In Denmark and many other countries, criminal justice systems have used pre-sentence reports for
decades as a tool to construct knowledge about the defendant in order to impose a range of alternative
sanctions. These changes within alternative sanctions have been linked to shifting ideas about the
relation between criminality, person and society during the 20th century. However, this paper argues that
the larger, paradigmatic changes within penal decision-making may be articulated quite differently in
everyday institutional perspectives and practices. When analyzing specific Danish Probation forms and
guidelines for issuing pre-sentence reports, we see that these forms have been surprisingly stable during
the whole century, in the sense that the categories of questions put to defendants remain almost
unchanged. This indicates that it may not be the knowledge format of the report itself that has changed
significantly, but the way its knowledge has been put to use, suggesting that the report can actualize
different aspects of the criminal person according to available penal interventions.