Advise, Assist, Befriend - life in the National Probation Service

2012-01-29T10:54:00.002Z

Yesterday's Independent carried a front page article about a "surprise surge" in the England and Wales prison population, which now stands at 87,668, having risen by more than 1,000 over three weeks. If this was genuinely a surprise for the Ministry of Justice then, well, The Enforcer can do little more than a rolling of eyes and a throwing of hands in the air. Surely someone could have been monitoring, in some small way, the cases of those involved with last August's riots with their glacial progress through our Crown Courts? Even the most straightforward indictable-only cases take months to wend their way through the system, and that's not even thinking about those either way charges that the magistrates will have deemed too serious for them to deal with.

Having said that, our prison system is so unwieldy that there is no realistic way of responding to large fluctuations in demand, other than using police and court cells as a short term option. The alternative is rushing unsuitable people into the Category D estate without a careful risk assessment, which puts those open prisons (which, by their nature, have lower levels of staffing and supervision) under more pressure - this reduces their effectiveness at both monitoring and resettling prisoners (as we saw at HMP Ford over Christmas 2010) and hence the public more at risk.

As a hand-wringing big state liberal (note the small 'L', please), The Enforcer's answer is more government spending. But not just on the criminal justice system - in fact, spending more money here is effectively an acknowledgement of failure, much as I hate to say it. No, we need money targeted where it can do the most good - I'm talking about funding Sure Start centres properly (NB, Dave and George - that doesn't mean just saying you support Sure Start but failing to require councils to fund it by not ringfencing the cash), about proper support for drug and alcohol rehabilitation, and about supporting the small and medium-sized businesses that will create the jobs that will keep the majority of those who end up committing offences out of trouble.

At the moment the salami-slicing of budgets means that departments look to find their own savings without thinking (or, let's be honest, without caring) about how this is going to cost someone else more money. The short-termist attitude and allergic reaction to any type of public sector spending currently seen across Westminster and Whitehall is only leading us into a game of who can blame the last lot quickest.

2012-01-08T13:38:00.003Z

If the economy begins to pick up in 2012, I like to think that my colleagues and I will have played a small part in this. Not necessarily through the economic benefits of reducing the number of victims or from assisting ex-offenders to find work, however.

No, The Enforcer fully expects to see a noticeable uptick in the sales of new television sets, thanks to the damage wrought by hundreds, if not thousands, of cups of tea (herbal, natch) flung at the screens during the broadcast of Public Enemies last week.

This was trailed earlier this week as having sought technical advice from Harry Fletcher, assistant General Secretary of Napo - well, if this was the case, I shudder to think what crazy stereotypes the producers had in the original script! I enjoyed the bits involving Eddie, the lifer, but the PO character, played by Anna Friel, was completely unrecognisable from anyone I've ever worked with. Having said that, an accurate depiction of offender management in 2012 would probably not make for very interesting television.

The public profile of probation officers is never particularly high, except when things go badly wrong. Dramas like this have an obligation to get it right, and this one failed, in the name of entertainment.

It's all the fault of probation officers, of course

2007-04-10T21:00:00.000Z

Today's Guardian reports that the Prison Governors Association are blaming the unsustainably large number of prisoners on two things: the inexorable rise of the indeterminate sentence for public protection, and prisoners being recalled to custody for breaching their licences. You don't have to be as paranoid and hassled as I am to spot the implication: it's those bloody wishy-washy liberals in the probation offices, who've suddenly decided to get steel toecaps for their sandals and get tough.

The point about licences being breached is old hat, really, and pretty vague with it. Yes, prisoners are recalled to prison for breaching terms of their licences - and isn't that what's supposed to happen? I'm told that Inside Time, the magazine written by and for prisoners, regularly carries stories of prisoners having been recalled for being a few minutes late for their appointments. I very much doubt if this is much more than an urban myth - recalls happen when appointments have been missed completely and earlier warnings have not been heeded, or when further offences have been committed, or when there are good grounds to believe that the risk of harm to others is increasing, not just because someone arrives half an hour after their allotted time. But of course we're now being criticised for over-enthusiastically enforcing orders and licences!

I think the point about IPP sentences is a valid one, though I do object to the article's assertion that these are being passed without "proper risk assessment" - they almost always are based on risk assessments which are called pre-sentence reports... But again the blame is being placed on the wrong people. A judge is required to pass a sentence of imprisonment for public protection if the offence is on a list of "serious specified offences" and he or she considers the offender to pose a serious risk of harm to the public. If that offender has a previous conviction for a specified offence (a wider definition but also including the serious specified offences), then the judge must presume that they do pose a risk, unless it would be unreasonable to presume otherwise. I've written reports in cases where it's been very clear that the judge has carefully considered all factors before making a decision, but in reality they are extremely constrained in terms of what sentences they can or cannot pass.

What do we do?

2007-04-01T20:30:00.000Z

As widely predicted (even by me), prison numbers hit new heights on Friday. Some will no doubt say, so what? Well, higher prison numbers means more time has to be spent on containing those who are there, rather than making efforts to rehabilitate them, provide education or training, facilitate family visits and so on. It also means a greater likelihood of prisoners harming themselves as, according to a BBC report, apparently happened in London last week.

So, what to do? Lord Falconer, keeper of the brand, shiny new office of Secretary of State for Justice (an excellent title) has been out and about talking about possible solutions, from an early release scheme for non-violent offenders (I can sense tabloid editors already writing their stories for when the first such prisoner re-offends after release). Hidden amongst all of that is a promise to make community penalties tougher - because of course the presumption is that "tougher" means "more acceptable" to those voters who can swing elections. Nowhere is there any mention of any serious attempts to make community sentences more understandable to the general public - to explain what goes on, what being "on Probation" really means, and what probation officers really do, except drink our camomile tea and scratch our toes through our sandals. And I blame the Probation Service for this, just as much as I blame other parts of the Home Office - there hasn't been a concerted effort to provide leadership in this area on a national basis, although a search through local newspaper headlines shows that there is some very good work going on at a local level.

So why is this? Probation work has a very solid values base, backed up by decades of criminological research, backed up by extremely committed front line staff. But why do we never hear anything other than the story that "Mr X walked free from court" rather than "Mr X received a community sentence"?

Yesterday's Guardian had this interesting piece tracing back the roots of increasing use of custody, and an ever-more punitive sentencing climate to the early 1990s and the killing of James Bulger. The article quotes David Blunkett as describing the individualism of the 1980s that caused a social breakdown, and the massive influx of crack cocaine in the 1990s as further key factors in this shift - what a shame he didn't seem to show that sort of insight as Home Secretary. It's a little beyond me on a Sunday night to push all of this into a coherent framework - there's probably a postgraduate thesis in there somewhere - but what seems to me is that there will not be an end to prison overcrowding until there's a greater acceptance that non-custodial measures can be - and are - effective in cutting crime. Tougher community sentences will only lead to more breaches, and yet more prisoners.

Division

2007-03-30T09:00:00.000Z

Confirmation came yesterday that, as widely trailed over the last few months, the Home Office will shortly shed some of its responsibilities to the Department of Constitutional Affairs, which will become a Ministry of Justice. Probation, prisons and courts will be the principal elements to shift, though responsibility for policing, counter-terrorism and immigration will remain. However, there will still be a National Criminal Justice Board which will be jointly chaired by the Home Secretary, Lord Chancellor and Attorney General, which in effect means that the Home Office will still be keeping its fingers in the criminal justice pie. The Home Office's statement notes that some of these changes, including the creation of the Ministry of Justice, will take place in May this year.

The announcement attracted quite a bit of criticism, particularly as it was felt this was rushed out before the Easter recess, thus preventing a proper chance for debate. The main attacks have focused on the expense and effort involved in yet another change within the Home Office (the cost of establishing NOMS, which still as yet is not entirely functional and may still be contingent on the safe passage of the Offender Management Bill, is said to have been as much as the budget for the whole of the National Probation Service), and further fragmentation in a ministry that has been heavily criticised for poor internal communication. The former Home Sec Charles Clarke was particularly scathing, and I would think he could be forgiven for being a bit miffed about this, given that it seems that John Reid has surfed over just as many crises as Clarke did, but managed to dodge the flak.

Today's Guardian leader is very critical, speculating that the announcement is more about the political impact of being seen to be doing something (probably ahead of the local elections in May). The Times asks questions about how sections within the two departments will now be able to work with each other (particularly the police, who will remain under the Home Office), and Peter Riddell comments that Reid had to play the "terrorism card" in order to get his way.

In other news this week: a few days ago we saw the publication of the government's Security, Crime and Justice Review: I'll admit to not having read it in great detail, as I've been far too busy, but the impression I got was that it was high on headline-grabbing 'ideas' such as fingerprint-activated MP3 players to cut crime (a side effect of which would probably be an expansion of the fingerprint databases...) and low on anything really new (it mentioned continuing the Permanent Revolution in privatising criminal justice services - I may be paraphrasing). And later on today we'll hear what the new record number of prison places is.

Politicking

2007-03-25T18:00:00.000Z

Thanks to angrymammal for drawing my attention to this article in the Sunday Times - in the run-up to the Third Reading of the Offender Management Bill, the prisons minister Gerry Sutcliffe MP asked his officials to identify Chief Probation Officers who were for or against the legislation. Ostensibly this was to use those who were more in favour to act as 'champions' in persuading recalcitrant Labour backbenchers - clearly politicising civil servants - but there's also an obvious, threatening implication for the job security of those who have been more critical.

The Home Office reportedly insisted that "It is normal that the opinions of stakeholders are canvassed and assessed before a Bill is published as often they are on the front line delivering the policies" - unfortunately, whilst they did indeed consult when the White Paper was published, they chose not to listen to the 700+ respondents who criticised the proposals, compared to the 4 who were in favour. More meaningless guff from the Home Office. Still, it does at least show how frightened they were about the potential rebellion.

What do probation officers do? (1)

2007-03-17T11:00:00.000Z

This occasional series (exactly how occasional remains to be seen) was inspired by a comment posted here several months ago from someone who was considering applying to become a Trainee Probation Officer, and wanted to know what the job entailed in practice. I'll try to write a bit about all of the different aspects of the job as I see it, though please bear in mind that this is only a view from the desk of one particular probation officer. If any of my PO colleagues would like to comment and add their experiences and opinion to what I've got to offer, I'd be very pleased to hear from you.

1: Court work and Pre-Sentence Reports (PSRs)

It's probably best to begin at the beginning. A defendant appears in court and pleads guilty or is found guilty of an offence, and the court requests a PSR to assist it in passing sentence; when you read newspaper reports of trials that say the case was put off for 'reports', this is usually what is meant. The court is not obliged to ask for reports (I think - please correct me if I'm wrong here), particularly in cases where the offence is "so serious" that only a custodial sentence is justified, but they frequently do, and especially when the offence falls on the cusp between a community penalty and a custodial sentence. Somewhere near 250,000 PSRs are written each year.

The defendant is interviewed by a probation officer, who then writes a report for the next hearing. The report contains an offence analysis, which looks at the motivation behind the offending (might be money, drugs, alcohol, anger control problems and so on), the effect of the offence on the victim(s), and any pattern of offending behaviour. This last element is usually based on previous convictions, which are (or should be...) supplied to the report author by the CPS at the court, but can also be based on police intelligence. This is quite a sensitive issue, because obviously the defendant will only be sentenced on the basis of the offence for which they have been convicted. However, and particularly in cases involving domestic violence, where there might be a long list of police 'callouts' to an address that have not resulted in arrest or charge of the offender, this can be relevant in terms of an assessment of where the offence fits into an overall picture of that person's activity.

The analysis should also contain an account of the defendant's attitude towards his or her offence, including towards the victim(s), and any expressions of remorse that they may have made during the PSR interview. This is another tricky area; unbelievably, it's not unknown for someone to fake remorse in order to try to con the PO into giving them a 'better' report... Actually, we're pretty good at spotting where this is the case, and the court itself should have an overall picture of the offence anyway, so this is not really as big a problem as it might seem.

