prostitution and women’s experiences of the criminal justice system.

This chapter provides an overview of the child rights in India. The Guardians and Wards Act 1890, Child Marriage Restraint Act 1929, Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act 1956, Young Persons Harmful Publications Act 1956, Probation of Offenders Act 1958, Apprentice Act 1961, Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act 1971, Children (Pledging of Labour) Act 1933, and Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act 2000 are some of the provisions that deal with children. Some major policy and plan documents relating to children are described briefly. The Government of India is enforcing about 120 schemes and programmes for the welfare and development of children and women through more than thirteen ministries and departments. The child's right to development is crucial, both to safeguard the right to a future as well as the rights of future children.

Chapters 7, 8, and 9 focus largely on the experiences of Grade 2 inmates at Raiford prison farm during the 1930s and 1940s. This chapter examines official efforts to prolong commercial farming as an integral part of the state prison system and evaluates the states-use system during the Depression and war years. The links between state and national anxieties over rising numbers of young white male offenders in the Depression years and the implementation of new classification procedures for white male first offenders are examined. These changes underscore that penal reform in Florida was designed first and foremost for white male inmates and consequently perpetuated the secondary and discriminatory treatment of black male and many female prisoners.

The creation of the Probation Service in England and Wales could be seen as an expression of public theology in action. The evangelism of Victorian life was an important factor in shaping the early practices of probation through the work of the Police Court Missionaries, employed by the Church of England Temperance Society. In his seminal quartet of essays, Bill McWilliams describes the period 1876-1936 as one of ‘special pleading’ (McWilliams 1983:129-147). ‘Mercy’ was the concept which provided the key to understanding the missionaries’ place in the courts, and in particular their social enquiry practice. Mercy stood between the offender, the missionary and the sentencer, and it was mercy which made sense of their relationships. In this chapter the author considers if the concept of mercy still has salience in contemporary probation practice and argues for a re-assertion of the humanitarian sentiments that guided the early work of the Police Court Missionaries.

This chapter examines the range of formal institutions and mechanisms – including borstals, approved schools, detention centres, remand homes, probation and supervision – that aimed to reform juveniles who had been processed by the courts for criminal or status offences. An uneven but discernible shift in rhetoric and ethos was apparent across the period 1945-1970; corporal punishment was increasingly rejected and there was a move towards psychiatric intervention, democratic forms of governance and person-oriented approaches to the management of behaviour. However, lack of resources, including deficiencies of accommodation and staffing, remained a problem for many services. Thus it can be argued that the penal-welfarist approach to youth justice, assumed to be hegemonic in the post-war years, was never fully or consistently delivered.

Chapter Ten explores the changing nature of probation practice through a critical analysis of the multiple and complex roles of practitioners, who are required to be agents of public protection and enforcement, and rehabilitation. This chapter argues that the work of the Probation Service needs to be identified at three levels of a complex adaptive system: the policy system, the organisational system of the probation trust and the individual practitioner-probationer relationship. Within the context of complexity theory, arguments are made for the importance of creativity at all levels of the system and the need for positive feedback within those systems that allows organisations and practice to exist at the ‘edge of chaos’, which allows novel solutions to apparently intractable problems.

This chapter sets out the premise and aims of the book – bringing together international research on evidence-based skills for working with offenders in the criminal justice system. It explains the breadth and parameters of the books, including defining and contextualising the term ‘desistance’ for the purposes of the book. The chapter also explains the genesis of the book, arising from the international Collaboration of Researchers for the Effective Development of Offender Supervision network (CREDOS), and sets out the aims and work of CREDOS. Finally, the introduction summarises the structure and the chapters of the book.

Social scientists have often had difficulty evaluating the impact of probation services, partly because expectations and political circumstances change and partly because appropriate methodologies have been slow to develop. This chapter outlines the history of evaluative research on probation. It describes the limitations of early probation research which led to erroneous conclusions that ‘nothing works’, and goes on to show how more recent research has been based on a fuller understanding of practitioner inputs through research on programmes, skills and implementation. This is starting to lead to a better understanding of which practices are effective (‘What Works’). The chapter advocates a mixed qualitative and quantitative methodology for evaluative research which combines understanding, measurement and comparison. Finally, it points to some risks to evidence-based policy which arise from current populism and post-truth politics.

The Transforming Rehabilitation policy in England and Wales, involving the separation of the Probation Trusts into a publically National Probation Service (NPS) and 21 privately financed Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRC), was promoted as being an opportunity to stimulate innovation and develop new working practices within probation. Drawing on an ethnographic case study of the implementation of Transforming Rehabilitation the authors will consider some of the key challenges and opportunities for staff working in a Community Rehabilitation Company and what they might suggest in terms of the longer-term impact upon the working practices of probation staff as they move into a more competitively structured environment. Using Gorman et al’s (2006:21) assertion that constructive probation practice is ‘more artistic than technical, more creative than procedural, more collaborative than instrumental’, the authors explore what skills, qualities and values will be required in this new practice environment and whether or not it will lead to further deprofessionalisation?

This chapter briefly present the results of a research study that took place between 2012-2014 in Romania. More specifically, the chapter will analyse the extent to which probation practice in Romania follows the principles of desistance. The chapter starts with an overview of what the desistance literature suggests is required for effective probation practice. It then goes on to present the findings of a study that was based on external observations of practice using a checklist. Based on this study it seems that although the right premises are there, probation practice is still distant from the desistance principles and practices. In its conclusion, the chapter explores the implications of the study’s findings for practice.

A key aspect for promoting quality in one-to-one probation supervision is to focus on what practitioners actually do with those being supervised during supervision sessions. The SEED initiative, developed by NOMS in England and Wales, aimed at promoting offender engagement in probation supervision. Through training and continuous development of experienced practitioners, it aimed to bring together practitioners’ skills in areas such as motivational interviewing, problem solving and cognitive-behavioural approaches, risk-need-responsivity and structuring and provide a framework through which they could respond to the individual being supervised over the course of the supervision, promoting desistance. This chapter provides some of the results from two evaluations of SEED training, one in England and one in Romania. Both evaluations included staff views, user views on their supervision and compliance measures. The chapter also reflects on the process of policy transfer needed and the experience of doing evaluations in the two countries, given the different histories and lengths of orders for probation supervision in England and Romania.