The use of multiple cautions by the police, the efforts of prison personnel to encourage links over the walls between offender and community through home leaves, and the professional autonomy of probation officers variously came under fire. The penalty for cannabis possession was also increased. Also, experiments to increase community safety and feelings of well-being have often meant the exclusion of troublesome populations to another estate or into prison. In this political climate rehabilitation has fallen into disrepute. Similarly, and symbolically, the decision to end the academic training of probation officers indicates a down playing of the social work skills and understanding necessary for rehabilitative work with offenders - but especially with drug using offenders who often face a range of public and private difficulties.
Enforcement now occupies a central place in strategic thinking.
Proposals on the table, if enacted, will make forms or combinations of the probation order compulsory. The 1991 CJA made the probation order a sentence but still required the offender's consent - and probation officers have used this as the basis for establishing with the offender a contract of compliance through the public expression of commitment. For community based drug treatment agencies the balance between compulsion and voluntarism has been critical for medical and philosophical reasons. As in general medicine the idea of compulsory treatment is profoundly problematic here. The probation officer may soon be faced with an offender unwilling at the very outset to attend, listen or change, and subsequently faced with the task of convincing outside treatment agencies that they should do something for an individual sentenced against their will to treatment as part of a new community punishment.