Mark Oldfield, Research Officer with Kent Probation Service, discusses how the increasing use of market based concepts and approaches by Probation Service managers combined with the move toward a national computerised information system signals a drastic phase of re-organisation for the work of the Probation Service. He argues that the move toward a high-tech, finance-led Probation Service with its associated expansion of data gathering, although apparently resonant with information driven innovations in the private sector, represents a method of management concerned more with the maintenance of bureaucratic and hierarchical control and that such control threatens professional work within the Service, with fragmentation and de-skilling as the removal of discretion becomes a necessary part of the delivery of a standardised probation 'product'.
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