Probation and the ethics of care

Discussions of probation's values can be enriched by an appreciation of care ethics. This approach is explained with attention to its emphasis on relationships and individualisation. The implications for probation's work are explored, including its significance for the supervisory relationship, its challenges for the management of the organisation and the value of individualised approaches. Care ethics argues for practice shaped not by rules and processes, but by people and their circumstances in all their diversity. Care ethics offers a principled and effective approach to probation's work.


Introduction
The values and ethics that underpin probation practice have long been the subject of debate and discussion. The language of values and ethics is used to justify or to oppose shifts in policy and governance. Attempts are made to codify values and to write statements of ethical conduct. Training programmes, practice guidelines and managerial processes seek, in different ways, to ensure that the quality of probation work and the culture of probation organisations are ethically grounded.
In these debates, probation has tended to draw (even if not explicitly or consciously) on ideas about the importance of ethical rules and principles as well as reflections on the outcomes and impacts of moral choices. The aim of this article is to broaden this debate by introducing the paradigm of virtue ethics (Hursthouse, 1999) and its close relative care ethics (Gilligan, 1982(Gilligan, / 2016Tronto, 1993) and arguing that these offer a new and fresh way of considering how probation should be practised.
These ethical frameworks shift our focus away from ethical rules and attempts to calculate uncertain outcomes to questions about the cultures of organisations and the qualities of practitioners. Care ethics is particularly instructive for its emphasis on relationships, which seem at the heart of so much that probation attempts to do. Ideas about care and caring may, at first sight, appear to fit poorly in the world of criminal justice and punishment. This article takes a different view: arguing that ethical probation work requires thoughtful consideration about what it means to put care at the heart of practice.

The values of probation
Probation workers have been aware of the moral significance of their work from the earliest days. In recent years, these aspects have often been explored in terms of probation values, considering the moral worth, the politics and the practical feasibility of finding ways of giving expression to probation's ethical commitments (Canton and Dominey, 2017: Chapter 3; Cowburn et al., 2013;Gelsthorpe, 2007;Nellis and Gelsthorpe, 2004;Williams, 1994). Sometimes, in the contested political arena, it can seem as if these concerns have been pushed aside in the relentless pursuit of the enquiry to find out 'what works'. Yet, as David Garland has insisted '… the pursuit of values such as justice, tolerance, decency, humanity and civility should be part of any penal institution's self-consciousness -an intrinsic and constitutive aspect of its role -rather than a diversion from its "real" goals or an inhibition on its capacity to be "effective". ' (1990: 292) For that matter, it has been argued that trying to establish probation practice on the foundation of what's right rather than what works may turn out not only to defend and enhance these values, but even to make it more likely that probation practice will achieve some of the objectives that it sets for itself (Canton, 2013).
For much of the twentieth century, probation aligned itself with the values of social work. In the early 1990s, however, the government decided that association with social work, a recognised caring profession, did nothing to advance public confidence in the work of an agency intended to deliver punishment in the community (Knight, 2002;Ward and Spencer, 1994). This repudiation of social work and its values was much more about connotation and political tone than substance. Indeed the shotgun separation, welcomed by neither profession, took place at a time when they were discovering how much they had in common -perhaps especially the renewed emphasis on the importance of safeguarding vulnerable people through the assessment and management of risk in their respective practices. While some lamented the loss of connections with the traditions and practices of social work, others drew attention to the opportunities that this brought to affirm other values, and not excluding at least some of the values of social work, even if differently framed (Nellis, 1995). This new framing might be accomplished within the discourse of the emerging concept of 'community justice' (Nellis, 2000), an expression that was becoming established and familiar, but whose character, objectives and principles were in many respects still open for determination. Community justice expressed commitments towards people with criminal convictions, but also towards the victims of crime and a response to crimes that saw them as an occasion to identify and strive to remedy flaws in social justice that the crime had exposed. Both of these had to be recognised as legitimate concerns that, at least arguably, had been inadequately encompassed by the values of probation.
