Do you work in probation? We need your voice!

The importance of this topic has been high on CEP’s agenda for the long term, primarily through the Expert Group on Caseload and Workload, whose Guidelines on Caseload and Workload were published earlier this year (available in the Members’ Section).

Increasing workloads, growing case complexity, staff shortages, and rising expectations of probation services continue to affect practitioners and people under probation supervision across Europe. While workload pressures are widely recognised by probation practitioners, opportunities to discuss and reflect on their impact openly remain limited.

We therefore encourage colleagues-practitioners to submit abstracts exploring the lived experience and practice-based accounts around the history/impact/experience of workloads. Other themes can be found in the call for papers (see below). As described in the call, these can be longer academic-style publications or shorter accounts of the experiences of practitioners and probationers of the impact of caseload and workload management. Please do feel free to propose a format that you think would be best for communicating your realities. The important thing is to include practitioner and lived experience in the journal to ground the academic research in everyday realities of those living and working in probation.

The call for papers is available here.

Submit your idea by filling in this form here.

The deadline to submit the abstract is 30 September 2026.

Are you unsure of journal expectations, yet you want to have the practitioners’ voice included? Check out the special edition of the European Probation Journal on criminal justice social work or/and consider consulting the special co-editors of the issue – Prof. Christian Ghanem and Dr. Caroline Bald.