The role and function of drinking games in a university community

Understanding the role of drinking games in college student life is critical for program planners who wish to develop education and prevention programs to reduce abusive drinking. Drinking games are popular social activities that provide a focus for social interactions but place students at considerable risk for serious consequences. This article reports preliminary results of a study using participant observation and in-depth interviews to develop a typology of drinking games and describe patterns and practices associated with the games.     

The new probation training in England and Wales: Realising the potential

A new probation training qualification, separate from social work but still connected to higher education, was created in England and Wales in 1997 and undoubtedly has the potential to produce more knowledgeable and better skilled officers than its generic predecessors. Whether this potential is realised depends on a proper balance being struck between the intellectual integrity of the higher education component (an undergraduate degree) and the practice demands of the probation service (a 12-module NVQ). Given the managerialist pressures on the probation service, and indeed on higher education itself, it is not certain that the potential will be realised. Debate on the nature of the integration between the intellectual and practical components of the qualification has thus far been poorly conceptualised. This paper seeks to extend debate by distinguishing between "underpinning" and "overarching" knowledge and thereby to strengthen and legitimate the position of higher education in the new arrangements.     

Towards "the Field of Corrections": Modernizing the Probation Service in the Late 1990s

The Probation Service in England and Wales has been caught up in the New Labour government's broader programme of "modernization". In a document more radical than anything produced under the previous Conservative government, New Labour has proposed that the Service be brought under centralized control, that its name be changed to reflect its new primary purpose of public protection, and that it be brought into closer structural alignment with the Prison Service. This paper discerns in the case made for centralization and the need for closer ties with prisons an authoritarian impulse which is deeply at odds with the Service's own local traditions, and questions whether the undoubtedly necessary process of modernization must take the form being proposed by the government.     

Probation Training and the Community Justice Curriculum

Summary In England and Wales the Diploma in Social Work was supersededby the more specialized Diploma in Probation Studies in 1997/98as a basic qualification for probation officers. It combinesacademic and practical learning in the form of a two-year undergraduatedegree and a twelve-module National Vocational Qualification(NVQ). There was considerable professional opposition to thisat the time and opinion remains mixed as to how justifiablethe change was, and how successful it has been. This articleseeks to defend the principle of combining the academic andthe practical but, via a critique of two recent commentarieson the Diploma in Probation Studies, questions whether the ideaof academic teaching on a professional qualification has beenadequately conceptualized and implemented. It argues againstteaching that is governed uncritically by the protocols andproblematics of pure academic disciplines, and insists uponthe use of material which is selected and tailored to the intellectualneeds of working probation officers. It outlines a better conceptualizationof what a ‘community justice curriculum’ might looklike, based in part on the approach taken to probation trainingat the University of Birmingham.     

Probation Partnerships, Voluntary Action and Community Justice

Having been offered — and prepared to accept — a “centre-stage”role in the operation of the criminal justice system as recently as 1991, the Probation Service in England and Wales seems increasingly to be marginalized by politicians who, in a more punitive climate, have changed their minds about what is expected of it. As a probation spokesperson has recently said: “the big vision has gone”. One strand of policy which the Probation Service was expected to develop in 1991 was increased partnership with voluntary organizations, but, although progress has been made, it is a policy about which the Service has been very ambivalent, fearing that it may lead in the longer term to privatization of their work. This paper will outline the origins and implications of the policy, note how some local Services have so far responded to it, and suggest that, if pursued in certain fields of activity, partnership could contain an alternative vision to the one that has been lost.