After the offence analysis comes the 'offender analysis'. Back in the good old days, PSRs were known as Social Enquiry Reports, and contained an examination of the defendant's personal circumstances that might be relevant for the court in passing sentence. A wide range of potential information can fall into this section: family history, education, drug or alcohol abuse, mental health problems, employment... each case is different though this section should give a broad range of coverage. This is potentially tricky, because - particularly in cases where the defendant has not been involved with the Probation Service in the past - they are usually the primary source of this information. Again, we can check with the police, Social Services and other statutory agencies, as well as family members if relevant, but PSRs are done to quite strict deadlines so any information in the offender analysis must be seen as coming with a 'health warning' in terms of its sources.

Following the offender analysis is a section on risk assessment and risk management. I'll be writing a separate post on this, because it's such a major component of working in the Probation Service, but suffice it to say that this looks at the likelihood of that person harming others or themselves, and the chances of them committing further offences. This section first became a requirement in 1995.

Finally, there's a section where a recommendation to the court is made. This tries to encompass any statements made by the court about the level of seriousness of the case (which they are obliged by the Criminal Justice Act 2003 to give to the Probation Service, though in practice this does appear to be rather patchy), and the view of the author on what the key issues are in reducing the risks of harm and re-offending. A suggestion is then made of what an appropriate sentence might be, which could include a community order, a suspended sentence order, or a custodial sentence (it might also even be a recommendation for a fine or a conditional discharge).

If a community penalty is recommended, the author should recommend requirements chosen from the 'menu' of 12 possible requirements contained in the CJA 2003, the overall number of which should reflect the seriousness of the case (usually no more than three on any one order). This might include supervision by a probation officer, up to 300 hours of unpaid work, an offending behaviour programme or a curfew. The author might also recommend that the case be adjourned for further information, such as a psychiatric report or an assessment of the suitability for a Drug Rehabilitation Requirement, which would be done by a specialist drugs worker.

If a custodial sentence appears to be the only appropriate disposal, the PSR may not contain recommendations for particular work to be done in custody, but they are increasingly used by prisons as a basis for sentence planning, and courts are now able to recommend particular licence conditions for when a prisoner is released from custody.

Basically, that's what all PSRs should contain. However, there are some differences between reports written for particular courts. Crown Court PSRs, because the offences are more serious, often contain an assessment on 'dangerousness' (more on this when I talk about risk assessment), and there are fewer recommendations for community penalties. Magistrates Courts are usually offered a choice between 'standard' reports, done during an adjournment of usually three or four weeks, or 'fast delivery' reports, done in a much shorter period and sometimes even on the same day. Fast Delivery reports should really only be done in the least complex cases and where there are no suggestions that the defendant poses a risk of harm, though these guidelines are, unfortunately, not always strictly adhered to.

Prison experiences

2007-03-12T22:04:00.000Z

Today's Guardian carries a mammoth set of articles about life in British prisons - from the guy on his first day of a 12 month sentence at HMP Wandsworth in south London, to Phil Weatley the director general and Anne Owers, the prisons inspector. Quite a read.

Sorry...

2007-03-11T10:48:00.000Z

Apologies to anyone reading this via RSS feeds (hope I've got that right - I'm not sure how it works) for what probably looks like a whole lot of spam from me - I've been updating the labels for my archived posts and trying to get a little bit of consistency into this blog. Hopefully that's all now completed and I can just get on with writing rubbish about the criminal justice system.

Courting trouble

2007-03-11T10:30:00.000Z

The BBC quotes figures from the Magistrates Association, which record that in 2006, 8.2% of defendants did not turn up for their hearings, up to 150,000 out of the two million or more seen in court in a year.

The Magistrates Association are running a campaign called 'Cutting Costs, Jeopardising Justice' to highlight the impact that the widespread lack of resources will have on the ability of magistrates court to deliver fair and just outcomes. This is a timely reminder for me that there is a chronic lack of funding throughout the criminal justice system, and not just limited to one particular area. Problems in one part have a knock-on effect in other areas, and it's important to recognise that this will have an impact across the board in terms of our ability, as people working in this field, to do the work effectively.

Yet more on the Offender Management Bill

2007-03-11T10:04:00.000Z

Some comments from a few blogs on the Offender Management Bill:

John McDonnell, rebel Labour MP and aspiring leader of the Labour Party, has a highly critical post and mentions that Gordon Brown intervened personally by calling individual MPs into meet with him about the Bill.

Graham Broadbelt of Demos argues that the bill represents action without insight - it will create an even more complex system without any real idea about what has an impact on reducing re-offending.

Not specifically on the Bill but here Trevor Philpott, who has considerable experience of voluntary sector engagement with offenders, puts the case for greater funding for charitable organisations seeking to get involved.

Bizarrely, the Home Secretary's blog, Reid My Lips, contains no references to his triumph whatsoever. Which makes me wonder about his priorities...

What the Butler saw

2007-03-08T21:22:00.000Z

I've been meaning to post this for a few days but have been distracted by NOMS-related stuff. Recently the Butler Trust announced its list of award winners for 2007; their names can be found here, and well done to them all.

The Butler Trust, for those who don't know, was set up more than 20 years ago in memory of 'Rab' Butler, to recognise and promote positive, creative work going on in British prisons (I can't help thinking that the Howard, Blunkett or Reid Trusts might have a different flavour). Annual Awards have been given for some time to acknowledge particularly dedicated work by prison staff, and in 2005 this was extended to probation staff.

More on the Offender Management Bill

2007-03-07T23:16:00.000Z

In the run-up to last Wednesday's Third Reading of the Offender Management Bill, the prisons minister Gerry Sutcliffe was on the Today programme to support the legislation. The Probation Boards Association website has a transcript (a pdf file) of the piece, with Martin Sergeant of the PBA given a chance to have his say about the Bill.

As we have now come to expect from this Government, the minister rather disingenuously painted the Bill's opponents as being against any change of any hue, completely dismissing a number of very valid concerns about the proposed reforms. If he, or his boss, actually bothered paying any attention to the criticisms that have been levelled (something like 99% of the responses received to the White Paper were critical, let's remember), they would discover that actually there isn't a great deal of opposition to new ideas and new methods of working. Probation officers do actually want to try to prevent re-offending - that's why we're in the job - and the service has a proud tradition of innovative work with offenders. However, this has been lost over the last decade or so after a series of reforms brought Probation under much greater centralised control, and subject to National Standards, targets and so on.

This is, as I'm sure I've said before, precisely the problem with the Offender Management Bill. Yes, there are a good number of non-state organisations trying to do work with offenders, particularly in prisons. In the past I've mentioned St Giles Trust, and the Inside Out Trust are another good example of positive work being done in partnership with the statutory services.

However, the Government has completely missed the point that their work has been a success not because of central control, but because of individual governors and the organisations themselves identifying a need and finding a solution to it. The Offender Management Bill removes control of commissioning services from probation boards, and places it in the grasping hands of the Home Secretary, who then devolves it to the ten Regional Offender Managers. Neither NOMS nor the ROMS can possibly have any idea of what the problems are at a local level - the ROMS' responsibilities will cover vast geographical areas, lumping them all in together - and they will simply end up driving through Service Level Agreements with big private companies like Group 4 and Securicor, and the few charitable/voluntary sector organisations that can cope at that scale. Smaller and more specialised groups, which may have been operating very successfully for some time but on a very specific and localised level, will be squeezed out because of the competition; the playing field is only level for those with the biggest teams.

If this bill was genuinely about improving the work that is done with offenders, it would devolve more power to probation officers, not reduce it by centralising control, and give us more authority - and more money, of course - to identify services for offenders as individuals, rather than threaten our jobs and sap our morale. We want to innovate, we want to work with offenders in the most effective ways that we can to protect the public and to reduce re-offending; but we're constrained by inflexible central government targets and bureaucracy.

Despite all this, and contrary to the image that is put out by ministers, we still manage to perform well against those targets, and re-offending rates are coming down. I noticed a very even-handed report in The Economist this week: I'd expected it to be in favour of the bill and in competition in service delivery, and to some extent it was; however, it also puts forward a good case for holding back from further change in order to see whether the last set of reforms worked. The current data on re-offending rates dates back to 2003, so there is no actual way to see if all the money that has apparently been "thrown at" the Probation Service since then has had any impact. At that time, the last set of changes to hit probation officers were only just bedding down, and even according to those figures there is a 13% gap between the level of reconviction for community supervision and prison. So why the need for further measures, if not for ideological reasons?

Early Day Motion 833

2007-03-06T22:58:00.000Z

Early Day Motion 833 was introduced to the House of Commons back in February, and reads:

“That this House congratulates the National Probation Service on its 100 year anniversary, and its contribution to local communities in rehabilitating offenders; and believes firmly that it has a vital role to play as a properly-funded public service for the long-term future.”

At the time of blogging there were 81 signatories; you can see the names here, and it's an encouraging mix of parties and political persuasions. If your MP hasn't signed it yet (and I don't think mine has, so that's one less Christmas card!) why not drop them a line?

Offender Management Bill passes Third Reading

2007-03-05T17:03:00.000Z

So the Offender Management Bill made it through its Third Reading last Wednesday night, but not without a couple of scares. The Government's majority was cut to 25, and John Reid was forced into making a number of concessions, principally that the writing of pre-sentence reports would be retained within the public sector (thus avoiding a situation where pressure might be placed upon the writers of court reports to favour one particular disposal over others for commercial reasons). A guarantee to keep offender management in the public sector for at least three years also appears to have been extracted.

Neil Gerrard MP, chair of the All Party Parliamentary Justice Unions Group and a key figure in the Labour opposition to the Bill, proposed an amendment that would have excluded a number of probation functions from the legislation entirely; 51 Labour MPs voted against the Government on this, but it was defeated, largely due to Conservative abstentions. The Home Secretary even seems to have been sufficiently worried about the result to have baited Conservative MPs about their wanting to inflict a defeat on the Government, rather than support legislation that is not all that far away from their own views about private and voluntary sector involvement in public sector work. Though of course he'd probably have done that anyway, just for kicks.

All now rests on the House of Lords to deal with this ill-thought out, unnecessary, unsubstantiated and ideologically-motivated legislation. According to NAPO's Stop The Bill page, the First Reading was last Friday and in all likelihood it will be formally debated within the next two to three weeks. It now seems unlikely that the Bill will be 'defeated' per se, as the Lords tend to accept that the Commons carries a greater weight of public legitimacy; however, there will be excellent scope for further amendments that can begin to rescue this legislative mess.

Women in prison

2007-03-04T16:09:00.000Z

Today's Observer carries this article about the state of women's prisons in England and Wales, with a government review, due in the next week, or so expected to conclude that there are too many vulnerable and mentally-ill women in custody.

Working with women is a particular challenge for probation officers. I'm not sure of the exact figures but would guess that less than 10% of our caseloads are women (at the moment, I have 0 out of a total caseload that veers between 45-50 at any one time). However, they are usually very demanding cases with high levels of need and necessitating large amounts of time-consuming work with multiple agencies. The sense of "where do I start?" is a very common one.

What is usually clear, though, is that prison is normally the worst place to be putting female offenders, since there are very few who pose more than a minimal risk of harm - to anyone other than themselves. Homes are lost, children are taken into care, mental health problems and substance abuse are exacerbated; all these problems are compounded by sending women to prison. This isn't to say that there aren't people trying to help: in my experience, women's prisons have a very high proportion of committed staff and a considerable number of innovative ways of working (which are often absent in the male estate). However, this is often a matter of trying a number of approaches just in case one of them works, with the priority simply about making someone manageable whilst under the duty of care of the prison authorities.

Women are treated differently by the criminal justice system: they don't offend nearly as often or as seriously as men, but frequently attract harsher punishments - see this story from the Times, picked out last week by Bystander, a clear case of tackling the symptoms, rather than the disease.

A different approach is clearly needed - but no resources are forthcoming, and in a punitive climate, any efforts to 'help' are likely to be publicly scorned as soft. The Observer article makes the point that the new indefinite sentences are effectively targeting those with mental health problems whose disorders make them unpredictable, and thereby filling the gap where the Government obviously hopes its draconian Mental Health Bill will ultimately go.

