Letter From a Vanished Profession

To whoever now performs the functions once known as probation,

We are writing from what you would probably describe as an earlier model - back when this work was considered a profession rather than a process.

We were trained to exercise judgement, not simply to apply guidance. We were expected to challenge decisions, including those made above us, if we believed risk or fairness required it. Disagreement was not automatically treated as non-compliance. It was part of the craft.

That word 'craft' may sound strange to you. It implied something learned slowly, through experience, supervision, mistakes, and reflection. It could not be downloaded, standardised or accelerated without loss.

Much of the work happened in conversations that were not scripted and outcomes that could not be guaranteed. Change, when it came, was uneven, fragile and often invisible to anyone not directly involved. That was understood. It was still considered worthwhile.

You may have inherited a system that prioritises consistency, auditability and risk transfer. We recognise the logic. Systems prefer certainty, and human judgement is inconveniently unpredictable.

What disappears, however, is the relational core that made probation distinct from surveillance. Once the relationship becomes secondary, the role changes even if the title does not.

We watched this transition happen gradually. New language appeared first. Then new metrics. Then new technologies. None of them individually abolished the profession. Together, they reshaped it until something recognisable only in outline remained.

The public narrative suggested modernisation. Internally, it often felt like subtraction.

Experienced practitioners left faster than they could be replaced. Those who arrived later were expected to perform complex work without the apprenticeship that once sustained it. The system called this resilience. We recognised it as exposure.

If you now work in an environment where discretion feels risky, where time for reflection is scarce, and where success is measured primarily by compliance rather than change, please understand this was not the original design.

Probation once assumed that people desist from crime through human connection, accountability, and the slow rebuilding of ordinary lives. It was imperfect, inconsistent and sometimes frustratingly slow. It was also profoundly human.

We are told progress required something more efficient.

Perhaps it did.

But efficiency answers a different question from rehabilitation.

If you find yourself wondering why morale is fragile, why turnover is high, or why the work feels heavy in ways not captured by workload tools, it may be because you are carrying responsibilities shaped by a profession that no longer exists, without the authority or conditions that once made those responsibilities sustainable.

Should you encounter references to “advise, assist and befriend,” or to probation as a service grounded in social work values, treat them not as myths but as artefacts. They belonged to a period when public protection was understood to depend on relationships as much as controls.

No formal announcement marked the end. There was no closure notice, no ceremony, no final day. The profession dissolved through incremental change while everyone was busy managing the consequences.

If this message reaches you at all, it is because someone believed a record should survive, not of policies or structures, but of what the work once felt like from the inside.

Whether that matters to you will depend on what the job has become.

We hope you have more room to be human than we did at the end. If not, then probation did not evolve it was replaced.

Signed,
A probation officer from before