More recently, attempts have been made to ground the policies and practices of probation on the foundation of human rights in the European Probation Rules (Council of Europe, 2010) and to set out the profession's Core Values & Ethical Principles (Probation Institute, 2020). The codification of moral principles in this way can be a valuable undertaking, but it does have plain limitations. One of its most important functions is the public declaration it makes about the moral parameters of probation practice which enables others to call probation services to account when they violate the principles they affirm. Again, they are of value in reminding staff of the boundaries of their decisions and of the moral mission that the agency is seeking to advance. They are, however, of limited value in guiding specific actions or in helping practitioners to take difficult decisions. Moreover, the attempt to realise ethical aspirations in practice may lead, notoriously, to consequences that are unintended, unforeseen and even perverse. There is a need to know much more about what happens when abstract, high-level principles are applied in practice where they are mediated by a diverse set of interacting personal, social, cultural, political and economic considerations.
Probation has had limited recourse to moral philosophy, even though part of the business of that discipline, at least in its applied forms, is to help us to understand how we should act and what is the right thing to do. For many years, modern Anglo-American philosophy was preoccupied with deontic and consequentialist accounts of morality. Deontic (or deontological) approaches understand moral conduct in terms of obligations and duties (we ought to tell the truth; we ought to keep our promises; we ought not to harm other people; we should be loyal to our friends); consequentialist accounts, of which the most familiar is utilitarianism, appraise the moral worth of an action in terms of its consequences (the right action is the one that has the best consequences). One markedly distinguishing feature is that deontic accounts emphasise the worth of acting out of a sense of duty, while for utilitarians motives are substantially irrelevant. As John Stuart Mill put it, 'utilitarian moralists have gone beyond almost all others in affirming that the motive has nothing to do with the morality of the action, though much with the worth of the agent.' (Mill, 1863(Mill, /2004 The distinction between these approaches to exploring right actions may be familiar to those who have considered the ethics of punishment. Punishment, including community sanctions (Durnescu, 2011;Hayes, 2015;McNeill, 2018), involves hard treatment -the imposition of pains, burdens and deprivations -and this appears to call for justification. The usual beginning to this inquiry is to distinguish between retributive and reductive accountsrespectively deontological and consequentialist justifications. Retributivists hold that punishment is justified because (and to the extent that) it is deserved and owed to the offender and victim. These are moral obligations that require no justification beyond their intrinsic value in doing justice. Reductivists by contrast argue that punishment is to be justified by its effects in reducing the harms of further crimes, perhaps by deterrence, incapacitation or rehabilitation. Some (too many) philosophers, incidentally, have been dilatory in challenging the claim that justice is done in these ways or crime reduced by the mechanisms of punishment.
Deontological and consequentialist approaches do not exhaust the possibilities. For example, the discourse of human rights has come to be the most common language in which the limits of state interference are set and the claims that might be made upon government articulated. Yet within the moral philosophy textbooks, there is another compelling paradigm: in the second half of the twentieth century, dissatisfaction with deontological and consequentialist approaches and the manner in which they were set against one another led to a rediscovery of virtue ethics.

Virtue ethics
The starting point for many expositions of virtue ethics is the work of Aristotle 1 who argued that we should act in ways in which a person of excellent character would act, our behaviour giving expression to virtues like courage, loyalty, honesty and generosity. His account of what it is to act in the right way thus centres on the person and this shift from actions to a focus on agents is a defining feature of virtue ethics (Bennett, 2015: Chapter 6.;Hursthouse, 1999). A virtuous person will choose to do what is right for the right reasons (not, for example, for personal gains like reputation) and in order to decide on their course of action they will need, as far as possible, an understanding of all the relevant circumstances. Since people and the circumstances in which they find themselves differ in any number of ways, generalities about the right course of action may point in the wrong direction. Virtue ethics is accordingly suspicious about rules. Aristotle (c. 335 BCE / 2009) considers a particular intellectual virtue or excellence called phronesis, conventionally translated as 'practical wisdom', which is needed to discern the relevant considerations that will enable a decision about the right course of action in difficult circumstances. People of excellent character will be able to make the proper judgement. It is for this reason that Aristotle believed that children could not have practical wisdom: you need to have lived a bit. When probation staff are encouraged to value their own life experiences, it is because in this way they will have acquired the practical wisdom that they might now apply to the difficult decisions they have to take.
