A Future for Evidence-Based Do-Gooding?

Abstract

This chapter will focus on the international history of the probation service with a particular emphasis on the values and principles that underpinned both management and practice during most of the twentieth century, and how latterly they have been compromised by overtly political agenda. It will define those values and principles, explain why they are important, describe how they have been undermined as well as how they have survived in the undergrowth of practice, and set out the arguments for their reinstatement at the heart of a newly constituted probation service. This will not be an exercise in nostalgia for a golden age but instead it will posit values and principles in the real and current world of accountability and legitimate demands for demonstrable effectiveness. A central argument of this chapter will be that during the emergence of the Effective Practice Initiative an opportunity to incorporate the demands of accountability within the humanistic tradition of probation was lost. This chapter will pitch for that opportunity to be revisited.