Book Review: Loraine Gelsthorpe and Rod Morgan (eds) Handbook of Probation Cullompton: Willan Publishing. 626 pp. £31.50 ISBN 1—843921—89—8
| Author | Dennis Gough |
| Published date | 01 May 2009 |
| Date | 01 May 2009 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/17488958090090020803 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Book Reviews 251
imprisonment rates and punitive politics of law and order are most strongly
associated with those countries that have most enthusiastically embraced
neo-liberalism and that the exceptions to these patterns are those societies
that have retained a social democratic framework provides the basis for
Reiner’s preferred route out of the darkness.
Reiner notes that neo-liberalism has been the dominant discourse for 30
years and as such has become the ‘common sense’ of late modernity; efforts
to promote alternatives, he argued, should be pursued even if they might
struggle to shake the orthodoxies of our time. While he acknowledges that
his outlook is bleak, the global financial crisis that has rapidly developed
in the period since this book appeared (which has led to something of a
renais sance in Keynesianism) might mean that Reiner’s passionate argument
for social democracy might receive a more enthusiastic response from the
honest citizen than perhaps he imagined. In the preface, Reiner states that
the book aims to inject criminological research into public debates on
crime and control and in this he succeeds admirably: no easy or comforting
answers arise.
Loraine Gelsthorpe and Rod Morgan (eds)
Handbook of Probation
Cullompton: Willan Publishing. 626 pp. £31.50 ISBN 1–843921–89–8
• Reviewed by Dennis Gough, University of Portsmouth, UK
Any review of a book on the Probation Service containing considered
chapters by Loraine Gelsthorpe, Rod Morgan, Mike Nellis, Tim Newburn,
Peter Raynor and Maurice Vanstone among others is of seminal importance
to scholars in the field. As a result it really goes without saying that such a
book is going to be indispensable to academics, criminal justice commenta-
tors, trainee probation officers and undergraduate students of criminal
justice and criminology. As a result, the Handbook of Probation, like all
of Willan’s Handbooks, is essential core reading and will go straight to
uni versity core reading lists of probation officer training programmes and
academic units on community punishment. Furthermore, it is a large book
and it is difficult to do justice to the breadth of the contributions on offer
here in an orthodox review.
The political backdrop to such a book is worthy of comment. The Govern-
ment’s reorganization, some would say modernization, of the Probation
Service into an extended family of probation in a mixed economy forms the
backdrop to this excellent collection. As a result, there is a real sense that in
looking back at probation’s history and changing roles and practice the book
is sure of its ground. However in terms of looking towards the future as any
good text should, the book is on less sure footing in that the Government’s
reforms are being played out in the House of Lords after a significant back
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