Introduction

The Probation Service in England and Wales occupies a unique role in the delivery of criminal justice, with probation staff having multiple roles, including being agents of public protection and enforcement, as well as promoters of rehabilitation and looking after the needs of the victims of crime. To fulfil these roles, the Probation Service has always worked across boundaries and, as argued by Gough (2010, p 21), this position ‘has made effective working relationships essential with sentencers, police and prison officers, and a whole host of organisations in the voluntary and community sector’. This chapter will explore the changing nature of probation practice in England and Wales through a critical analysis of the multiple and complex roles of practitioners, and examine whether it is possible for practitioners to maintain these roles in a state of ‘superposition’ (see later) or whether they are, in fact, contradictory giving rise to unintended and damaging consequences. This analysis of the work of the Probation Service will identify three levels of system, which are complex and adaptive in nature (while acknowledging from a realist and general complexity perspective that all complex systems are nested (fractal) in nature, and that the boundaries of any system are unclear, and also that any system or subsystem has influence beyond what the boundaries may be): the policy system, the organisational system of the probation trust and the individual practitioner–probationer relationship. In this discussion, I want to explore the creative and novel solutions that can be found at ‘the edge of chaos’ through engaging in necessary, just and virtuous relationships with probationers, which draw upon a realist understanding of the relationships between determinism, order for free and emergence. A key focus for the chapter is that some of the tools and concepts and ways of working that are already familiar in criminal justice and social work are sensitive to working with complexity. In that sense, this approach represents an evolution rather than a revolution.

The policy context

The 2010 establishment of the Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition government in the UK has seen the beginnings of changes in social work, child protection and probation practice after the centrally driven national service framework approach of the New Labour governments (1997–2010).