The announcement to Parliament on January 6, 2004, of a unified correctional agency under NOMS meant that custodial and community supervision of offenders would be combined under NOMS. The blurring of the custodial-community distinction will have a significant effect on the role of probation. The NPS will work more closely with prisons to develop and promote community-based dispositions based increasingly upon offenders' incapacitation and isolation while living in the community. Generic community penalties will emerge with a multitude of additional mandated restrictive conditions. Within the community, the probation officer's role is likely to become solely concerned with public protection and a type of community-based "incarceration" that focuses on incapacitation through various means. This chapter argues that the incorporation of the NPS under the NOMS and the overarching correctional philosophy of restraint, incapacitation, and punitiveness that characterizes incarceration will ultimately change probation values from being anti-incarceration to viewing custodial sentences as having a central role in the rehabilitation process, thus creating a seamless sentence of custody and community supervision. This will ultimately undermine probation's traditional commitment to treatment-oriented case management in which offenders participate in, rather than become isolated from, responsible roles in the community. 30 references