The first epiphany of this book was published in 2010: Exploring Modern Probation: Social Theory and Organisational Complexity. It spanned the years from the election of New Labour in 1997 to 2009. The current edition has substantively rewritten, revised and updated the original text. It is chronologically extended to include 1997–2015, which witnessed the eruption of the rehabilitation revolution. It is also theoretically enriched. Authors are not the best judge of their own work, just as parents are not the best judge of their own children. Nevertheless, I advance the bold, perhaps reckless, claim that this is a better book primarily because of its extended chronology, theoretical additions and refinements.

I have been associated with the probation service since 1977 (approaching 40 years), when I first worked as a volunteer at the Lancaster probation office. One of my tasks was to explore employment opportunities for borstal boys released on licence. Since 1979, the criminal justice system in general, and probation in particular, have been confronted with a series of critical events or hinge moments: in 1979, the conservative government; in 1992/93, prison works; in 1997, New Labour; in 2001, the National Probation Service (NPS); in 2003, the National Offender Management Service (NOMS); and in 2010, the move towards transforming rehabilitation. This book covers the period of the New Labour and Coalition governments, 18 years that culminated in the privatisation of a proportion of probation work by 21 Community Rehabilitation Companies. This politically imposed process was driven relentlessly forward through time, but backward ethically, by the ideological and material interests of neoliberal capitalism and its New Public Management. One serious casualty is the probation service.

I proceed as follows. Chapter One moves around within an extended chronology that embodies the New Labour governments from 1997 to 2010, followed by the Coalition government from 2010 to 2015. The first substantive period disturbingly modernised, the second convulsively transformed, probation services and the criminal justice system. Chapter Two assembles the theoretical resources to excavate and critique developments since 1997: Durkheim, Weber, Marx and Foucault, in addition to the conceptual framework of Lacan and Žižek that is conducive to organisational analysis and critique. Chapter Three turns to the religious and personalist tradition to promote reflections on the conceptual device of moral economy (see Whitehead, 2015b).