There were deep personal motives for John Hedge's original decision to enter the Probation Service as a young Social Science graduate in 1970; his own mother, a struggling publican, had been put on probation during his youth, and he had seen how the service can prevent a criminal conviction from ruining a life beyond repair. He spent the next 37 years working to try to give offenders a chance and help them move away from crime and find their way to a law-abiding existence. The barriers to success were all too often the attitudes of police and sentencers, the state of prisons and the prejudices of ignorant or biased politicians. This is a candid account of those years of hard work, frustration, and occasional triumph