Cultural Tensions

A recent article in the Guardian (21st August) about the working life of a probation officer serves once more to remind me just how out of touch I am with the modern service. For a start I'm male. One of the most extraordinary features of the last 10 years is the almost complete absence of men from the probation landscape. Quite rightly there has been attention to improving the cultural diversity within the service, which has improved significantly, but where have all the men gone? For many years virtually all new recruits have been mostly young and female with the result that the service is now massively gender imbalanced. To put it simply, most officers are female and most offenders are male. I raised this with a trainer a few years ago and she said that for some reason less men are now applying and the few that do are failing the interview process.  Even management are now conscious that this is not a good situation and quite likely to be storing up serious trouble for the future.

Being a somewhat cynical person, I have to ask myself how an officer is chosen to be interviewed by the Guardian in the first place. Some of her statements answer this question I guess, like:- 

"Our job is strange in that when it goes right, nothing happens," Grice agrees, as we face each other in a meeting room at Cannock magistrates court, north of Birmingham, which she is visiting today. "But when it goes wrong," she adds. "Then it's a big media situation." On such rare occasions, with all the oversight and teamwork that surrounds the job, it would be almost impossible for one person to be held solely responsible".

Well that certainly isn't my perception! Since the service has spent the last 10 years convincing the public of our tough and rigorous supervision regime, by extension if anything goes wrong it must be a failure of that officers oversight. Sadly, the inevitable enquiry will focus on any administrative failures by that officer, and especially in connection with their completion and updating of OASys. In days gone by, any reoffending would clearly be the responsibility of the offender, nowadays it will be viewed as a failure by the officer involved, not in any work that has been undertaken, but in how timely the assessment has been recorded in OASys. This is the real priority in todays service - not doing the work necessarily, but recording it. As I once heard the chief say prior to an inspection 'If it isn't recorded, it didn't happen.'

The interview continues:-

"When they don't want to engage at all, they will generally walk through the door and say, 'You can't make me do anything'. I hear that a lot," Grice says, without altering her even tone. "And I always reply to them, 'No, you're right. I can't make you talk to me about anything.' What I suggest to them is that if they don't want to engage in that order, then the court can sentence them to something that might be more appropriate. But what I ask of them is that if they make the choice to come to the office, they make the choice to talk and do some work." Co-operate or go to prison, then, is still the message. You just have to deliver it correctly.

Strangely, over my career, I've never heard anyone say that to me! Clearly our approaches are very different and no doubt stem from my social work based probation training. In my experience, it's far better to get people to talk because they want to and that's a key skill of the job in my view.  


Finally, I couldn't help but laugh out loud at her answer to the question 'what is the worst part of the job?' answer, "Having to read victim statements". She is clearly destined for promotion very soon - I think most officers with a bit more service under their belts would say 'the bloody computer and especially OASys'.