Advanced Search

Journal Navigation

Journal Home

Subscriptions

Archive

Contact Us

Table of Contents

CiteULike is a free service for managing and discovering scholarly references - click here to get started.

Sign In to gain access to subscriptions and/or personal tools.
Probation Journal
This Article
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow References
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to Saved Citations
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Right arrow Request Reprints
Right arrow Add to My Marked Citations
Citing Articles
Right arrow Citing Articles via Google Scholar
Right arrow Citing Articles via Scopus
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by McNeill, F.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Complore   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us   Add to Digg   Add to Reddit   Add to Technorati   Add to Twitter  
What's this?

Remembering probation in Scotland

Fergus McNeill

Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde, Fergus.McNeill{at}strath.ac.uk

Set within the contexts of probation’s upcoming centenary in Scotland (in 2005) and the current debate about the future of criminal justice social work in Scotland (and probation in England and Wales), this article provides an account of the early history of probation in Scotland, focussing on the rarely discussed period between 1905 and 1968. Following Nellis’s (2001) injunction to develop a ‘historically tutored memory’ as a defence against the narrowing of our visions for the future, and drawing on Vanstone’s (2004) recent work on the history of the service in England and Wales, the article pieces together and seeks to understand a significant change in Scottish probation’s core identity and purpose from providing supervision as an alternative to punishment to providing ‘treatment’ as a means of reforming offenders. In the concluding discussion, the article briefly summarises the subsequent move towards a welfare-oriented approach after 1968 and, more recently the drift towards public protection as an overarching purpose (Robinson and McNeill, 2004). The article concludes that the current debate in Scotland should shift from ‘second order’ questions around organizational arrangements to ‘first order’ questions around which aspects of these various purposes and identities should endure in the 21st century.

Key Words: Glasgow • probation history • Scotland • social work history

Probation Journal, Vol. 52, No. 1, 23-38 (2005)
DOI: 10.1177/0264550505050624
Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Complore Complore   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us   Add to Digg Digg   Add to Reddit Reddit   Add to Technorati Technorati   Add to Twitter Twitter    What's this?