Can it make sense to follow Aristotle in attempting to stipulate a good life for human beingsfor everyone? Even if that project is misconceived, it remains possible to explore what excellence would be in relation to a particular occupation or role. There is, for instance, sufficient agreement among those best qualified to make the judgement about the attributes of an excellent carpenter or an excellent clarinettist. Perhaps it may be possible to determine the qualities of excellent workers in criminal justice.
For example, Alison Liebling and colleagues asked prison officers about the qualities they looked for in an ideal colleague, who might be a 'role model' for others (Liebling et al., 2011). There is insightful probation literature too, explicitly considering the 'virtues' that probation staff should cultivate or describing research that has implications for such qualities (Mawby and Worrall, 2013;McNeill and Farrall, 2013;Rex, 1999). Respondents in one study were asked to reflect on their own practice and draw out those characteristics that they felt enabled their best work as a device for identifying excellence in practice (Robinson et al., 2014).
The idea of a role model may resonate with readers of this journal. Many of us who worked in the probation service will be able to call to mind one or more colleagues whose practice we admired and even aspired to emulate. It is not that this person was one to be 'copied', for this would be an abdication of the responsibilities to assess cases and circumstances for oneself, but when wondering 'what kind of practitioner ought I to be?' at least part of the answer may have been 'be a practitioner like x'.
It is important to appreciate that, again in most cases, our identification of these role models relates to more than their competence in the job. Aristotle wrote of technai -skills and crafts that are indispensable to excellence in roles (Book VI)but a role model gives more than this. A role model is likely to be someone whose commitment and integrity transcend knowledge and skills (in the practice of which all of us at least sometimes fall short). The word integrity implies a 'wholeness' and a harmony of thinking, acting and feelingthe hallmark of the virtuous person who does the right thing for the right reasons and with the right associated emotions.
In summary: the attractions of virtue ethics as a means of exploring how probation should go about its work include its affirmation of the importance of motivation and emotion in our decisions. It is not enough to act as a virtuous person would, but to do so for the right reasons, which includes caring about the same things that a virtuous person would. It is true that in itself virtue ethics will not resolve moral dilemmas. But for that matter neither will a deontological approach, for our obligations may conflict and how are we to know what they are in any case? As for consequentialism, not only are outcomes difficult to anticipate, especially in the hardest cases, but in any case a totting-up of interests and preferences, of gains and losses, reduces morality and '… destroys its dignity. It doesn't teach us to distinguish right from wrong, but "only to become better at calculation".' (Sandel, 2009: 107, quoting Kant).
Moral quandaries are part of the work of probation and cannot be handled by rules. If a moral dilemma could be resolved by the application of a rule or a quasi-arithmetical accounting of costs and benefits, it would hardly be worthy of being called a dilemma. One of the qualities of a good prison officer was found to be an ability to be flexible, to have the confidence and sensitivity to depart from rules when the circumstances required (Liebling et al., 2011: 48) and flexibility is identified as contributing to good quality in probation practice (Robinson et al., 2014). Recognising the claims of different principles, moreover, can influence the way in which the difficult decision is put into effect. For example, it may be hard to decide whether to invoke breach proceedings or even recall to prison. If breach or recall is the right course, there is still all the difference in the world between a respectful acknowledgement of the pain and frustration that this may occasion and accordingly a willingness to give account to the individual concerned for the reasons behind the decision and, on the other hand, a cold and stark recitation of the regulations. The difference is between caring and not caring.