Where was I?

2007-03-04T10:47:00.000Z

Erm... hello everyone. It's been rather a long time since I last posted here, hasn't it? The reasons behind this can best be explained with a list of acronyms: PSR, LSP3E, C-SOGP, NOMS, LSP1F etc etc etc - I rather drowned in work for a while and blogging just had to take a back seat.

In fact, I logged into Blogger this morning with the intention of deleting the whole shebang (there's nothing sadder than an out of date blog...), but have been swayed against it by discovering that there were a number of comments that - for some reason - I had completely failed to see! In the absence of any more concrete evidence, I'm going to blame my technological ineptitude! Anyway, consider yourselves all published now - and to those of you who were trying to make contact with me via the comments, please try again! You'll probably understand why I don't publish an email address here...

I have plenty to say on the subject of the NOMS Bill, which passed its Third Reading earlier this week, though I've drunk too much coffee this morning and I'm not sure my blood pressure would cope. Maybe later on.

Insiders

2006-11-21T20:00:00.000Z

This week is Inside Justice Week, "your chance to see behind the scenes of the justice system in England and Wales" (without committing an offence, which would be another way to get an insider's view...) There are a lot of events going on around the country, and quite a bit of press coverage the length and breadth of the land:

The Northern Echo

Lincoln Today

Worthing Herald

York Press

Someone's even had the crazy idea of getting a probation officer to write a blog (it'll never catch on)

Taking a leak

2006-11-19T15:00:00.000Z

The Sunday Times has seen some leaked cabinet papers that show that Gordon Brown has attacked the Home Secretary's tough sentencing agenda, and asked him to reduce costs by making better use of non-custodial alternatives, both before and after sentencing. The point about the high cost of John Reid's punitive agenda was made at the time when the brouhaha about sentencing first arose during the summer, though at the time it seemed that the Treasury's approach was to keep quiet.

In a roundabout way, this is pointing out the cost-effectiveness of community sentences, fines and electronic tagging as compared to custody. However, if this really is going to be properly sold to the electorate, someone needs to be explaining exactly how and why non-custodial penalties do work to reduce re-offending and to protect the public. But unfortunately the pro-privatisation agenda within the Home Office runs firmly in the opposite direction.

One person who is standing up for the Probation Service is John Raine, chairman of the Probation Boards Association, who wrote to the Home Secretary last week. His letter was eloquent and deeply passionate, and particularly critical of John Reid's choice of audience to whom he would attack the performance of the Service. The letter was quoted quite heavily by the Yorkshire Post, and attracted mention on the BBC website and in The Times - all three of these are worth a read, if only to counter some of the rubbish that has been coming out of the Home Office recently.

Letter

2006-11-19T12:00:00.000Z

On Friday Gerry Sutcliffe*, the Under-Secretary of State for criminal justice and offender management, wrote to Chief Probation Officers and the Chairs of Probation Boards in England and Wales about the soon-to-be-published Offender Management Bill. His letter was published on EPIC, the Probation Service intranet, so that all of us front line grunts would have a chance to see what was what.

The letter starts off well; Mr Sutcliffe mentions his "appreciation of the professionalism of probation staff and your dedication to the difficult, and often dangerous, work which you do on behalf of the wider community." He also acknowledges that the Service has delivered real improvements over recent years - this is a point which cannot be stressed strongly enough: the NPS is performing well against the targets set by the Home Office despite the unremitting barrage of new initiatives over the past few years. There has also been a reduction in reoffending rates (though you wouldn't know it from the way the politicians are speaking), based on the most recent figures - though these figures relate to November 2003 and so bear very little relation to how things are right now.

But, of course, all of this comes within a missive that is intended to "clarify again what we have in mind and the reasoning behind it", and so again it becomes very clear that this is central government diktat, ideologically-motivated and imposed from above without any meaningful consultation (and where there has been pseudo-consultation, the responses were overwhelmingly negative).

Still, at least this letter is something of an acknowledgement that there are rumblings and grumblings within the Probation Service - but it won't do anything to dispel them.

* It might have been fair to expect that, given the sweeping nature of these changes, that the letter might have come from the Home Secretary, but given that he was reported as talking about "those f***ing social workers in the Probation Service" recently, it's not in the least bit surprising

Someone's got their eye on a prize

2006-11-15T20:55:00.000Z

Elsewhere, there has been some coverage of a report published by Barnardo's, the children's charity, which calls for the use of lie detector testing and satellite tracking in the supervision (though surveillance is probably a better word) of sex offenders in the community.

The report was mentioned in several different newspapers (the sub-editors at The Sun showed their usual restraint with the headline "Eye in the sky to spy on paedos"), and all managed to pick up on the point that the chief executive of Barnardo's is Martin Narey, who was the first head of NOMS until last year, and oversaw the beginnings of the privatisation agenda in the Probation Service. This does have the effect of making this report look like a first skirmish in the contestability battles - what does Barnardo's think it might be able to provide?

I'll fully admit that I haven't read the Barnardo's report (enough bumf comes from official sources to keep me more than fully occupied during my working week), but it appears that it makes reference to a study of the use of polygraph tests which showed that 80% of those tested made greater disclosures about their offending. Again, I haven't seen this study. But I have very little doubt that its sample size was very small, and those who did take part were probably selected for their willingness to do so. Whilst not wishing to undermine this work, which may provide some valuable insights into new methods of public protection, it is extremely dangerous to attempt to make public policy on the basis of such limited information. Probably just as dangerous as trying to privatise huge chunks of the Probation Service without so much as publishing a business case.

Queen's Speech

2006-11-15T20:41:00.000Z

Today was the Queen's Speech, and as predicted it contained an Offender Management bill. It's been separated from the Criminal Justice bill, which suggests to me that the Government is anticipating a fight over both pieces of legislation, and is adopting a divide and conquer approach. Presumably the hope is that offender management will be much easier to slip through if they can win a public argument about what the Probation Service 'should' be doing, despite never having been given the resources to do so.

I've just been watching BBC News 24 (far too busy today to pay attention to any of the earlier coverage of the speech), and their news ticker thing says it's a bill to "improve supervision of offenders". Those in the Home Office and the hierarchy of NOMS who have a massive stake in this bill going through (because their jobs would be meaningless if it didn't) must be delighted - how can anyone oppose something that would improve the supervision of offenders?

Except as I've pointed out in previous posts, and as Napo and the Probation Boards Association - amongst others - will be making clear over the coming weeks and months, this Bill will do nothing of the sort. By introducing 'contestability', it will introduce the pursuit of private profit into the management of dangerous individuals, lead to serious cuts in service provision, and fragment the system of public protection that is currently operating.

Panorama

2006-11-09T20:00:00.000Z

Last night's Panorama programme was not as bad as I had feared. Yes, there were some incidents where warning signs had not been reported properly, or action taken when necessary (I was very concerned that the police did not appear to have taken action on the information received - but then of course we don't know that they didn't; who knows how many of these kinds of allegations are received by the police on a daily basis?), but in general the impression I got was of two sets of staff trying to operate a very difficult system with very strained resources. They did come across as too aware of their limitations; however, I suspect the editing process probably weeded out any of the times where staff were going above and beyond the call of duty, as most people in the Probation Service will do. Those hammy 'de-briefing' sessions with the undercover journalist did nothing for my confidence in it as a piece of unbiased reporting.

The thing that this programme did make abundantly clear is that there is a huge gap between the public perception of what 'supervision' means, and what actually goes on within the Probation Service. This gap has grown because senior Probation management have 'sold' the Probation Service on the idea that it can deliver "public protection", without actually describing what that means. Rehabilitation is not a fashionable concept at the moment, but rehabilitation helps protect the public by reducing the number of offences that are committed. This needs to be the selling point of the service, but it is being lost in favour of an entirely false image of probation officers as people who follow offenders around and check up on what they are doing. If you want surveillance, you need to get the police involved (and you need to give them a hell of a lot more money, because such operations are massively resource-intensive.

More on the speech

2006-11-08T19:00:00.000Z

A rumour that I've heard from more than one source today is that John Reid's Live From San Quentin (sorry, Wormwood Scrubs) gig was originally going to be about sentencing policy, but someone rewrote his speech after learning of the Panorama programme due to be broadcast tonight. If this is true, it does at least suggest that it's simply naked political opportunism on the Home Sec's part, rather than a shadowy conspiracy involving the BBC to place journalists inside the Probation Service to discredit it before launching a massive reform programme (hey, conspiracy theories are fun!) Anyway, it's still all about neutralising the opposition before the National Offender Management Bill comes in in a month or so.

The speech, unsurprisingly, got a bit of press coverage today. The Guardian had pieces in the news and its Society section, in which Helen Edwards, the chief executive of NOMS, was wheeled out to try to justify her own job, and those of the 10 regional offender managers, who are muttering about commissioning services without really having a service to commission them for. The Telegraph's article starts off with a fanfare about private firms rescuing 'failing' Probation Areas, but then does at least quote Martin Wargent, of the Probation Boards Association, who stands up for realism in demands of criminal justice agencies. Deborah Orr at the Independent has quite a nice little article which points out that there has been a near-endless series of probation reforms since Labour came to power in 1997. It's enough to make you vote Tory.

John's back

2006-11-07T19:00:00.000Z

A spot more probation bashing from the ever lovely John Reid, who's been visiting HMP Wormwood Scrubs in London to talk to the 'residents' about how the Probation Service isn't up to scratch (a quick aside for the benefit of Dr Reid, who I'm sure reads this blog assiduously: it'd be nice if you'd give probation areas enough money so that we officers could actually go and visit them, but that's another issue).

This is little more than political opportunism, given that the Panorama programme tomorrow night will undoubtedly make a few cheap headlines, and he can then point to the new National Offender Management Bill which will be in the Queen's Speech. This, as I've pointed out on previous occasions, forces probation areas to put out considerable areas of their operations to tender to other providers - this is described as contestability but in reality it's privatisation by another name. This is continuing despite the Home Office's failure to make public any kind of business case for this move, and the overwhelmingly negative response that it received for its public consultation document.

Last year Napo, the probation officers union, very successfully ran a Stop the Bill campaign, which significantly contributed to the last NOMS bill from becoming law. It's resuming the good fight; I only wish that they'd called it Kill the Bill, so that this year we could have Kill the Bill Vol 2... (only me then? right). The central message of this campaign is, quite rightly, that the enforced fragmentation of the probation service will damage local accountability and prevent this core component of the criminal justice system from working with other services to protect the public. When have we ever seen a private company operating a public service better than the public sector can? Without the massive subsidies that privatisation almost always involves, as a sweetener to the businessmen to take these troublesome do-gooders off our hands? Private companies will cut corners, because that's what they do to maintain or increase their profits. This will damage the service that is provided, and disaster will follow.

Mind you, the Home Sec did make a good point about POs writing too many reports and not doing enough of the actual supervisory work. You won't - unusually - find me arguing with him on that one.

Television

2006-11-06T20:00:00.000Z

Two television programmes will be broadcast this week that will hopefully shed some light on the mysterious world of Probation. That, or grossly misrepresent reality in pursuit of ratings and press coverage.

The first, entitled 'Lock Them Up or Let Them Out', will be broadcast tonight on BBC2 at 9:00pm. It looks at how the Parole Board makes decisions to grant or refuse early release to prisoners serving over four years in prison, and will follow the fortunes of violent offenders going through the parole system. On a day when it was reported that the proportion of lifer cases granted parole has fallen to 1 out of every 9 applications (compared to 1 in 5 some time ago), this programme should give some interesting insights.

Whilst tonight's programme does rather revel in its title, at least it's suggestive of a balanced look at the issues. I'm rather less optimistic about the second, 'Exposed: The Bail Hostel Scandal', to be shown at 9:00pm on Wednesday. If this didn't come under the Panorama banner I would have written this off as mere red-top fodder, but - depressingly inevitably - it is an 'expose' of the goings-on inside probation hostels, claiming to have footage that was secretly filmed by undercover journalists who obtained work there. Leaving aside the issue of whether reporters who do this should be charged with obtaining pecuniary advantage by deception, clearly this raises serious questions about some Probation Areas' recruitment methods! No doubt it has kept a few PR departments busy this week too...

