From the progressive era through the 1960's, probation's commitment to the rehabilitative ideal was virtually unchallenged. However, this commitment faded in the 1970's in the face of assaults on rehabilitation on normative, empirical, and political and economic grounds. As a result of the assaults, recent discussions of probation's mission have been dominated by neoclassicism or a justice model. This model emphasizes volition, offender responsibility, proportionality, and fairness. This desert-based model poses domain challenges for probation, which has historically and normatively been dominated by its rehabilitative mission. In addition, the justice model, by challenging probation officers' discretion, challenges conceptions of probation professionalization. Further, the model's limited focus on punishment and its due process boundaries provide a domain challenge to probation as a community function. There are, however, several alternatives competing with the justice model for probation's mission. These include a reaffirmation of rehabilitation, probation as control, a balanced service approach that integrates law enforcement and rehabilitation functions, probation as a local community option, and probation abolition. In addition to domain challenges, the future of probation will be challenged by technological and economic issues and institutional legitimacy and organizational control issues. However, despite these challenges, probation is adaptive, pragmatic, and likely to survive so long as it does not overreach itself or promise more than it can fulfill. 70 references.