Care ethics
A newer paradigm in moral philosophy has come to be known as care ethics (Gilligan, 1982(Gilligan, / 2016Tronto, 1993;Slote, 2007;Held, 2010;Noddings, 2015;Sander-Staudt, n.d.). As we shall see, this has similarities with virtue ethics to the point where some have felt they are indistinguishable, while others continue to insist on the difference between them (for discussion, see Slote, 2007). Whether or not virtue ethics should be considered among the ancestors of care ethics, a foundational work is Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice (1982 / 2016). Gilligan's research had found, amongst other things, that girls appraised moral predicaments differently from the way in which boys did: boys tended to apply rules or principles (roughly, the deontic approach we have considered), while girls were more sensitive to the relationships affected by decisions and the way in which they were arrived at. Far from being a less sophisticated approach to moral reasoning, Gilligan argued, this might be developed into a different paradigm: care ethics.
Virginia Held summarises this approach succinctly: 'The ethics of care understands the value and necessity of caring labor and it emphasizes the values of empathy, sensitivity, trust, and responding to need. It cultivates practices such as the building of trust, and practices of responding to actual needs. At its most basic level it understands persons as interrelated, in contrast with the model of the independent, self-sufficient individual of liberal theory.' (Held, 2010: 117, emphasis added) It is true that some of the virtues that virtue ethics considers are intrinsically relational: generosity, benevolence, friendliness and many other virtues have the interests of another person in mind. Yet virtue ethics is agent centred, while care ethics has for its focus the social relationships and networks in which people are enmeshed. Care ethics places human interdependence at the heart of its thinking.
The focus, in care ethics, is on the practice of caring and seeing the individual receiving care as an active participant in the interaction. Tronto (2010) writes about four phases of care, described as caring about (recognising the need for care), caring for (taking responsibility for need), care giving (the practical labour of caring) and care receiving (acknowledging the importance of the experience of care). She argues that it is important for institutions that provide care to evaluate and understand how this is being experienced by recipients. It is not sufficient for organisations to care about service users and for practitioners to have caring intentions; authentic care requires that individuals receive a service which they feel to be caring.
As with virtue ethics, care ethics is an approach where the decision making is shaped by the particularities of the situation. Consequently, care ethics shares with virtue ethics a mistrust of rules. Contexts differ and the implications of different courses of action vary so much from case to case that any rule is as likely to mislead as to give the right guidance (Noddings, 2015).
Care ethics, as an approach to moral philosophy that foregrounds relationships, seems particularly relevant for people concerned with criminal justice. A crime fractures the relationship between wrongdoers and their community -at least in the sense that they have violated the norms that bind the community and which, Durkheim argued, are reaffirmed through punishment (Lukes and Scull, 2013). The crime also affects the relationship between the victim and members of the community who may now feel themselves to have particular attitudes and obligations towards her. This line of thinking has been most thoroughly followed through by proponents of restorative justice (Elliott and Gordon, 2011;Johnstone, 2011) who may take as their priority an attempt to repair damaged relationships. There are other conceptions besides: for example, wider understandings of rehabilitation can encompass relational or social rehabilitation or reintegration -not only changes in an individual (more generally, Burnside, 1994;McNeill, 2012;Robinson and Raynor, 2006).

Care ethics and the work of probation
Since its early days, probation has explained itself in terms of help and support, has described itself as a caring profession and defined itself in contrast to other criminal justice agencies judged to be punitive; the founding aims of the probation service were to advise, assist and befriend (Vanstone, 2004). However, the responsibilities of probation practitioners also include public protection and the enforcement of court orders. While the notion that care and control are necessarily in opposition is unhelpful (Canton and Dominey, 2020), the idea the probation service should care for offenders sits uncomfortably with political rhetoric that has a focus on punishment, a reluctance to attribute crime to problems in society, and a desire to be on the side of the (ideal) victim.
