Editorial Comment
| Author | Jean Hine and Kevin Wong |
| Pages | 1-3 |
1
British Journal of Community Justice
©2021 Manchester Metropolitan University
ISSN 1475-0279
Vol. 18 (1) 1-4
EDITORIAL: THE FUTURE OF PROBATION
Kevin Wong; Co-Editor
Jean Hine; Co-Editor
Abstract
This Special Is sue is themed around the Future of Probation - post 2020. Contrib utors
were invited to take as their starting point (but not exclusively) the special issue of this
journal which we published in March 2016 (Vol 14 Issue 1). The landscape of prob ation
provision in England and Wales looked very different then. The Transforming
Rehabilitation (TR) changes (MoJ 2013) had just seen the part privatisation of th e public
probation service. The papers in that issue – in part a response to that significant
structural change - were based on the theme o f: “Imagining Probation in 2020: hopes,
fears and insights”. It drew on discussions which occurred at a retreat hosted by Paul
Senior the then Co-Editor of the jou rnal, with a small group of probation academic
colleagues.
Dedication
This Special Issue is dedicated to Paul. H e co-founded this journal in 2002 with his friend
and colleague Dave Ward – our editorial board’s longest serving member. Paul was Co-
Editor from 2002 till his retirement in 2016. Through out his professional life, he was a
passionate advocate for probation as a practitioner, policy commentator, trainer and
academic. In his last editorial for that 2016 special issue, he commented:
“The death knell has been sounding for probation for some years now and
this group was gathering to imagine what probation might look like in 2020,
if indeed it had a future!” (Senior, 2016).
Arguably the newly expanded National Probation Service for England and Wales provides
an affirmative answer to that question, although doubtless the shap e and form of this
unified service will take some time to fully emerge.
Paul sadly passed away in 2019 but his legacy – of which this journal is part – continues.
As part of this tribute our first paper is an edited transcript of a lecture that Paul gave to
mark his retirement in April 2016. Perhaps fittingly, it was the last lecture in the
Community Justice Portal series which he originated. The lecture was based very much
around the special issu e of March 2016: unsurprising given th e amount of intellectual
thinking and effort which had been undertaken by Paul and his ten colleagues to produce
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