Some non-attendance is inevitable with pre-booked appointments, as GP appointments must compete with patients' other priorities and the complexities of their day. Utilising modern communication technologies, such as SMS text messaging, may make cancellation simpler. A structured approach to matching supply and demand of appointments might reduce problems arising from non-attendance.

Restorative justice (RJ) has found significant utility outside the prison setting. For many reasons, it has not received the same level of consideration inside the institution. While not every case can, or perhaps should be considered for restorative justice processing inside the prison, some could easily fall into the broad purview range of restorative and transformative justice. We provide examples of RJ practices that exist in some prisons focusing on: offending behavior and victim awareness programs, community service work, and victimoffender mediation, as well as prison systems that exhibit a RJ philosophy. Also considered are the effectiveness of prison RJ practices, and the limitations of such efforts. Although RJ has the potential to have a positive impact on the work of prisons and the experience of imprisonment, it has not found wide acceptance and is currently limited to a relatively small number of prisons and then often only delivered in partial form. We believe that RJ has a realistic future in prison settings and that the contradictions that may be identified are not debilitating.

This article is a response to a 'Counterblast' concerning the delivery of probation training (Stout and Dominey 2006). The authors mounted a 'defence of distance learning', as a method for training probation officers, and took issue with assertions earlier made by us on the subject of distance learning. Our article is intended to clarify our position on distance learning (which previously amounted to no more than a few words) and to clarify the basis of some of our reservations. In doing this, we make more general, critical observations concerning the state of New Labour's probation training programme and about the current crises in which the service, and its training arrangements have become embroiled.In their first sentence, Stout and Dominey (2006) refer to 'probation education' and, in their penultimate one, to 'training for offender managers'. Our view is that these are two different things and this leads us to take a different position as to where preparation for practice should take place. Whereas we agree wholeheartedly that probation officer education should remain in higher education (HE), whether or not 'training for offender managers' (p.539) should be similarly rooted in HE appears to be a more taxing question and, as a result, our answer is more equivocal. Working professionally with people subject to court orders and prison licences in order to help them live as peacefully as possible in their community requires a university education. Something similar, albeit less convincing, can be argued for delivering 'what works' correctional services. 'Managing offenders' in the context of a misguided, Home Office-driven fixation on 'public protection' needs staff who can tick boxes and press buttons. If risks are to be avoided, never to be taken, then a university education seems superfluous.Stout and Dominey bewail the absence of a suitable place to debate criminal justice education. There may be some truth in this, although the

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The probation service is at risk of serious harm from the discourses of toughness and cure. People subject to community rehabilitation orders are categorised first and foremost as 'offenders' by probation officers, their managers and governors. Not surprisingly, people on probation are increasingly viewed as bad or as misfits, either way they have nothing intrinsically valuable to contribute to their supervision nor to the work of the probation service more generally. As a counter to this exclusion and disenfranchisement, two replacement discourses are commended: first, the language of userism/consumerism; and, second, an integration of strain and rational choice crime theories, as an alternative to the 'psychic prisons' of conservatism and individual positivism fast enveloping the service. 1