“We’ll always go back for more”? Probation, precariousness, and professional identity

Over the last few decades, the environment in which the Probation Service in England and Wales operates has become both more punitive and managerial, dominated by the logic of risk. A challenge to the tenets on which probation’s professional project was founded, such as its (social work) knowledge base and autonomy to work with individuals under supervision, has accompanied this changed landscape. Indeed, probation’s relative powerlessness to mobilise against governmental impositions has resulted in four top-down organisational restructurings since the turn of the millennium. This paper, therefore, considers the impact of such change on professional identity in probation. Against the backdrop of the most recent organisational reform–the “unification” of services, in June 2021 which brought to an end a failed seven-year experiment in part-privatisation–it explores how punitive, managerial, and marketising reforms have contributed to a crisis of identity that has been decades in the making. The paper argues that, while an appeal to an ideology of service centred on helping clients remains significant among staff, the nature and extent of the challenges probation faces has rendered professional identity more precarious.