Financial crisis

2006-09-20T09:30:00.000Z

Yesterday the Guardian reported on a financial crisis in both the Prison and Probation Service, including the alarming suggestion that in the London Probation Area, probation officer grade staff delivering the domestic violence and sexual offending programmes may be redeployed as field probation officers to cover some of the huge gaps that exist in the capital.

Not a lot surprises me about the Probation Service these days, but this idea is so spectacularly short termist, and - as the manager quoted in the article quite rightly points out - liable to compromise the public's safety, that I find myself rather lost for words.

Cher-ching!

2006-09-15T07:15:00.000Z

On Wednesday the Guardian published this article by Alan Travis, the home affairs editor, about the Home Office's "privatisation prospectus" (something that I wrote about here nearly four weeks ago).

Yesterday we had the letters in response. There were four in total: one from Graham Beech of Crime Concern, who had been quoted in the original article - possibly misquoted, given the tone of his reply - and one from Dr Mike Nash of Portsmouth University (one of the biggest providers of Probation training in the country, my sources tell me). A third was from the "Chief Operations Officer" (whatever that means) of London Probation Area, Geraldine Gavin, who seems to have responded to a rather different article, since she talks about recruitment of additional staff and "an organisation-wide training programme on all aspects of offender risk assessment and management". It's a rather defensive letter, when the article itself had not been particularly critical, although I think most people in the Probation Service will understand where she's coming from, in getting the retaliations in first!

The fourth letter (the first to be printed) was always going to raise my blood pressure. Dr Neil Bentley, Director of Public Services at the CBI (an organisation that truly knows the price of everything but the value of nothing) was quick to point out that crime costs the country £60bn a year (how much of this was corporate fraud, he sadly didn't say), and that the Government's plan should be implemented swiftly because the miracle of greater competition will somehow tackle the problem of re-offending.

This case is one that simply has not been made: private sector involvement will be in those parts of Probation work that can be turned to a quick profit. This will be at the expense of staff's working conditions and terms of employment (the CBI is quick to point out the supposed benefits of the privatised prisons, where staff pay and annual leave entitlement have been eroded compared to those that remained in the public sector) and, no doubt, at the expense of the service delivered to offenders and the communities who want reduced re-offending.

Once these services are taken out of public hands, they will be subordinated to the demands of profit and shareholders, and lost to democratic accountability. Dr Bentley pays lip service to "the hurt and suffering crime causes"; how does he feel about making money out of that very suffering? He probably can't see it all too well because of the £ signs flashing in front of his eyes.

Early intervention

2006-09-05T18:29:00.000Z

If I were in a generous mood, I'd give the PM credit for the apparently good intentions in the recently announced idea of early intervention in hard-to-reach families (which have, inevitably, been dubbed "baby ASBOs". The aim of providing better-targeted support to tackle problems such as alcohol or drug abuse, inadequate housing and so on is a good one.

But I'm not, and this policy is clearly not about actually doing something effectively but grabbing a few cheap headlines to pull attention away from the succession problem. The idea smacks of being seen to do something in the short term, when the benefits of any intervention can only be seen 15 or 20 years further down the line, and dragging out the whole "respect agenda" a little bit further and a little bit thinner.

It will - or should - be spectacularly extensively opposed: there's ammunition in there for those who rail against the nanny state, those who oppose increased public funding, those who are against labelling and stigmatisation of the socially-disadvantaged... There is historical form for this type of thing though: I tended not to pay attention in RE lessons, but I do remember something about a King Herod who took 'early intervention' against first-born male children to avoid drastic consequences for himself...

Enforcement

2006-09-01T09:00:00.000Z

A report in yesterday's Guardian records that prison numbers in England and Wales have now reached another new record at 79,247, which is some 653 places below full capacity. The report identifies recent trends in tougher sentencing (contrary to the popular image) but also the part played in pushing up prison numbers by enforcement action taken by probation officers.

This can take two forms: anyone released part-way through their sentence can be recalled to custody for breaching the terms of their licence. This is sometimes because of the commission of other offences, often because of failing to attend appointments with their probation officer, but also sometimes because of unacceptable behaviour that suggests that they are at risk of offending or causing serious harm. This is an interesting and challenging area (particularly once the solicitors become involved) but one where the close co-operation between agencies, especially the police and social services, has really shown a benefit.

The other way in which probation enforcement drives up prison numbers is through breaching community orders. The Criminal Justice Act 2003 removed some of the discretion that courts and probation officers had in this area; prior to April 2005, when the Act came into force, breaches could be dealt with by small fines and allowing the Order to continue. This was used in cases where the offender had breached the terms of their Order but there were signs that they were still motivated to address their offending and were 'on the right path'; this was very much a judgement call by the individual probation officer, but in my experience was frequently supported by the courts. Since last April, this course of action is no longer an option: after any breach, a Community Order must either be revoked and the offender re-sentenced in another way, or the Order must be made more stringent (such as additional hours of Unpaid Work, or extra requirements).

The article quotes Juliet Lyon, the director of the Prison Reform Trust, who says that there "ought to be a more sophisticated way of ensuring compliance than just yanking them back to prison". Most probation officers would agree with this, in most cases. But the discretion has been taken away from us, as it has been from the courts, and we're now seeing the clear cost of that in intense pressure on the resources of the Prison Service.

It seems that the Home Office are now considering moves to release some low-risk prisoners 10 days early in order to free up some spaces. Presumably this will involve notifying the relevant Probation Areas well in advance so that arrangements can be made for their supervision, where required, but I'm not holding my breath (the Immigration and Nationality Directorate have no duty to inform us when they are a) detaining someone for immigration checks or b) about to let them go, so I have a sneaky suspicion that the rest of the Home Office will take the same approach and let us be the last to know). This will apparently create 500 more spaces, which is really just a drop in a very stormy ocean.

Prospective

2006-08-19T11:17:00.000Z

Thursday saw the publication of "Improving Prison and Probation Services: Public Value Partnerships" (see here for your very own copy), the latest glossy pamphlet about the proposed introduction of contestability/privatisation into the Probation Service. It begins to read like a prospectus, extolling the virtues of private enterprise over the dinosaur of public servants. Maybe this is the first draft of the catalogue for the closing-down sale of the nearly-100-year-old Probation Service?

There are some bizarre things about requiring Probation areas to double the proportion of services that are contracted out, but on a voluntary basis (my emphasis) - which is it, guys? A voluntary requirement makes as much sense as a chocolate fireguard. I'm also a bit alarmed by the specific focus on faith organisations - what happens to people who don't happen to share those beliefs? But the main contention I have with the document is its claim that contracting out services will lead to an end to the "one size fits all" approach to offender management.

Firstly, this betrays an ignorance of what probation officers do. We work very hard to match the right things to the right people; if we put offenders onto the same offending behaviour programmes, that reflects the fact that the Home Office has set targets for the number of completions, and not necessarily a belief that they are right for each individual. Sometimes they are, and sometimes they aren't; the fact that there's limited room for manoeuvre here is not the fault of the probation officer. We try very hard to make the standard programmes relevant for each individual, but we're constrained by instructions handed to us by the people who are now telling us to work around them.

Secondly, the contestability/privatisation agenda will not, actually, end up in a situation where an individual officer can make decisions about what is right for an individual offender; we won't see a whole raft of different options coming onstream, or a smorgasbord of possibilities to choose from, even though this document tries to propagate this illusion. It will actually mean Service Level Agreements struck at senior levels to replace existing options, not a greater amount of choice. The PO at the ground level will simply be forced to amend their report proposals from Unpaid Work to "100 hours of SERCO Service to the Community", or whatever. This does not mean choice! Rail and bus privatisation did not mean a choice between companies for the consumer: only one company operates the route I have to take to my office, so they get my custom. The same is true with contestability/privatisation: it means taking public services out of the hands of publicly-accountable people and placing them into the hands of private companies whose duties are to their shareholders.

The document claims that this is all in the interests of driving up performance. I have no problem with that; in fact, I'm very much in favour of improving standards and the way in which we work. But it's predicated on the same dogma that has sustained this Government for over nine years, that private is best; it's a position that has been shown to be untrue in so many different cases that I'm, frankly, astonished that it's still being pursued. But it is. It will end up costing more, without any significant improvement in performance (and in all probability lower), across an increasingly fragmented and confused sector, with increased room for abuse of the system. We've seen it so many times before.

Over 700 responses were received when a consultation document was sent out earlier in the year; all but two of them were negative about contestability/privatisation. The message was clear: if you want to improve performance standards, you need to provide proper resources, ensure that those at the front line feel valued and supported, and give them time to react to changes before dunping a whole load of new ones on them.

I don't have an objection to working with different agencies and companies (although I do have a problem, ideologically-speaking, with the public good being farmed out to private profit); in my day-to-day work I have regular contact with central government agencies, local government, charities and even private companies. But I do object, in the strongest possible terms, to this hacking away approach, taking chunks of the public sector away and handing them out to the highest bidder, whilst the unprofitable core (and most difficult) tasks remain to an undermined, under-appreciated and demotivated set of staff.

Timely

2006-08-14T21:25:00.000Z

I've recently noticed that I've been dealing with a lot of offenders whose birthdays fall in August. This is by no means a scientific sample, of course, but is there something in this? Long-burning resentment at having had childhood birthday parties when all their friends were away on holiday? Who knows.

I'm not going anywhere with this, by the way - just felt like saying it.

Victims and justice

2006-08-13T17:40:00.000Z

Tomorrow SmartJustice, a campaign for more effective sentencing, will publish a study saying that 62% of victims of crime do not believe that prison sentences are a deterrent to future non-violent crime, according to the Observer.

It's trailed as a "surprising finding", but I think that's over-stating it; I think there's a tendency to assume that being a victim of crime automatically means someone will want the person who committed that crime dealt with in the most punitive way possible. My own experience of working with victims of crime - which is a completely unscientific sample - suggests that everyone reacts differently, and you really can't predict how someone will react to being a victim.

The common thing that victims of crime do say, however, is that they don't want other people to go through what they have. A lot want to understand why the crime was committed, and why it happened to them. Restorative justice schemes, which bring offenders face to face with their victims, are much more developed within the youth justice system than in the adult services, although it does happen on a case by case basis (Thames Valley Police are amongst the leaders in the field with adult offenders). The Sycamore Tree programme (pdf) is run in several prisons, aiming to get adult offenders to face up to the effect that their crimes have had on others, and to accept responsibility for that harm.

Such schemes also have a benefit for victims; in many cases they can begin to feel that they weren't specifically targeted, which often helps them to feel safe again, and they may develop an understanding of why the person offended in that way, and a desire to see social or policy changes that would help prevent such crimes in future.

Easy - or perhaps not

2006-08-06T16:34:00.000Z

It hasn't always seemed that HM Inspectorate of Probation has been the friend of the probation officer over the last 12 months. Of course, there has been much to criticise, and one of the tasks of the inspectorate is to say some tough things - in many ways, an HMIP critique is more widely-respected than any from home secretaries. But the inspectors are also in the business of recognising and promoting good practice.

That's the function of the Effective Supervision Inspection (known as the ESI, though anyone who's been through this gruelling process will tell you it certainly ain't easy), which has involved selection of a large number of individual cases across England and Wales, in the name of finding out exactly what probation officers actually do (apart from wearing sandals, making mung bean casseroles and reading The Guardian).

A thematic inspection report, entitled 'Half Full and Half Empty' has just been published (see here for the key findings and here for the full report). The theme of this report is the substance misuse work that the Probation Service does with offenders, and it notes a large improvement in provision of drugs treatment but nowhere near as much for alcohol misusers (hence the title). This is despite the higher prevalence of alcohol as a offending-related factor (the report indicates 30-50% of offenders in the Probation Areas sampled had a problem with alcohol, compared to 16-23% who had a problem with drugs, although it does also suggest that this is an under-estimate).

