This chapter discusses a specific example of the politicisation of social policy. I contend that shifts in language that have taken place across different policy sectors, at different rates, over the past three decades, give us access to transformations in the underpinning values of policy work. Thus I consider the nature of the language, the knowledge and the values of policy – using the probation service as a case example – to analyse ‘policy politics’. This chapter links the specific case with wider developments in crime control policies. Faced with the distinctive socioeconomic features of late modernity, including the penal crisis that has developed since the 1970s, governments in Britain and the US have engaged in two strategies: an adaptive strategy focusing upon ‘preventive partnership’ and a sovereign state strategy involving ‘punitive segregation’. The first is a way of spreading the responsibility for crime control to the wider society, to the ‘responsible citizens’, the shopkeepers, business people and community members, engaging them in partnerships to take preventive action against crime; redefining the roles of criminal justice agencies such as the police and the probation service (Garland, 2000, p 348). It is an approach that focuses less on crime causation and more upon the management and processing of offenders. The second is a politically driven ‘tough on crime’ stance that involves harsher penalties, fewer opportunities for early release, harder prison conditions and a move away from treating young offenders as children and towards treating them as criminals (Gregory, 2006).

This chapter traces probation policy language from the late 1970s to date, and shows how language supports particular versions of values and practice. The chapter is not intended as a detailed discourse analysis of policy documents, rather the aim is to demonstrate how attention to language enables us to access some of the conceptual matters that underpin policy intent. At a macro-level, a discourse both shapes and is shaped by the prevailing socioeconomic context. At the micro-level, language choice preferences certain concepts and values above others; from the designations used to describe policy actors, to the characterisation of what is done, to the terms used to refer to recipients of policy services (Gregory and Holloway, 2006). Thus language serves as a way in which to explore changing contexts of policy making, underpinning values and the relations between policy, politics and values.