Yet, as a moral grounding for probation practice, care ethics has much to offer. Probation is a relational activity requiring tough decisions and care ethics has a great deal to say about making moral choices in this context. Shapland et al. (2012), writing about quality in probation practice, make a clear link between ethical practice and the quality of supervision. They contrast utilitarian approaches (conceptualising good practice as that which leads to desired outcomes, often narrowly determined as reduced re-offending in the short term) with rights-based approaches with a focus on 'commonly agreed good processes of interaction with service users' (p.10). They then acknowledge the relevance of virtue ethics to probation practice, suggesting that quality practice might be linked to the virtues and character of the supervisor together with the exercise of practical wisdom.
They do not explicitly consider the interplay between care ethics and the quality of supervision. Implicitly the link is there; one of their concluding points about factors important for quality prescribes 'building genuine relationships that demonstrate "care" about the person being supervised, their desistance and their future, and not just control / monitoring /surveillance' (p43).
However, while some insights from care ethics enrich thinking about probation, others challenge existing probation culture and practice in important ways. Three areas that merit further exploration are the nature of the supervisory relationship, the extent to which a caring organisation is necessary for caring practice, and the insistence on individualised (rather than rules-led) approaches to people and to decision making.

The supervisory relationship
Care ethics is about relationship. In some understandings of probation work relationships are at its heart too, and perhaps even constitute part of the definition of its practices (Canton and Dominey, 2017: Chapter 7 and especially 124ff.). The ability to develop 'good working relationships' was the first quality identified by the respondents in the study undertaken by Robinson and her colleagues (2014) -and indeed recognised as a precondition of many of the skills and characteristics that marked best probation practice.
There was some concern that probation's embrace of evidence-based practice ('what works') in the 1990s (Home Office, 1995), with its focus on process and programmes, might suppress the importance of relationship. Programme integrity requires that interventions are delivered in accordance with their intended aims and principles: it would otherwise be impossible to compare and evaluate outcomes. Yet a bureaucratic focus on a particular script might leave no room for emotionally literate and flexible practice, reducing the possibility of working in an engaging and responsive way and thus violating the responsivity principle. Proponents of 'what works' sought to resolve this tension, arguing that programmes should be delivered in ways that incorporated relational elements of practice alongside staff skills in areas like motivation, modelling and reinforcement. The importance of relationship factors in achieving positive programme outcomes was accordingly reaffirmed (Bonta and Andrews, 2010).
Empirical evidence also points to the importance of good supervisory relationships for outcomes including compliance and legitimacy (Robinson and McNeill, 2010;Ugwudike, 2010). McNeill and Robinson (2013) build on this evidence to argue that the supervisory relationship is central to and crucial for development of legitimacy in probation practice; they warn that this legitimacy, in the eyes of the supervisee, 'is hard-won, easily lost, and almost impossible to recover' (p133).
Policy documents and practice guidance for probation describe supervisory relationships as goal-achieving tools: 'Our planned approach to Sentence Management is based on building strong, meaningful relationships with supervised individuals that provide them with comprehensive support throughout their probation journey, with the aim of achieving better outcomes for them and enhancing public protection.' (HMPPS, 2021: 54) However, care ethics insist that trusting and respectful relationships are important not only because the supervisory relationship is an effective tool for achieving correctional outcomes, but because this is the moral way for practitioners and service users to work together. Unlike virtue ethics, which has a focus on the character of the individual actor, care ethics argues that moral choices are shaped in interactions. Ethical probation practice, therefore, requires practitioners to have caring and attentive relationships with the people they supervise.
