In the last decade the Probation Service has had a rough ride. It has been changing fast and is now being called upon to change even faster, and to cast itself off from its current base of training and values derived from the social work. Until recently a service providing social work with offenders, it has become one where probation is, since 1991, a sentence of the courts and where the reduction of re-offending is (sometimes) explicitly stated to be its prime aim.