This won't come as a surprise to many people working in the field; despite the tremendous harm done by alcohol, it simply isn't seen as being as much of a problem as drugs. This has a lot to do with the lobbying influence of the drinks industry, and the preoccupation of public debate with demonising drugs and drug users. It also has a lot to do with the way that treatment provision has developed.

Treatment of substance misuse has long been the domain of other agencies, and it's only in the last few years that drugs treatment has really come into the criminal justice system. Historically, drug and alcohol agencies had been reluctant to take clients who had been 'coerced' into treatment, arguing that their commitment to complete treatment was questionable. However, research gradually began to suggest that it didn't matter how someone got into treatment, as long as they did. The Powers of the Criminal Court Act 2000 created Drug Treatment and Testing Orders (DTTOs), and the Criminal Justice Act 2003 enabled courts to make drug rehabilitation requirements (DRRs) and alcohol treatment requirements (ATRs) as part of a Community Order.

DTTOs attracted a lot of publicity and a lot of funding; and they were also the subject of lots of cash-linked targets. Therefore the average Probation Area diverted its resources to meet this challenge, which meant cutbacks in other areas (and often a drop in performance in these other aspects of Probation work). This has carred on with DRRs; drug treatment via the criminal justice system is now well-established, but ATRs are by some way the poorer cousins. It's no wonder that they aren't as far along the road, since they haven't been travelling as long.

Anyway; it's nice to know that someone's interested in what we do, rather than what we're not doing...

Drugs

2006-07-31T20:51:00.000Z

The Science Select Committee has published a report that recommends an overhaul of the way that drugs are classified, based on scientific assessment of the harm that they cause, rather than simply the way it's always been done.

The graph at the bottom of this page shows how muddle-headed the drugs classification system has become, with several of the Class A drugs a long way down the list of most harmful substances, and good old unclassified alcohol right up there at number 5.

Apparently the suggested format was presented to Charles Clarke before he left office; somehow I suspect it's now not even in the same building as Dr John's in-tray...

Old news?

2006-07-26T14:35:00.000Z

Following a bit of idle googling, I discovered this article from the Telegraph, published back in March. It bears a surprising, and very strong, resemblance to Alasdair Palmer's 'The Probation Con' from last Friday...

TV dinner

2006-07-21T18:55:00.000Z

I'm watching '30 minutes' as I type this, and it's more or less what I expected. The disgust that drips from Alasdair Palmer's voice every time he says the words "the Probation Service" or "community supervision" is quite extraordinary. But there's nothing new being raised here: yes, the minimum requirements of Probation supervision are fairly minimal, and there is no way of monitoring offenders 24 hours per day. If there were a lot more probation officers, offenders could be seen more frequently, but that doesn't look likely (particularly with programmes such as this trashing our profession).

I'm hoping that, after the adverts, Mr Palmer might come up with some solutions for his proposal of not releasing prisoners - does he want them to be set free without any kind of monitoring or intervention whatsoever? Because that's what it sounds like. I shan't be posting further after the break, since I'm beginning to feel a need for a stiff drink...

A question of balance

2006-07-20T20:43:00.000Z

A coincidence, of course, that the Home Office's Criminal Justice Review is published on the same day as the crime statistics. And in no way does the title, "Rebalancing the criminal justice in favour of the law-abiding majority" suggest that this review was driven by a tabloid agenda and already knew what its outcome was going to be.

Ah well. There's some interesting stuff in there, and also some things that will never happen or will never work, but look good on glossy paper. But in many ways, it's just old policies dressed up as new reforms - and sometimes not even slightly subtly. All the stuff about introduction of expertise from the private sector (i.e. privatisation or 'contestability') is still there. And, of course, there's our old friend Mr Target (who appears in some places as a "tough target"), as if telling a bunch of harrassed, stress professionals that they need to do a certain number of things in a certain kind of way, was any kind of a substitute for actually letting them do the job properly and effectively in individual cases.

There's a suggestion that probation officers could be given the power to vary the punishment an offender serves without having to go back to court, which is a new one on me. Whilst the idea of giving someone an extra 50 hours of unpaid work because they swore at me was initially enticing, there are huge legal implications, and I doubt anything will come of this. I do quite fancy the idea of "practical 'myth-busting' advice and guidance to those working on the front line" about human rights, though I'd also like to see some 'myth-busting' through (and sometimes against) the media from a couple of ministers, rather than myth-pandering. The Human Rights Act will stay, you'll be glad to hear.

Wonderfully, there is a recognition that "The staff who work in the criminal justice system want to deliver a modern, simple and effective service without being overburdened by bureaucracy and regulation" (the Enforcer is not religious, but a heartfelt "Amen" nearly escaped there), and about a need for "smarter justice", i.e. treating different crimes differently. There's also more talk of making sure probation resources are focused on the more serious offenders, meaning that less serious offenders are fined instead of given community orders, and that courts are expected to ask for fewer pre-sentence reports (two trends that have been rising for many years now, so I'm not holding my breath). But there's a slightly weird-sounding focus on "gripping" offenders, which sounds rather industrial, but is probably just short-hand for "not losing them".

At first reading (and if I'm honest, there's not likely to be a second), it's all a bit of a mish-mash. But what did I expect? Comments, questions to: rebalancingthecjs@cjs.gsi.gov.uk. Tell 'em I sent ya.

We're all doomed, doomed I tells you!

2006-07-20T20:26:00.000Z

It's every home affairs correspondent's favourite day of the month - crime statistics day!!! Time to pick out a few figures, recycle last month's article, and let the subs pick a snappy headline...

Street crime surge dents Reid fightback

Street crime and armed mugging are on increase

Rise in muggings embarrasses Reid

Top cop blamed for 22 per cent rise in robberies

Phew, what a scorcher!

30 minutes (or thereabouts)

2006-07-19T20:33:00.000Z

On Friday at 7:35pm, Channel 4's 30 minutes programme (billed as a "series of provocative polemics in which high-profile authors address important current affairs subjects") is entitled "The Probation Con".

In this edition, journalist Alasdair Palmer (I had to google him to discover he's Public Policy Editor at The Sunday Telegraph, which may give an insight into his take on the matter) argues that "the Home Office's policy of releasing criminals into the community under the supervision of the probation service is putting public safety at risk by handing them the opportunity to re-offend". I rather hope it's a bit more sophisticated than that...

Anyway, I bring this to your attention because my sources have informed me that also appearing on the programme will be representatives from the Probation Service, including a main grade probation officer and the Chief Probation Officer of London Probation Area. Presumably to offer an alternative viewpoint, although no poultry are being quantified at this stage.

I think this should be worth watching even if, by starting at 7:35, it's clearly not thirty minutes long at all. And then, of course, at 8:30 on the same channel you have a vision of the future of British penal policy.

Normal service resumed

2006-07-19T20:31:00.000Z

My broadband connection 'issues' are now resolved, so hopefully normal service will be resumed (i.e. nothing posted for a week, then some links to an article in the Guardian and a bit of a rant about how the Probation Service needs to be better funded).

End of an era

2006-07-14T09:45:00.000Z

Today sees the final session at Bow Street Magistrates Court in London's Covent Garden. Over the last 125 years the court has seen some of the country's most notorious criminals pass through its (cell) doors, but now - somewhat inevitably, it would seem - it has been sold to a property developer.

The chief magistrate for England and Wales, Timothy Workman, is not happy about the closure of what may well be the world's most famous magistrates court, or the transfer of all its business to Horseferry Road Magistrates Court in Whitehall. However, in true last-day-at-work style, he's planning to take some mementoes with him, including the royal seal and the dock from Court No. 1 - if it's as big as I suspect it might be, he'll have to work pretty hard to sneak it out past security under his jacket...

HMIP report

2006-07-13T10:18:00.000Z

HM Inspectorate of Probation has published its annual report for 2005-06.

What a plucker

2006-07-13T09:55:00.000Z

Sentencing guidelines in the 1850s were fairly strict, according to The Guardian's 'From The Archives' feature today. I'm sure there are plenty of good citizens who'd agree with the idea of hard labour and the lash, even for offences of pie-thievery and flower-plucking.

Mind you, community penalties didn't exist then, and there was no such thing as the Probation Service, which will - subject to government policy - be celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2007. The 'Facing Crime' section on the Probation Boards Association website contains a timeline of Probation and a brief section on how our work has changed since the police court missionaries were first trying to rescue drunkards from the streets.

Ever-decreasing circles

2006-07-11T14:55:00.000Z

"Why would anyone want to spend time with high-risk sex offenders and become the object of hatred themselves?" asks Yvonne Roberts in The Guardian today. No, not an interview with a probation officer (or at least not specifically), but an article about Circles of Support and Accountability that work with men convicted of sexual offences in a combination of supporting them and modelling pro-social acts and attitudes, challenging their behaviour and providing an extra level of monitoring to that of the various statutory agencies. Of course, like seems to happen to any decent, locally-developed idea these days, their funding is insecure and liable to disappear within the next 12 months.

Disconnected

2006-07-04T17:42:00.000Z

The Enforcer has recently had some relocation issues and is still not connected to the internet. Therefore he speaks to you from one of Dante's seven circles of hell. Actually, I'm in an internet cafe, but it's possibly the hottest place in the country at this precise moment (I pity anyone who has to sit in my immediate vicinity during the rest of the day). Anyway, apologies to my 14 regular readers (don't you just love Statcounter?), and hopefully normal service will be resumed shortly.

There've been some interesting stories over the past couple of weeks but since they're not topical at the moment I shan't be commenting. Plus I'm a bit frazzled at the moment and not really thinking straight. The wonders of summer!

The debate goes on...

2006-06-22T21:52:00.000Z

Thanks to Bystander for pointing me in the direction of this article, by Ian Loader, Professor of Criminology at Oxford University, posted on the 10 Downing Street website. It calls for the PM to encourage a better dialogue with the citizens of this country about crime, social disorder and human rights, and basically to stop leaping into every problem with another set of legislation.

The Times has been quick to comment on it, as as the BBC and The Guardian. It's all in advance of the PM's big speech on criminal justice in Bristol tomorrow. I'm tempted to make up some "speech bingo" cards with choice phrases such as "re-balancing the system in favour of victims" and something about reforming the Human Rights Act. But I won't, since a) it'd only depress me and b) I'm moving house over the weekend, and I've got far more important things to be worried about than the criminal justice system.

Must do better

2006-06-20T21:56:00.000Z

I've just noticed that recently I've been commenting a lot about prisons, courts and policing - anything, in fact, other than Probation practice. Which is not really what this blog was supposed to be about! Obviously the component parts of the criminal justice cannot be seen in isolation, but equally I don't want to move away from my intended focus. I had been planning to write a bit about Custody Plus, the introduction of contestability (aka privatisation), and the other burning issues affecting my work, but recent events have rather overtaken my thinking. Not necessarily a bad thing, but I want to try to haul myself away from getting irked by tabloid nonsense on a daily basis.

Research

2006-06-20T21:15:00.000Z

The Home Office Research Development and Statistics (RDS) website is a treasure trove of interesting - and occasionally useful - information about crime, justice and immigration. Unfortunately, the current settings on NPS internet browsers means we're not actually allowed to download the reports, only wonder at the mysteries within. Unless we've got our own access at home, of course (though it is vaguely sad to be looking this stuff up in my spare time).

Anyway, this 'Findings' report was published today - it's an evaluation of a pilot of the Offender Assessment System (OASys) tool now used on an everyday basis by probation and prison officers to assess the likelihood of reconviction and the level of risk of harm presented by any individual under supervision. The report gives a reasonably good introduction to some of the complexities of OASys, and whilst it's not the most riveting of reads, it's quite short and so perhaps worth a look for anyone who wants a bit of an insight into this particular area of risk assessment practice.

The findings suggest that OASys is a good predictor of reconviction, and that the criminogenic (offending-related) needs that were statistically most predictive of reconviction are drug misuse and accommodation problems. No real surprise there. Amongst the three least predictive (along with alcohol misuse and emotional well-being, which encompasses psychological and psychiatric problems), though, was the 'thinking and behaviour' category.