Relationships in probation are shaped by the power inherent in statutory supervision and by expectations about professional boundaries. Care ethics stress relational mutuality; something identified in the literature about quality probation practice (Shapland et al., 2012) but rarely discussed in policy. However, care does sometimes flow both ways, with service users feeling committed to their relationship with their supervisor (Lewis, 2014;Rex, 1999). Similarly, reporting on the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on supervision, McNeill (2020) noted that, where there was a strong pre-existing relationship between individuals, supervision by telephone need not be perfunctory but allowed for mutual expression of concern about health and family.
Care ethics does not see the building of caring relationships with service users as a passive or infantilising process (Brown Coverdale, 2018). Rather, good supervisory relationships enable people to develop their capacity to treat others with care and respect. They can play a role in the identity shift associated with the process of desistance (Maruna, 2001). Brierley (2021), bringing together insights from professional practice and lived experience, argues that relationships comprising presence, attunement, connection and trust, have to be at the heart of work with young people with backgrounds shaped by neglect and trauma. Caring and consistent relationships create the space for change. In a similar way mentoringincluding and perhaps especially peer mentoring (Nixon, 2019) -often has a decisive influence on the processes of desistance. And mentors do more than offer advice and support; they inspire and can act as a role model. The concept of modelling has been influential in modern probation practice with an awareness that acting 'prosocially' can bring out the best in people (Cherry, 2017;Rex and Matravers, 1998). Yet certainly this is unlikely to 'work' unless there is this congruence of action, thought and feeling; without that, interactions will be -and will be felt to be -insincere, condescending and false. Care ethics, then, asserts that the supervisory relationship is morally, not merely practically, important.

Probation as a caring organisation
The quality of probation practice depends on more than the skill and approach of the practitioner: it is shaped by organisational culture. Tronto (2010) considers what it means for an institution to be caring and makes several observations that are relevant to the probation service. She argues that institutions are not caring well when there is evidence of commodification of care, when service users are excluded from decision-making, and when organisational structures hinder rather than help care-giving.
The commodification of probation is most clearly seen in the privatisation that followed the Transforming Rehabilitation (TR) reforms (Dominey and Gelsthorpe, 2020). However, the impact of commodification extends beyond the use of market mechanisms to procure services; it has consequences for the way that rehabilitation and care are conceptualised. Tronto (2010) argues that it is a mistake for organisations to think about care as a commodity rather than a process. Her view that care is not best managed by the market is in line with much criticism of recent probation reform (see, for example, Burke and Collett, 2020).
The TR reforms accelerated the commodification of probation, creating a system that depended on contracts, supply chains and the purchase of fragmented and discrete packages of intervention. The reforms diluted the thick network of relationships (Dominey, 2019) that provide help, support for desistance and the possibility of community integration. The shortcomings of the TR model have led to its further reform (Carr, 2020) and a reduction in the reliance on out-sourced provision. However, under the new operating model (HMPPS, 2021), rehabilitative interventions are still conceived as a product to be provided by and purchased from approved voluntary and private sector organisations.
The insistence from care ethics that caring is a reciprocal process, with importance attached to the voice and response of the care-receiver, may appear to sit uncomfortably in organisations like probation with clear demarcations between staff and service users. The organisation has the power to set the framework for supervision, constraining the actions of the supervisors and leaving little space for the preferences of the supervisees. There are indications, however, that service user involvement is being taken more seriously, while thoughtful commentators who have worked hard to incorporate co-production and participation into their practice highlight the complex and demanding nature of this work (Armstrong and Ludlow, 2020;Weaver et al., 2019). Care ethicists ask probation to move beyond asking service users to complete surveys and give feedback to take seriously the creation of an organisation which includes all stakeholders in the development, delivery and evaluation of services.
