About Probation
The Cambridgeshire Area of the National Probation Service employs 280 skilled professionals.
Annual report
Courts & reports
When someone appears before the court our job is to prepare a pre-sentence report and 2,400 such reports are written each year in Cambridgeshire.
Find out more in Courts & reports.
Community Orders
If someone is sentenced to prison, our teams, based in the prisons, are there working alongside the prison staff. If the courts impose a Community Order - Probation staff supervise it. In practice, we supervise over 2,000 adult offenders at any one time. Our caseload comprises about 70% serving community orders and 30% on licence from prison.
Find out more in Community sentences.
Life skills
Our key roles are to:
- assess the risk offenders pose to the local community
- supervise them
- monitor their progress rigorously.
We do this through a range of activities where offenders learn the life skills they need to rehabilitate their lives and find employment opportunities. These include thousands of hours of unpaid work (now called Community Payback) which both benefits the local community and teaches offenders key skills.
Find out more about the Employment, training and education requirement.
The roots of offending
There are also highly effective Drugs Intervention, Domestic Abuse and Drink Driving programmes which aim to tackle the roots of offending.
Find out more in Programmes.
Public protection
Although often overlooked, a key role for the Probation Service is to work closely with the Police, Prison Service, Social Services and other agencies to control difficult and sometimes dangerous offenders. Where the offender is one of the few posing a high risk of harm, the Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements (MAPPA) come into force. Accurate and reliable risk-assessment allows a way forward to be planned carefully with each agency fully aware and supportive of what the others are doing to provide supervision and surveillance.
Victims
We work closely with the victims of serious violent or sexual offences following the offender receiving a custodial sentence of 12 months or more.
Find out more about our work with victims. |
