The De-professionalization of Probation Officers

This chapter investigates the ability of an occupation group to control the purpose, process and outcome of its working activities. The emergence of probation may be traced in the work of police court missionaries. Beginning with the Church of England Temperance Society, their work was informed by an evangelical spirit which placed absolute responsibility for a criminal act in doubt due to the idea of ‘lapse’ from a moral way of life. In 1922, the Report of the Departmental Committee on the Training, Appointment and Payment of Probation Officers noted that probation was not a profession in which people could expect to command high salaries. Furthermore, the 1925 Criminal Justice Act made it mandatory, rather than discretionary, for each area to have a probation officer attached to it and to designate each petty sessional division a probation area.