Tronto (2010) also asks whether senior managers are attentive to the needs of staff and service users, and whether they care sufficiently about the work to ensure that it is properly resourced and supported. Brown Coverdale (2020: 3), arguing for the applicability of care ethics to the practice of imprisonment, explains that decision making requires the people involved to 'to reason together about how to proceed in the context of other responsibilities and needs and almost always in the context of limited time, resources, and knowledge' (emphasis in original). As a result of the twin assaults of public spending cuts and the Transforming Rehabilitation reforms, probation work has not been adequately resourced and supported over the past decade. Probation supervisors are not able to work at their best if their caseloads are too large (HMIP, 2021). Where practitioners are stretched too thinly, they are not able to create supervisory relationships that demonstrate care and build trust. Good practice requires more than the commitment and skill of staff; it cannot be achieved in organisations where people are being asked to do too much work with too few resources and where staff have no sense of being cared-for. Above all, the commitment to care should infuse the whole organisation: managers and practitioners should demonstrate this care to one another in support of the agency's commitment to care for those who use its services.

Individualised approaches
Finally, care ethics calls for a practice approach that is inherently individualised and responsive to the situation and distinctive circumstances of the service user. In this sense, it aligns comfortably with desistance-focused practice with its stress on the importance of individualising support for change, led by those striving to desist who will bring their own distinctive aspirations to this process .
Current approaches to practice (shaped by standards and rules ostensibly intended to achieve consistent treatment for service users and uniform behaviour by staff) struggle with the notion of individualisation. Allowing practitioners to step outside guidelines appears to risk the possibility of inappropriate discrimination. Staff do have discretion to depart from the standards, but this discretion is subject to monitoring and managerial oversight. Individualisation is identified by practitioners as part of good quality probation practice (Robinson et al., 2014) and intrinsic to approaches shaped by care ethics; it fits less well with rules-led practice models.
Care ethics also challenges the way that probation practice deals with the assessment of need. The care ethics perspective takes more account of needs than rights or abstract principles; it insists that the moral approach is to allow individuals to identify their own needs. Noddings (2015) acknowledges the complexity of this (needs are not the same as whims or preferences) but counsels against trying to define needs precisely. She warns care-givers against confusing their needs with those of the other and of making assumptions about needs. She identifies that needs arise together and not in sequence (someone can need both food and respect). Tronto (2010: 163) argues that 'the process of determining needs is one of the foremost political struggles of any account of care' (emphasis in original).
In the probation world, need is often defined by the organisation and squarely linked with the 'criminogenic need' associated with 'what works'. Criminogenic needs are those factors assessed as underpinning offending behaviour. They are the targets of correctional interventions (including cognitive behaviour programmes and drug treatment interventions) and easily reconceptualised, not as needs but as dynamic risks (Ziv, 2020). Proponents of 'what works' do not argue that noncriminogenic needs should be ignored, but rather that criminogenic needs must be the focus of interventions intended to reduce recidivism. Yet this over-narrow definition of needs ignores the social injustice that underpins much crime, reframing disadvantages as dynamic risk factors, as well as ignoring issues of difference and diversity.
Probation practice makes assumptions about service user need and, in turn, service users have limited opportunity to identify their needs for themselves. The assessment process is shaped by tools that prioritise dynamic risk factors and is driven by timescales set in national standards. There is limited scope for individualised assessments in which service users are enabled and encouraged to explain how their period of supervision might be made most helpful. Among the insights of desistance theory is that change is best supported by attending to strengths and to aspirations which must not be set aside because of preconceived notions of problems and what would be a solution to them.
Care ethics argues for practice that is shaped not by rules and processes, but by people and their circumstances. The argument is not that current practice never permits staff to respond with latitude and discretion but rather that it is often too hard to depart from the rule or standard given that adherence to it will always be 'defensible', however wrongheaded. However, calling for increased opportunities for practitioners to respond to service users as individuals is not the same as advocating for practice that is unaccountable and without scrutiny (Eadie and Canton, 2002). Such practice does, though, require investment in and commitment to the systems that support the use of professional discretion. Wise and accountable use of discretion is most likely in situations where staff bring knowledge, skills and values to the professional dilemmas they face. Training (both for newly appointed staff and as part of continuing development) is important here, as are a reflective orientation to practice and a transparent approach to decision making. Practitioners benefit from opportunities to share practice dilemmas with colleagues and staff supervision arrangements that allow space for reflection alongside the management tasks of monitoring performance and adherence to targets (Coley, 2020).