Now, this is very interesting, since the majority of the accredited offending behaviour programmes currently operated by the Probation and Prison Services are almost exclusively targeted at this particular area, addressing 'cognitive deficits' such as poor problem-solving or impulsivity and failure to consider consequences before acting. Much has been made of the need for 'evidence-based practice' in dealing with offenders; is this report a sign that the evidence is shaky? (This report analyses the available research into the successes or failures of a variety of interventions, but is much longer so it may be a link to skip. Don't worry, I won't get offended).

The report also suggests that one group of offenders with a below average level of criminogenic need is those who were assessed by probation officers in the community, as opposed to offenders assessed in prison. Which is basically as it should be, since higher criminogenic need (should) equal a higher frequency and severity of offending, which should in turn mean a greater use of custodial sentences. This should then mean that the onus should be on the Prison Service to address those criminogenic needs, but it doesn't work that way; the apparent desired core function of custodial sentences is to keep dangerous people off the streets (and out of hostels near schools) rather than actively trying to ameliorate their problems.

Of course, excellent work is done throughout the prison estate to help prisoners cope with their problems - I mentioned the St Giles Trust in a previous post, and establishments like HMP Coldingley are working wonders with resettlement of inmates at the moment. But with numbers rising - and this is a trend that won't soon be reversed - the capacity for such work diminishes. What is needed is a grown-up debate about what prisons and probation should be doing, and what they can reasonably be expected to achieve.

Control

2006-06-19T18:55:00.000Z

It looks like 10 Downing Street is reining in the Home Sec after his proposal to introduce a "Sarah's Law" enabling parents to be told when convicted paedophiles are living in their area. Some sensible soul has pointed out that this is a licence for lynch mobs, and therefore likely to a) drive sex offenders underground and away from close supervision (only months after the Home Office already managed to lose more than a thousand foreign prisoners, let's remember) and b) lead to hundreds of new offences being committed, from criminal damage and public order offences through to common assaults, GBH and possibly worse.

And exactly what good purpose would such a law serve? Except to boost the circulation of certain Sunday tabloids to whose websites the Enforcer refuses to link? What exactly would people do with the information obtained under Sarah's Law? Yes, it would allow people to make choices about where they should live or send their children to school - but the only people who have the financial muscle to really take action on such information are the wealthy. The outcome would be sex offenders living in ever-more socially-deprived neighbourhoods, increasing their dislocation from society and doing nothing to treat or re-integrate them into society (and this coming less than two weeks after questions are raised over the future of the Social Exclusion Unit, a government initiative that actually did make sense).

All this extra information would also serve merely to increase the fear of crime, which is often a more pernicious influence on communities than actual crime. Attacks on children by predatory sex offenders are, mercifully, extremely rare, although inevitably a great deal of media attention is attracted. Telling people where convicted paedophiles live will expose much greater numbers of people to such fears, founded or unfounded.

Trust in the criminal justice system to deliver on public safety is very low at the moment, and yes, there are some good reasons for this. But we can't put that same public safety in the hands of vigilantes.

Relief

2006-06-18T21:31:00.000Z

So Custody Plus is to be shelved for the time being. By my reckoning this is the second time; it was supposed to be introduced in April this year, 12 months after most of the new provisions of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 came into force, but was put off until November. We'd been given to understand that implementation was imminent, as there have been a series of 'Train the Trainer' events for members of staff who will then cascade information about CP down to the rest of us at local training sessions. As far as I know, these are still going on, but with no start date in sight, it's difficult to know what to make of this. Regardless, it's a decision that brings no small relief.

The Guardian's figures suggest it could have applied to 60,000 offenders who would previously have served a sentence of under 12 months. At the moment, the Probation Service only supervises those serving 12 months or more, as well as all young offenders (18-21 year olds), who automatically get three months on supervision after release, however short the actual period in custody. That's potentially an extra 60,000 cases to supervise, when there are something like 220,000 people on community sentences at the moment. The Telegraph reckons there are 60,000 offenders being supervised in London alone at the moment, and only 800 probation officers to do the job - the system simply could not cope.

But it's not just the Probation Service that would have problems with Custody Plus; although it's portrayed as a more liberal scheme, and a recognition that prison does little to rehabilitate but probably makes things worse, my suspicion is that it would (will?) actually encourage greater use of custody. The temptation for magistrates, when faced with a case on the cusp between custody and a community sentence, will be to give the offender a quick 'taste' of prison to see how they like it, in the knowledge that a longer than usual period of supervision will follow. There will then be a greater pressure on prison resources, with a much quicker turnaround of places.

We're fast approaching 80,000 people in custody, and the prison estate is already creaking. The Times reports that there are only 1,715 spaces free at the current time, and the population has been rising at 148 a week since May, leaving around three months before capacity is reached. Overcrowded prisons means staff have to spend more time on containment and less time on doing things that can reduce the risk of re-offending on release. St Giles Trust is an organisation operating in a number of jails that trains long-term prisoners to assist short-term inmates to maintain their tenancies despite their incarceration. But when prisons get full and there aren't enough staff to cover, everything gets shut down and such programmes suffer. That's the future if numbers keep rising - and the current situation is such that anything to cut those figures is not politically feasible.

The premise behind Custody Plus is not a bad one. But it can't possibly work in an ever-more punitive environment, and without properly-resourced services to deal with the implications.

Judgement

2006-06-17T08:18:00.000Z

And now there's a whole other furore in the criminal justice system! We are no longer talking about knife crime (Polly Toynbee in The Guardian had a look at the statistics and showed that, actually, there aren't any more murders involving knives than in previous years, they're just being more widely-reported) because the press has a new punch-bag: our friends on the bench.

Most of what I would want to say on this issue has already been said elsewhere by commentators much more informed than I, so I will restrict myself to saying two things.

you can't restrict the sentencing powers of judges with increasingly prescriptive guidelines, and then criticise them when those very guidelines are followed to the letter, but don't produce a result you want (or you can, if you're the Home Secretary or Prime Minister, but it just makes you look stupid and leads the former chief inspector of prisons to tell you to shut up). The problem is with the guidelines and the legislation, not those applying them. I sometimes disagree with the sentences passed in the cases I deal with (too short as well as too long, in case you're wondering, I'm not a complete woolly liberal), but I have to accept that they're applying the rules of their trade as laid down by the law.
someone needs to explain what life sentences actually mean, and what tariffs are, as this all seems to have been lost in the last week or so.

Thanks to Bystander for flagging up this article from last Sunday's Observer (when The Enforcer was having some possibly-well-deserved R&R), about a day (or two weeks, in this case) in the life of a Crown Court judge.

Incidentally, it seems that the knife amnesty is collecting some interesting finds...

Action

2006-06-03T09:38:00.000Z

The mother of Naomi Bryant, the woman killed by Anthony Rice, is reported to be suing the Home Office under human rights legislation for the failures and errors in Rice's release and supervision on parole licence. She has the support of Liberty in this, which may be an indicator that her case will get further than most. Something to be watched.

Knives

2006-06-03T09:15:00.000Z

The last couple of weeks have seen a spate of reports about people being attacked with knives - I say "a spate of reports" because I'm not 100% clear whether this is a new trend in crimes being committed, or whether they're simply being reported with greater frequency.

Either way, knife crime is clearly a big political issue at the moment. The Home Sec is looking at raising the maximum penalty for possession of a bladed article from 2 to 5 years (despite voting against a Tory amendment to the Violent Crime Reduction Bill six months ago that would have done just that), but as with all sentencing reform, this is discussed in isolation from a) the impact it will have on the criminal justice system, particularly prison numbers which are expected to hit 80,000 later this year and b) the wider social context.

Esther Addley in today's Guardian makes an attempt to engage with b), and finds that knives are an every-day experience in London (no doubt in other major cities as well). Thursday's Independent carried an article along the same lines, reporting a Home Office study of gang culture which found one in eight children between the ages of 10-19 had carried a knife, and that they were doing so, and joining gangs, because they felt safer doing so.

I must admit, I hadn't previously thought about this (I'm not going to call it a sociological phenomenon, but the thought was there) before in much detail, but a large number of the offenders I work with have previous convictions for Possession of an Offensive Weapon or Possession of a Bladed Article. Now, they probably sound like terrifying offences to the average member of the public, and they do count as 'violent convictions' for the purpose of our actuarial risk assessments, but they don't usually attract particularly severe sentences: normally around the conditional discharge/fine level. It's quite rare for a full pre-sentence report to be requested on such offences, so we don't often ask in much detail about the circumstances, but when we do, the answer is usually "for self-defence". Obviously this is disingenuous; no-one carries a knife to try to disarm someone else - if you wanted to protect yourself you'd wear body armour, right? (and plenty do...). But the thinking seems to be that the knife can be produced in a threatening situation to make an aggressor back down - even though, it seems to me (in my middle class way) that this is more likely to escalate the situation. It's this attitude - and the feeling that people, particularly young people, aren't safe on the streets without taking such extreme steps to 'protect' themselves, that needs to be challenged.

Other side of the fence (sorry, story)

2006-06-01T19:16:00.000Z

Obviously the foreign prisoner fiasco is still bubbling along nicely, alongside immigration officers who might be illegal immigrants and whose offices are being cleaned by illegal immigrants. Less has been said about those actually caught up in the wave of swoops, arrests, clampdowns, seizures or whatever you want to call them.

Yesterday the Guardian ran this lengthy article by their prisons correspondent, Eric Allison, which goes some way towards redressing the balance. I keep hearing stories of people who've been in this country since the 1970s being issued with restriction orders (requiring them to report weekly to various Home Office buildings), tales of people born in this country to foreign-born parents being issued with deportation papers, and accounts of people born abroad but to British parents being hassled. None of these cases is simple - I don't pretend to know any immigration law, but there's no automatic right of any of these people to stay, as far as I'm aware - but the whole Home Office is jittery.

2006-06-01T19:11:00.000Z

This appealed to my sense of the ridiculous: the other day I was having a conversation about Big Brother with a prisoner.

Just a quick note

2006-05-26T08:40:00.000Z

Although The Mirror may try to contradict me, I am not Dr John Reid.

Stinks

2006-05-23T20:53:00.000Z

Several of my colleagues have recently been busily writing pre-sentence reports on a group of several young men, all in their late teens or early twenties. Without wishing to give away anything that would identify any of the individuals concerned, all were originally charged with a serious offence, to which they all pleaded not guilty and were due to go to trial. However, at some point the lawyers got involved, and suddenly all but one of the defendants find themselves pleading guilty to a similar, but much less serious offence.

The last individual, who happens to be the youngest by some years, pleads guilty to the more serious crime. This may be because a) he was the principal culprit, despite being the junior member of the crew in both years and offending history, and is 'fessing up; b) the others have leaned on him to take the greater share of the blame; or c) because he's the younger, he knows (or his legal representatives) know that his sentence will be much lighter than the others would get, and so they've made a deal that will be acceptable to all. Everyone wins, right?

Well, no. The CPS might improve their conviction stats, and I'm sure it looks good for the police. The lawyers can even convince themselves that they're saving public money into the bargain. But this is not justice! One individual gets a greater sentence for what seems, from the available evidence, to have been an offence involving all of the group. He's not happy, even if he does get a third off for his guilty plea, and will be disgruntled whilst he serves whatever sentence is handed down. This will reinforce his sense of victimhood. The others get to claim that they weren't really involved, and were led astray by this callow youth. This'll assist them in minimising their behaviour; effectively their denial of responsibility has been sanctioned in a court of law. And, right at the end of the line, are some poor buggers in a probation office trying to make sense of it all, and to make some kind of assessment of risk, culpability and so forth, completely undermined by the short-circuiting of the legal process.

Advocates

2006-05-23T20:40:00.000Z

This morning The Guardian reported John Reid's plans to improve public protection representation at parole board oral hearings by having special advocates present to put across the views of victims and the public. Err... what exactly do you think the Parole Board are there to do, Mr Reid?

