Attitudes and beliefs of trainee probation officers: A ‘new breed’?

Abstract

As part of their attempts to re-package probation supervision as ‘punishment in the community’ and concerned with risk assessment and the protection of the public, recent Conservative and Labour governments abolished social work training for probation officers and, over the last 10 years have sought to recruit trainees from a wider base than previously and train them in these new objectives. This study looks at the attitudes of two cohorts of trainees over a range of issues and concludes that they may be more ‘traditional’ in terms of these attitudes than government may have wished.