Back To the Good Old Days

"Really not bothered about the Tories or Napo top table in the grand scheme, here today and gone tomorrow. The future will be guided by ideas for tomorrow which we can influence. Where I have some issue with this blog, much as I admire it, is the idea that harking back to the 'good old days' will not inspire the changes we can find some new consensus around. I am heartily sickened by what has happened to Probation but I am ever more convinced that moaning and groaning (I moan and groan a lot about it) will achieve very little. Have some faith, this blog has got some legs left in it yet."

On the theme of harking back to the mythical 'good old days', here's an interesting quote from a long blog post entitled 'Do We Still Need Prisons?' by Paul Kirby and republished on the 'VolteFace' website and it seems to hark right back to our Victorian foundations:- 

Japanese Hogo-shi

One of the biggest problems about prison is that it takes, mostly, socially excluded people and excludes them even further from society.

Hardly anybody from mainstream society visits or engages with prisoners. There is a lot to learn from the Japanese system of probation (Hogo-shi). Unlike Western countries, 98% of the State’s 49,000 probation officers are volunteers. They have the status of part-time but unpaid civil servants. They supervise and give support to 40,000 offenders on parole and probation. They mostly use their own homes to meet the offenders. They commit to working with the offender’s family, help them find jobs and make social connections. Post-prison Hogo-shi halves re-offending rates. I think this would be a great idea for non-custodial sentences in other countries. But we could take this idea a step further.

Whenever a person is sentenced to prison, part of the sentence could be that they accept the supervision and support of a volunteer probation officer. The prisoner could be required to meet the volunteer probation officer at least once a week and they could enjoy visiting and communication rights similar to a lawyer. The volunteer probation officer could be a formal part of any decision-making about the prisoner (e.g. education, therapy, moving prison, internal sanctions, parole, exit plans, etc).

Critically, part of the sentence would be to fully co-operate with the volunteer probation officer for a defined period after leaving prison (e.g. 12 months) and for the volunteer to play an active role in helping the prisoner get a job, a home, stay clean, sort out any benefits and keep out-of-trouble. Like other probation officers, they would have the right to take offenders back to court if they are breaching their sentences.

This would have the added benefit of opening-up prisons to the community and reconnecting the excluded with many privileged and compassionate individuals. If every prisoner had one volunteer probation officer, we would have some 60,000 new people involved in our criminal justice system.

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In case you are wondering, "Paul Kirby lives in Oxfordshire in England. He is a Visiting Professor at the LSE and Non-Executive Director at the Cabinet Office in the UK Government. His career included being a partner at KPMG and Head of the Number 10 Policy Unit."

"VolteFace is a new space that offers fresh perspectives on drugs policies, lifestyle and culture. We are launching as a magazine that will draw in a wide and essential array of voices.

VolteFace will cover the policy and politics of drugs but also science, health, lifestyle, culture and business related matters. We look to provide a space that can help revivify the debate about drugs in both countries and bring new voices and views to the fore from across civil society and popular culture.

Our ambition is to commission lively features, promote intelligent commentary and provide breaking news updates. We want to allow new voices to flourish and fresh perspectives be aired, nurturing new journalistic talent alongside the best current writers. We’ll certainly want to address shibboleths, but we are also in the business of winning hearts and minds. We will be constantly innovative in how we curate our content and engage with our community of readers.

VotleFace is a space where ideas are freely shared and your voice can be heard.

VolteFace was founded by Paul Birch. An entrepreneur by trade and a long time drug policy reform advocate, Paul is interested in alternative methods of activism and policy change."

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Paul Birch seems a fascinating character. This from the New Statesman April 2015:-

Paul Birch, Bebo founder: "I’ve been consuming [cannabis] since I was 23"

For somebody who has achieved so much in the past ten years and could comfortably rest on his laurels for the next fifty, Paul Birch is surprisingly restless, almost impatient. Sitting in his big, airy home in North London on a sunny morning, he is fidgety and disquieted as he outlines the manifesto of Cista (an acronym for Cannabis Is Safer Than Alcohol), the political party he set up in February of this year.

In 2005, along with his brother Michael and Michael’s wife Xochi, Birch founded the social network Bebo, which became wildly successful while Facebook was still limited to students; the website was later sold to AOL for $850 million. A couple of tech ventures and ten years later, Paul Birch decided, only three months before the General Election, to dedicate himself to the founding (and funding) of a political party that would strive to change the “farcical” drug policies in the UK – and so Cista was born, “quite late in the day,” he admits, “but in time”.

“I got interested in the UK drugs policy and understood it’s quite silly, what we’ve got and what we continue to have, based on the information that’s available,” Birch says, citing huge “levels of ignorance” that surround cannabis consumption. According to its manifesto, Cista’s chief proposal is “a new approach to drug reform, starting with cannabis, one that is evidence-based, cross-party, humane and non-partisan.”

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This comment came in yesterday:-

Does missing appointments matter? Japanese Hogoshi (volunteer Probation Officers) have observed that the most consistent keepers of appointments are the repeat offenders. European probation officers view the clients attitude as more important than keeping appointments. Is there any evidence that clients breached for technical reasons are more likely to re-offend?

It might be worth noting that the third World Congress on Probation is to be held in Japan.