The system is effectively an extension of the principle of being judged by your peers, members of the community - albeit highly-qualified and extremely experienced members of the community. Parole Board members aren't ivory tower magicians, set in place to pluck mystifying decisions out of thin air; their role is to consider whether it is safe to release an individual into the community based on the best information available. Besides which, the Parole Board's role in taking such decisions was removed from the great majority of cases by the Criminal Justice Act 2003; they now rule on the suitability of licence recall applications, and will continue to consider parole for life and other indeterminant sentence prisoners.

So, please do try to keep up, Home Secretary. And stop trying to get sympathetic headlines on the morning of your first appearance before the home affairs select committee.

INDescribable

2006-05-19T17:23:00.000Z

I've had cause to ring the Immigration and Nationality Directorate twice this week, to try to get some details about whether a couple of offenders were listed for deportation or not. The staff there were even more careful than normal about confirming my details and not giving out information over the phone in the same call (unlike plenty of other agencies). I suspect they've had some pretty strong warnings about not giving information to people who might just be journalists, after yesterday's arrest of illegal immigrants at their own offices. I'm not saying it's their fault; it looks, most likely, that the company that provided the individuals in question didn't check their credentials thoroughly enough. But you really couldn't make it up.

All Talk?

2006-05-15T19:07:00.001Z

The PM's Let's Talk initiative launched today, purportedly to involve the public and interested parties in reform of public services. His opening broadside, as reported in The Guardian, firmly placed him on the side of those who don't think offenders should be allowed to breach community orders with impunity, and that prisoners who pose a risk of harm to the public should not be released early. Err... that's along with more or less everyone, Tony (apart from those offenders, probably), including probation officers. We're all working towards the same ends, but if you don't give us the resources - and continue to sap our morale with constant criticism and change - it's very difficult to do the job properly.

I did wonder how quickly the contestability reforms would take to come back after the reshuffle; it now seems likely that it'll be sooner rather than later, and that it's the PM that's driving the privatisation express.

Marcel Berlins has a stab at defending the Human Rights Act against its recent detractors. For some reason there seems to be widespread ignorance that release at the halfway point of a sentence is enshrined in the Criminal Justice Act 1991, brought in by a Conservative government, let's remember, and has nothing whatsoever to do with the Human Rights Act. And since when did "human rights" become a dirty word?

Ministerial movements

2006-05-13T10:02:00.000Z

Still haven't read the HMIP report yet - I had an absolutely frantic week (45 hours or thereabouts) and I simply don't have the motivation to read it over the weekend! I suspect it may make some pretty ugly reading though.

So far Dr John's pronouncements have been limited to terrorism - inevitably, given the publication of two reports into the 7th July bombs in London. So, as yet no word on his views on the future of the Probation Service. Given all I've been reading about his character (described in one paper as "an ex-communist bruiser", and he seems to move between ministries faster than some of my clients do between prisons), that's a bit of a relief.

We do have a new Under Secretary of State, Gerry Sutcliffe, but Charles Clarke used to jump over Fiona Mactaggart's head all the time and I don't think John Reid will be any different. There were some signs that Clarke was beginning to have a rethink about contestability, given the huge opposition to the Home Office Consultation Paper, Restructuring Probation to Reduce Re-Offending. But with one of the PM's favourite enforcers (not a claim yours truly will make) now in situ, expect rapid progress towards greater privatisation.

Report

2006-05-10T21:11:00.000Z

Off on a long-distance prison visit today, and what a lovely day it was to be out of the office! It's put me in a very good mood, and for this reason I will not be spending any time tonight on reading the HM Inspectorate of Probation's report into the Anthony Rice Serious Further Offence in Winchester, Hampshire. I'll save that for tomorrow (when I can be paid for reading it).

Howards

2006-05-10T20:54:00.000Z

On Monday the Howard League published a report into what it describes as the Government's failure to tackle the re-offending of young men. Almost 70% of the more than 1,000 18-20 year olds sent to custody each month will re-offend within two years; it says that "prison was found to confirm a criminal identity on the young men rather than helping them to reject offending." Short prison sentences, in contrast to the lovely Michael Howard's claim of a "short, sharp shock" do almost nothing to reduce offending. There isn't enough time during short periods in custody to tackle drug or alcohol problems, find employment or new skills, or challenge anti-social attitudes. But even a short sentence is more than enough time to break up relationships, lead to the loss of accommodation, and create an even greater sense of victimhood.

The 'criminal career' concept suggests that the frequency of offending will inevitably deteriorate as a person gets older, due to 'maturity' (which could be anything from a relationship and the birth of a child, to simply getting tired of running away from the police). This means that it's entirely unsurprising that so many young offenders are reconvicted. But it's difficult to say what exactly will make any individual reach the tipping point at which they're ready to stop offending. My own view is that it's different for everyone, which unfortunately runs somewhat counter to the Home Office's preference for standardised interventions (which, admittedly, are much less time- and other resource-intensive). Prison can work, but it's not possible to say who it will work for, and when and why.

Hands up...

2006-05-05T19:33:00.000Z

...who was surprised that Charles Clarke was sacked in today's Cabinet reshuffle? Yeah, thought not.

Though I've not had much sympathy for him lately (due, in large part, to the way he's treated the Probation Service - and not just in recent months but over the whole contestability/privatisation issue), the manner in which it happened was pretty ugly. It seems as though he did offer to resign as the whole foreign prisoners debacle broke, but he was turned down by the PM. What was the poor guy to do?

He was made, over ten long days, to look ever-more ridiculous by saying that he was going to fight on and was the man to sort out the problems his unwieldy department had got into. He had vast numbers of people calling for his head. He had the knowledge that, probably for the bulk of the next twelve months, the courts (and the papers) will be full of cases involving those of the infamous 1,023 who did re-offend, to which his name would be inextricably linked. There was simply no way he could fight his way out of that. Yet the PM refused to let him go.

Instead, Tony Blair clearly decided to wait, obviously expecting the local election results to be as bad as they were yesterday, and to hang Charles Clarke out to dry, and to soak up as much of the fall-out as he could. I realise my view of Mr Clarke has shifted a bit over the last couple of weeks, but I can't help feeling a bit sorry for him.

Language barriers

2006-05-02T20:31:00.000Z

I went to our friendly neighbourhood prison today for a pre-sentence report interview with - topical, this - a foreign national prisoner. Luckily for Charles Clarke, this particular individual won't be going anywhere anytime soon.

I like doing interviews through interpreters, because - while one question is translated and the response comes back in the other language - it gives me a chance to think about my next question, and hopefully I end up looking more intelligent. Unfortunately, it also cuts down the amount of time I've got available for the interview, and I do think the quality of the assessment and the report sometimes suffer as a result. That's not something I have a great deal of control over.

The best interpreters (in my opinion) give as close to a word-for-word account of what the person is saying; unfortunately there are others who instead give a summary or explain it in their own words (I'm reminded of an 'It'll Be Alright On The Night'-type clip where the interviewee's response was 30 seconds long, but that of the interpreter was simply: "Yes"). An essential part of my job is try to assess motivation, remorse, insight into offending behaviour and so on - things that aren't always easy to judge when there's someone else involved in the communication process. And some - the tri- or quadri-lingual interpreters - sometimes forget which language they're supposed to be translating back into, and so I get Italian into French or so on (and they get a blank-faced probation officer)!

People with limited English skills are often not eligible for the offending behaviour programmes we run, because of the practical problems involved in placing them within appropriate groups (though it's possible that some areas may have sufficient numbers to run groups in languages other than English). Does that mean they're less likely to get a community penalty, and more likely to go to prison? Possibly. Could that account for the rise in foreign national prisoners in recent years? Who knows?

Another view

2006-05-02T20:26:00.000Z

Dr William Wonogron, one of the co-authors of CALM, writes in today's Guardian, making the same points as I did on Sunday. Except, y'know, with actually knowing what he's talking about, and all that sort of thing.

Keep CALM

2006-04-30T10:46:00.000Z

Last week The Guardian reported that the Home Secretary was considering getting rid of the anger management offending behaviour programmes (OBPs) run by the Prison and Probation Services. It referred to a Probation Circular issued after the HM Inspectorate report into the killing of John Monckton (I think this is that document - it's a pdf file and the relevant section is on page 15). This article has drawn an official response (on the Probation Service intranet so I can't link to it) that seems to suggest that the Guardian has misinterpreted the Circular; I happen to think the response also misinterprets the article, but there y'go. The fundamental point is, anyway, that "there is no intention of ending the current anger management programmes".

The issue is that the prison OBP CALM (Controlling Anger and Learning to Manage it) and its community-based equivalent ART (Agression Replacement Training) are too often being used for offenders whose crimes have been instrumentally violent - that is, where violence has been used purposefully in order to commit that offence, such as robbery. CALM and ART are only appropriate for those who commit expressively violent offences, such as common assault or even criminal damage, where they are unable to control their feelings of rage. Interestingly, I've heard that attendees frequently demonstrate very high levels of moral reasoning - but they offend because they simply cannoy cope with other people's rudeness, for example in 'road rage' incidents.

The programmes are unsuitable for non-expressively violent offenders because they are interventions to give an individual skills to control their behaviour; in an instrumentally violent person this can increase their capacity to manipulate situations to their advantage, and so it actually increases the potential harm they pose.

This isn't a new instruction in the face of the Hanson-White inquiry; the programme manuals and the training has always made an explicit disctinction between instrumental and expressive violence (although not necessarily the reasons for this). However, there is constant pressure from the Home Office and Probation management to increase the number of offenders completing these courses (because they're run in groups, they're relatively cheap ways of being seen to do something; and because there are pre- and post-group questionnaires, there are quantifiable measures of evaluating success or failure, which you simply can't get from an individual probation officer working with an individual offender, even though the practice might be equally as good, if not better). In the face of this pressure, and the targets we have to meet (which are, of course, financially-linked), little wonder that shortcuts are taken.

In the same Circular, there is a note that further research is being undertaken to see how instrumentally-violent offenders can be treated. I hope that this is a recognition of the problems posed by this particularly difficult client group, and that it stimulates an improvement in the provision of tools to staff in order to do their work effectively.

Mind you, this coming week should see the publication of an inquiry into the murder of Naomi Bryant in Winchester, Hampshire. This will probably have a lot to say about the ways in which MAPPA procedures and hostel facilities operated (or didn't), and so we'll have new things to look at for a few weeks. I'm off to find a bunker to lie down in...

Thanks

2006-04-30T10:42:00.000Z

Many thanks to Bystander for adding me to his sidebar on his estimable blog.

UK Criminal Justice Weblog

2006-04-27T20:25:00.000Z

The other day there was some action on the much-missed UK Criminal Justice weblog - but only to direct us to this site as an alternative. Hopefully the author will be able to pick it up again in future, as it was an invaluable - and quick - source of news in the field of criminal justice (though I have doubts whether NPS web access extends as far as blogs)

Grim

2006-04-27T20:21:00.000Z

I recently finished reading Urban Grimshaw and the Shed Crew by Bernard Hare, a tale of one man's extremely unorthodox attempts at unofficial youth work. I recommend it as essential reading for anyone who doubts the scale of some of the social problems we're facing in this country.

Some days I'm glad that I only work with the over-18s...

Cough

2006-04-27T19:25:00.000Z

The National Audit Office has published this report, "The Management of Staff Sickness in the National Probation Service. The headline figure is an average of 12.3 days per year per member of staff, against the target of 9 days - apparently the difference costs around £11million or about 300 full-time employees.

One third of days, costing £9.8million in total, and only one fifth have had stress awareness training; The Enforcer is part of that 80% - though is regularly asked whether he has had stress awareness training. The report does at least mention the number of organisational changes that have happened within the last five years or so, plus the increasing demands made on staff. But apparently management lack sufficient information to diagnose (clever phrasing there) the reasons for staff sickness and to take appropriate action.

The Enforcer's bet is that we will see senior management form committees to investigate the matter, and it'll all get lost in the great round of emails, notices and general noise that washes over frontline staff who are just trying to get the job done.

Oh, and Charles Clarke fights on... Lord Ramsbotham, former Chief Inspector of Prisons, has recommended that the Home Office be broken up into more manageable chunks. An idea worth looking at...

