Mentoring - Probation Light

Well what a surprise! At a key moment, up pops Jonathan Aitken, disgraced former Tory cabinet minister and now firm supporter of yet-to-be disgraced Tory cabinet minister Chris Grayling and his plans for a TR omnishambles. He's written a report for right-wing think tank Centre for Social Justice arguing that what we need is an army of mentors to take on all the extra work coming the way of the CRC's.

The foreword is predictably written by Grayling and the content is all the usual repetitive stuff about 'leaving prison with only £46 in their pocket'. According to the introduction:-

"This report has been researched and written in the spirit of idealism without illusions. We know that the mentoring of offenders is challenging. We know it works in an impressive swathe of individual cases, small though the present numbers are. The fact that these cases have never properly been counted, measured or expanded on a wider scale is a fault line in the present criminal justice system. The TR strategy is a courageous attempt to correct such past faults.

Implementing the TR strategy, specifically in the area of mentoring, will have its difficulties. Initially this may be negatively reported, for the world of Criminal Justice commentators is overcrowded with pessimists prophesying doom for every fresh effort to reduce reoffending. Yet TR is a bold and original strategy. Its emphasis on the wide-scale mentoring of offenders creates a new game changer that can massively increase the chances of making the strategy succeed."

Make of it what you will. Here's how it ends:-

"Conclusion

Mentoring stands at a crossroads of opportunity. It is paradoxically the most hopeful and the most neglected weapon in the arsenal of rehabilitation. The neglect is history. It is uncomfortable to have to remember that rehabilitation has only recently started to edge up the agenda of criminal justice policy (although it was a high priority in Victorian times), and that mentoring has been an unfunded and almost invisible item within rehabilitation.

Two pessimistic mantras have far too long clouded the landscape of mentoring. The first was‘leave it to the Probation Service’. The second was ‘there’s no such thing as a magic bullet’.The Probation Service has many virtues and many fine officers. But mentoring has not been their priority for at least two decades. Indeed you have to go back half a century to find a time when probation officers routinely empowered volunteers to make regular visits to offenders and their families. In those days ‘mentoring’ was not in the vocabulary of criminal justice, but ‘befriending’ and ‘caring’ were words which had a resonance that meant something human to offenders. Probation volunteers were an important part of that humanity. But, alas they were pushed aside by jobsworths whose bureaucratic expansionism made them determined to suppress the work done with offenders by anyone not on the official payroll.

Despite hostility from ‘the system’, charities and volunteers crept back into the thin front line of rehabilitation. In the final years of 20th century, when probation officers were being dragooned by Whitehall away from befriending and towards box ticking, a door began opening to voluntarism. One politician who understood this was the former Prisons and Probation Minister, Sir Peter Lloyd. He realised that the first stirrings of the moves towards mentoring were coming from offenders. As he put it:

‘Prisoners respond most readily to unpaid volunteers who they can see are giving their time because they really want to help their prisoners individually to find themselves and sort out their lives, not because they are agents of the State to fight recidivism in general.’

After leaving government, Sir Peter Lloyd implemented the philosophy of mentoring summarised in the above quote as chairman of the New Bridge Foundation (NBF) – the UK’s oldest mentoring charity. Founded by the late Lord Longford in 1956, NBF has a long track record of organising voluntary mentors for prisoners. As early as 2001 NBF received funding from the Youth Justice Board to run mentoring projects for young offenders and in 2007 it won a three-year grant from the National Lottery for its London Through the Gate (LTTG) scheme to deliver resettlement services for some 360 short-term prisoners released from HMPs Brixton, Holloway, Wormwood Scrubs, Pentonville and Wandsworth.

Although LTTG was evaluated by ARCS (UK) Limited and judged to have been successful, the statistical outcomes were characteristically confusing, not least because they relied on erratic ‘self-reporting data’ from clients disinclined to report on themselves even when their progress was good. So the system pigeon-holed this and several other examples of impressive mentoring by charities, often deploying the cliché used to justify so much inadequate action on rehabilitation. ‘There’s no such thing as a magic bullet.’

Leaving aside the fact that the imagery of firing bullets is inconsistent with the gentle spirit of mentoring, it is undoubtedly true that there is no single route to rehabilitation. Mentoring in particular is a bespoke and highly personalised process. It needs the consensual engagement of the offender just as much as the thoughtful support, advice, and care of the mentor. We know it works in many individual cases. But will it work when rolled-out nationally in 21 CRC areas?

Never before has there been any political will to encourage mentoring as an operational arm of criminal justice policy. Transforming Rehabilitation changes that historic negativity. From 2015 onwards all CRCs will have to demonstrate a positive willingness to provide mentoring services to their areas. This is an exciting opportunity.

Whether the opportunity flourishes or falters depends on many of the key ingredients described in this report. But the most vital ingredient of all is people.

We take great hope from the fact that so many people – in fact a surplus number of people – are potentially willing to volunteer to be mentors or to become professional mentors. We believe that a sizeable number of people coming out of prison actually want to go straight and will appreciate the help that mentors can give them. We think that the main providers of CRCs will be infinitely more capable and more motivated mangers of mentoring than ‘the system’ has ever been. And we think the Transforming Rehabilitation agenda, led by any positive government, will change the landscape, the culture, and the practice of how our society responds to released prisoners with the objective of changing their lives. 

The present reoffending statistics can hardly get any worse. For instance, 58 per cent of those serving sentences of less than 12 months go on to reoffend within a year of release. If mentoring is allowed to play a meaningful part in the implementation of the TR strategy these depressing reoffending figures might become encouragingly better with great human benefits to the individuals concerned and to society as a whole."