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Accredited programme requirements were created from the Criminal Justice Act 2003 but in order to

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Accredited programme requirements were created from the Criminal Justice Act 2003 but in order to understand how this came to be it is significant that the history and political context of the probation service is understood.
The Probation of Offenders Act was established in 1907 and under this act the release if offenders into the community under the control of probation officers were made official. The primary aim of the probation was made clear under this act which was to advise, assist and befriend and it continued that way until 1970’s. During this period it transformed into an agency concerned with casework, diagnosis, and rehabilitation rather than the influence of personal character, psychological understandings of human …show more content…

However, research carried out in the 1990’s as part of ‘what works’ movement identified that the most successful sentences were those that attempted to change, not only the offender’s behaviour but also their attitude towards their offending (Hollin, 2007). This catalysed the push towards cognitive-behavioural approaches and by 1999 one especially important development was the establishment of the Correctional Services Accreditation Panel, which ‘quality assured’ probation and prison programmes for rehabilitating offending. This technique brought an emphasis of individual responsibility of an offender (Mair,2004). A criticism of this was the lack of attention of sociological factors that can influence criminal behaviour.
Responsibility of offenders can be considered to have arose as part of the ‘Just Deserts’ in which is fundamental to it rational in two ways. First, the need to sentence individuals for the crime committed rather than sociological or behavioural issue that may have been a factor in the offender committing the crime. Secondly, under the concept of proportionality in which the sentence is proportionate to the crime. At this point a very subtle difference in sentencing had an impact on the way probation was viewed because non-custodial sentences became recognised as an alternative to prison rather than an alternative to punishment (Worrall, 2006). Thus, probation was regarded as a punishment in its own right which is

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