Key messages

2006-04-25T22:33:00.000Z

I was going to write a bit about the 'key messages' that have come out of yesterday's conference with middle managers, but today's story has jumped the queue. After reading some of the bullet points posted on 'EPIC', the Probation Service intranet, I'm looking forward to the full speeches...

I will not quit

2006-04-25T22:17:00.000Z

"I will not quit" says Charles Clarke. Funny, that's the sort of thing that ministers usually say before a little exchange of letters with No. 10, ending with the PM thanking them for their service and wishing them well on the backbenches.

Apparently the Home Secretary "regrets" that more than a thousand foreign prisoners were released when they should have been deported after serving their sentence. I should bloody well hope so! (sorry, that's not good pro-social modelling, I must remember to tone down my language) He will asked by the Speaker of the House of Commons about why he hadn't made a statement about the issue, and perhaps there'll be more to follow tomorrow.

Basically, it seems that the Immigration and Nationality Directorate and the Prison Service couldn't keep up with the amount of work, due to the increasing number of foreign prisoners. That's entirely understandable with a government that keeps creating new offences and will take every opportunity given to be more punitive (Bystander talks about the problems that may lie ahead when 'Custody Plus' comes into force in November - I'll get round to them when I have a chance). But if you read this BBC News article, however, you'll see that Mr Clarke says he is not going to start pointing the finger and blaming people. The Enforcer couldn't possibly comment on the difference between this and his attitude towards the much-more-easily-kicked-when-it's-down Probation Service.

Dear old David Blunkett says that heads should roll, and he supports Mr Clarke in his efforts to get to the bottom of it. The Guardian and other papers report that Mr Clarke doesn't think it should be a "resigning issue". So what would be?

Conference

2006-04-24T20:52:00.000Z

Charles Clarke held a conference in London today with something like 800 senior probation officers. That's about a third of the total of the service's middle management, if my sums are correct - not a bad gathering, though of course he won't have reached everyone; when I asked one of our managers whether he was going, the response was "am I f..."

It'll be interesting to see what sort of "key messages" come out of this thing, and whether it's more than just making us more paranoid about recording every single little thing we do, just in case a file gets pulled for inspection. Maintaining up to date records and being accountable is one thing, but rabidly form-filling to cover our backs to the extent that we can't actually do the real work we're supposed to be doing is another.

I did a home visit today, and I've got another on Thursday. National Standards say we should do one in every case within the first sixteen weeks (unless they've changed it again), and they are quite valuable exercises in their own right, since you see people in their own environment, and sometimes have the delight of discussing the Probation Service with their lovely friends and families. But I wouldn't be surprised if my efforts this week constitute a majority of the visits done in my office this month. And that's because we've got too many people to see to be able to take two to three hours out of the day (I left at 10:15 and was back by 12:45).

More from the Observer

2006-04-23T19:59:00.000Z

(please don't take the gap between posts as an indication of The Enforcer's reading speed)

In the context of a discussion about this week's revelations about the salaries of doctors (average of £94k but some earn up to a quarter of a mill) and various DJs (vast sums I can't be bothered to check) - though no mention of probation officers, I might add - Sunder Katwala, general secretary of the Fabian Society had this to say:

Britain has become one of the most unequal European societies over the last two decades. Market outcomes are affected not just by public spending and taxation, but by less tangible cultural factors. An 'inequality' culture has legitimised excessive pay at the top which is not linked to success. We need to show that more equal societies can be economically successful and better places to live, because they are less socially divided.

I have more to say about my own personal criminology - it can't quite be summed up by the phrase "It's all Thatcher's fault" - but that's a good starting point. The huge, and growing, disparities in incomes and life chances in modern Britain are responsible for a large amount of acquisitive and violent crime, and until there's a narrowing, things will get worse rather than better.

Elsewhere in the paper, Mary Riddell discusses Charles Clarke's violent offender orders (the column's headline: "Even Michael Howard would blush at these reforms", and makes a point similar to mine from the other day: "the real problem, as he must know, lies in an underfunded and over-reformed probation service, poor communication and the obligation on any Home Secretary to be bullish."

My problem is, I read these eminently sensible words from these eminently sensible people and think "why do they continue to push ahead with these ludicrous suggestions?" But then of course I don't read the Mail, the Express, the Sun, or even the Telegraph and the Times. And millions of voters do.

Debate

2006-04-23T16:00:00.000Z

Not strictly related to my work in the NPS, but today's Observer carries this email debate between columnist Henry Porter and the Rt Hon Tony Blair MP. In the main, Porter's argument focuses on anti-terror legislation but the PM's replies tend to concentrate on the anti-social behaviour powers they brought into law - possibly because he senses his argument is stronger there?

Anyway, towards the end of the final email from Mr Blair is the following paragraph, which I thought was worth quoting in full:

This new terrorism requires a separate debate. But on anti-social behaviour I agree the causes of this are very deep - to do with shifting communities, dysfunctional families, globalisation and myriad influences, not all benign, to which our young people are subject. And, at the risk of opening another front, the remedies here are quite stark too. The system intervenes once kids are off the rails. This is usually hopeless. We need intervention at an early age.

Well said, Tony, well said. Ah, if only I had more confidence in your government's desire and ability to put them into practice, I - and hundreds of thousands of others - might be convinced to vote for your party's candidates a week on Thursday. But I'm afraid that's not going to happen.

Super-ASBOs

2006-04-21T19:24:00.000Z

Yesterday Charles Clarke unveiled new plans for controlling offenders deemed dangerous after they're released from prison. Frustrated by pesky things like human rights and the rule of law that mean he can't make his Imprisonment for Public Protection and Extended Sentence for Public Protection sentences retrospective, the new Violent Offender Orders (which may end up being called something else) will be measures obtained through civil courts (not criminal courts because then those subject to them could contest them on the grounds they were being punished twice) that would prevent individuals from going to certain places, associating with certain people and so on.

All well and good, except as any fule kno (or at least, any probation officer), these provisions can already be attached to a prisoner's licence after their release from custody. So the new Orders (as explained in The Guardian and The Independent anyway) will simply duplicate existing regulations. Except they can be in force for life, and any breach can be punished with up to 5 years in prison, rather than simply being returned to custody.

So, New Labour, new offences, new levels of coercion. I don't often agree with the Tories, but their description of "super-ASBOs" is pretty close on the money. What's needed, Mr Clarke, is not these new headline-grabbing measures, but properly resourced and trained public services.

But then I would say that, wouldn't I?

Domestic violence

2006-04-15T07:43:00.000Z

Domestic attackers escaping with a fine screams The Guardian today, in a reversal of the normal tabloid/broadsheet split over those woolly liberals/corrupt fascists who pass judgement on n'er-do-wells in Britain today.

Although, actually the article is rather interesting because it's looking at the output of specialist domestic violence courts, and not yer average every day bench. It's a small sample (5 such courts), but the key figures are thus:

59% are fined or ordered to pay compensation
30% are given a conditional discharge
29% are given community rehabilitation orders with a requirement to attend the Integrated Domestic Abuse Programme (or similar)
10% are given community punishment orders
4% are sent to prison

Now, The Enforcer got an A* in his GCSE Maths, so he will point out that the figures exceed 100% - and this is because, as mandated in the Criminal Justice Act 2003, fines and compensation cut across all sentencing bands, including custody. So the number who received only a fine is rather smaller than the figures immediately suggest.

The Enforcer will point out that the figures are only for summary or 'either way' offences, and thus represent the lower end of the scale in terms of violence. Domestic violence incidents do end up in Crown Courts (two women a week are killed by their partners) and they will attract significant custodial sentences. He will also speculate that the numbers receiving Probation intervention in this sample are significantly higher than those convicted of similar offences (most likely common assaults or criminal damage) who would get CROs. He won't quote figures at you simply because he doesn't have them to hand right now. But it seems likely that above statistics are a step in the right direction.

Domestic abuse (a term that includes violence but also non-violent behaviours that are controlling in other ways, such as economically or psychologically) forms a pattern in people's lives. The article above refers to research suggesting that women are the victims of 35 incidents of violence before the police are called (or before the police decide to take action, which is another issue altogether). Sending an individual to prison for a relatively short period of time is not going to be enough to change those behaviours; a two-year Community Order with an intensive programme might be. Six months (or less, as is much more likely) behind bars would probably reinforce the perpetrator's view of themselves as a victim, given that our society does not adequately challenge men's views towards women, despite the advances of feminism. A programme that forces them to face up to their abusive behaviours, while at the same time involves multi-agency working to monitor their behaviour and the safety of the victim, could potentially do a lot more than that.

Visits

2006-04-10T18:09:00.000Z

Today the Guardian reports that the Parole Board are asking the Home Office to pay for visits to interview serious offenders. This of course comes in the wake of HM Inspectorate of Probation's inquiry into the murder of John Monckton, and the killing of Robert Symons by Yousef Bouhaddaou (in whose case, by the way, there have been no allegations of misconduct whatsoever) - mind you, in The Enforcer's humble opinion, the Home Office should be making sure that Probation Areas have enough money to pay their officers' expenses so that they can go out to do these visits.

I'm in favour of this; although it might be seen as the Parole Board going over the heads of those professionals who undertook thorough assessments of risk, and the manageability of that risk, it has a number of things to commend it. Firstly, it may start to roll back some of the dehumanising influence of prison. When decisions are taken on the basis of little more than the words contained in paper files, it's little wonder that people fail to engage with the system. Give the individual to whom justice is being done a chance to respond, account for their actions and maybe even take responsibility for them, and there's a chance of a different result.

Secondly, and I think this is probably the Parole Board's main argument, there's a chance that the interviewing panel (or individual) might pick out something of significance that others have missed. I don't know what the qualifications for becoming a member of the Parole Board are, but I bet some of them have a half-decent insight into the human character. Again, it's not that the poor grunt in the probation office might have missed something, but more that an 'outsider' who won't be involved in the supervision process might have a different view.

And thirdly, it should improve accountability. With the Monckton case in particular, the blame was very quickly shifted onto those who had assessed Damian Hanson's suitability for parole, and not those who had actually taken the decision. Not that that wasn't necessarily appropriate, but it should be remembered that probation officers aren't directly responsible for those decisions.

Speaking of avoiding blame, Erwin James noted last week that the Government's reaction to the HMIP report was to blame individual errors, whilst the Tories (in amongst a bit of tabloid "lock 'em up foreva!!" grandstanding) blamed structural problems and a lack of funding. Isn't it supposed to be the other way around?

Welcome

2006-04-03T17:41:00.000Z

I am a probation officer. In recent weeks I've begun to think long and hard about admitting that in public! We're under pressure like never before, from courts, politicians, the Home Office, the media, the public... It comes from all sides, and at times it seems unrelenting. But more than that, it seems to stem from a lack of understanding of what we actually do. Mind you, I find it nigh-on impossible to describe what I do on a day-to-day basis in a few, easily-understandable words. And on some days, even I'm not sure what I do.

I suppose my hope for this blog is that it will go some way towards illustrating that. There are a large number of excellent blogs written by police officers, and - I'm sure - also some by probation officers, though I've never stumbled across them. (Possibly my colleagues are far too busy for this sort of frippery!) The Law West of Ealing Broadway is written by a magistrate, and is thoroughly commendable.

Today I went to my local MAPPA (Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements) meeting. The MAPPA system was established by the Criminal Justice and Court Services Act 2000, in many respects a response to Lord Laming's report into the death of Victoria Climbie. Lord Laming quite rightly pointed out that the horrific abuse could well have been prevented if all the agencies involved had shared some of the information that each held about the family involved, and taken action earlier. The meeting I attended today was chaired by the police, with five or six officers directly involved, but also had contributions from Probation, Social Services, housing, mental health and the Youth Offending Team. It was my first attendance, and it was a fairly positive experience (though I learned rather a lot about some of the dangerous people around in the borough in which I work!) Of course, the acid test is the action that is subsequently taken; I have several action points that I have to work on when I get back to the office, but input from different people with different skills and methods of working helped clarify several issues and identify useful points of contact for me.