Just seven years after it began in 2013, and amid a pandemic which has put enormous pressures on criminal justice institutions, the Transforming Rehabilitation (TR) programme was officially brought to an end. Under TR, and on the basis of little evidence, probation in England and Wales was split into an outsourced provision for low-and medium-risk offenders run by 21 regional Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs), to be contracted out to private-and third-sector providerswith high-risk

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... ders remaining under the supervision of a shrunken state-run National Probation Service (NPS). CRCs would be incentivised to reduce reoffending through a largely untested 'payment by results' model, alongside fixed 'fees for service' for some required activities. By most measures, TR has been a disaster: disruptive to probation practice, riven by IT problems, wasteful of public money, and unable to in deliver the reductions in reoffending which supposedly would be unlocked by the 'innovation' of the market. Many will have been relieved when TR ended, returning probation to state control. One might be forgiven, then, for thinking that TR was a short aberration in the history of a successful public service, as well as an attack on the professional status of probation staff. Matt Tidmarsh's thorough and compelling book challenges several mainstream understandings of TR, working on and between the key concepts of his title: marketisation and professionalism, introduced in Chapters 1 and 2 respectively and brought into progressively closer dialogue, with underlying tensions brought out and explored, through a carefully devised, clear and logical structure, assisted by ample use of illustrative quotes and extracts from observation. Based on an ethnography of an urban CRC, Professionalism in Probation situates TR as a wider movement towards 'marketisation', which Tidmarsh is careful to distinguish from 'privatisation'. Marketisation is not simply the transfer of services to the private sector, but the politically-driven imposition of the economic logic of markets on public services, and the concomitant multiplication of stakeholders to whom probation (and its staff) may be held accountable. Even under TR, the state remained deeply involved with the CRCs: as a supplier of (involuntary) clients, as shaping the socioeconomic conditions of the market, and through the continuation of an attenuated NPS. Hence, Tidmarsh argues that TR is not an aberrant experiment in 'privatisation', but a continuation of longer-term trends towards marketisation, beginning in the era of New Public Management and continuing through the New Labour years with the Carter Punishment & Society