This Special Issue is themed around the Future of Probation – post 2020. Contributors were invited to take as their starting point (but not exclusively) the special issue of this journal which we published in March 2016 (Vol 14 Issue 1). The landscape of probation provision in England and Wales looked very different then. The Transforming Rehabilitation (TR) changes (MoJ 2013) had just seen the part privatisation of the public probation service. The papers in that issue – in part a response to that significant structural change – were based on the theme of: “Imagining Probation in 2020: hopes, fears and insights”. It drew on discussions which occurred at a retreat hosted by Paul Senior the then Co-Editor of the journal, with a small group of probation academic colleagues.