Introduction

The year 2014 brought an unprecedented challenge to the Probation Service and its staff. After over 100 years of work as a public sector organisation, the Probation Service no longer exists as a unified public body. There have been perceived threats to the institution and governance of probation in the past and many changes over the past 20 years that have been aimed at controlling probation from the centre. One of the main reasons for this was successive governments’ desire to change probation values perceived to be too soft on crime and thereby to try to change practitioner behaviour, as well as to attract a new ‘type’ of person into the profession. Probation staff values appeared to survive previous threats but the current challenges threaten 100 years of development of an ideal around probation as a public sector endeavour.

This study is based upon research conducted with over 1,300 Probation Service employees in March and April 2014, that is, before the division (on 1 June 2014) of the Probation Service for England and Wales into a new National Probation Service (NPS – part of the civil service) and 21 Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs). CRCs were initially wholly state-owned organisations but were subsequently transferred to private and third sector ownership in February 2015. The study also draws on findings from a small-scale, qualitative pilot study with probation managers who had moved to the private sector (for a full discussion of this research, see Deering et al, 2014). The current study took place in March/April 2014, and participants completed an online questionnaire that elicited both qualitative and quantitative responses to a range of questions about why they had joined the service, its values and what its role should be, before considering the prospects for marketisation and privatisation under ‘Transforming Rehabilitation’ (TR) (Ministry of Justice, 2013).

While the views expressed were wide-ranging, a strong underlying trend was normative, encapsulating the ‘probation ideal’: a public sector, constructive, humanistic approach to community supervision that did not include the making of profit from punishment and thus, indirectly, from the commission of crime itself. As a result, we have grouped responses such that the analysis is focused upon this ideal of probation as a public sector endeavour.