Imperfect: The Life of a Probation Officer

I should be upfront: this is my book. So take this review in that spirit, not as an objective assessment, but as an honest account of why I wrote it and what I was trying to say.

I started in probation having recently been bailed from a police cell. That's not a detail I'd normally lead with, but it's in the book because it matters. The gap between the person who sits across from you in a supervision meeting and the person doing the supervising is often smaller than either of you would like to admit. That tension runs through everything I've written.

Imperfect isn't a textbook. It doesn't tell you how to do the job. What it does is take you inside it. The first terrifying client. The office politics. The dark humour that keeps teams functioning when the work gets heavy. The cases that stay with you long after the files are closed. It covers my journey from trainee probation officer through working with substance misuse, dangerous offenders, and youth justice, before eventually leaving the public sector altogether.

I wrote it because I couldn't find a book that told the truth about this work. Not the sanitised version. Not the policy manual version. The real one, where you question your decisions at two in the morning, where the system frustrates you in ways nobody warned you about, and where you learn as much from the people you supervise as they ever learn from you.

What I hope readers take from it is this. If you are new to criminal justice work, it will prepare you for things that training simply cannot. It will help you recognise the emotional weight of the job before it catches you off guard, understand why supervision and peer support matter more than any toolkit, and see that self-doubt is not a weakness but a sign that you are taking the work seriously.

If you are more experienced, I hope it offers something different. A chance to reflect. A reminder of the moments that shaped you. Perhaps a recognition that some of the things you have quietly struggled with are not unique to you at all.

And if you have never worked in criminal justice but you are curious about what it actually looks like from the inside, behind the court appearances and the headlines and the policy documents, this was written for you too. Because the human stories in this work deserve to be told honestly, and that is what I have tried to do.

It is not a perfect book. But then, it was never supposed to be.

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