Conclusion
The argument here is not that codes of ethics and practice guidance have no part to play in ensuring good quality probation practice, nor does it suggest that the probation service should pay no attention to the outcomes of its work. However, drawing on the principles of virtue ethics and care ethics, it does advocate an approach that takes seriously the relational element of practice, that considers the circumstances of each case, and that has an unapologetic focus on care.
Viewing probation practice through the lens of care ethics suggests that probation values emerge from principled people (at all levels in the organisations) trying to do the right thing in a caring way in difficult circumstances. Both care ethics and virtue ethics focus on the characteristics of the practitioner and, for care ethics, on the interaction between the practitioner and service user. Both approaches are sceptical that probation values could be understood simply as a set of prescriptions that simply need to be applied in each case and in each situation.
To put caring at the centre of probation practice does not produce easy answers to the ethical dilemmas faced by practitioners, which often involve not just the interests, rights and concerns of service users, but also those of past and potential victims of crime and of the wider community. Identifying the course of action that best communicates care and meets needs requires debate and reflection; different people may come to contrasting conclusions.
Care is as much about how work is undertaken as what is done or what outcome is achieved. For example, service users have been found to accept most probation interventions as legitimate. Even monitoring, which might be supposed to be a resented intrusion, can be perceived as an indication that you matter, that somebody cares about what you are doing, especially when it is acknowledged as a legitimate aspect of the role (Dominey, 2019). And a corollary of the acceptance of monitoring is that sometimes the service user will be found to have been in default and enforcement action taken.
There may be objections to the idea that caring is the ethical way to approach probation practice. Perhaps 'offenders' do not merit care; perhaps care has no place in punishment. The arguments from care ethics, and from this article, push in the opposite direction: care deserves consideration as a guiding virtue of probation. It is not the case that according more care to 'offenders' leaves less for 'victims'; ethical practice is concerned about the needs of everyone in the community. Further, the victim/offender dichotomy is misleading; insights into the trauma and abuse that form part of the life stories of so many service users (Anderson, 2016) highlight the extent of the victim/offender overlap and demonstrate that probation practice should, drawing on Tronto's (1993) framework, include caring about, caring for and care giving.
A signal advantage of a care ethics approach to the work of probation is its promise to align ethical practice, effective practice and the motivations that inspire so many probation staff. Although our main line of argument has insisted on the ethical merits of a care approach, we have also seen that it turns out to be effective in terms of the purposes that are often set for probationin particular, compliance, reduced reoffending and even the management of risk. Any successes that probation might achieve in reducing reoffending and in public protection amply fulfil its responsibility to show care to everyone and not just those under its supervision.
Care ethics, like virtue ethics, insists on doing the right things for the right reasons. For all the political attempts to disavow caring, it remains the case that large numbers of people join the profession because of a commitment to help and care for vulnerable people (Cracknell, 2016;Deering, 2011;Mawby and Worrall, 2013). The principle of care engages these motives, aligning them with both effective and ethical practice, bringing a coherence and integrity to probation's work.

Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Jane Dominey
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5577-8643 Rob Canton https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2001-4357 Note 1. There are other approaches to virtue ethics, but Aristotle's seems especially valuable. While Aristotle has been criticised for his attention to what a good life might be like for a free man, neglecting if not disdaining the position of women and people who were enslaved, his insights can be readily extended. For an excellent general account of Aristotle's Ethics, see Urmson 1988. We are aware, incidentally, that we are not the first to try to recruit Aristotle to the probation service (Gregory 2011;McNeill and Farrall 2013).