Pick of the Week 27

"Everyone knows that having an independent mind in the probation service is tantamount to being an insurgent."

I have always enjoyed going to work and took pride in doing the best job I could but now I loathe it and dread going in every day. This is all down to TR and the complete feeling of hopelessness about the situation. NPS PO.

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Drugs have always been a huge part of penal society, considered prevalent and endemic enough for the government to introduce mandatory drug testing in prisons in the mid 90s, at some considerable cost. There wasn't any particular issues with violence, unrest or deaths associated with drugs in prisons at that point. Instead of using mandatory drug testing as a means of collecting information that would develop strategies and inform policy, it was used totally to impose punitive sanctions.

Herbal cannabis being easy to detect was swapped for heroin, easier to mask, and exited the system far quicker. Heroin became more targeted, and subutex (an opioid blocker) became the drug of choice, crushed and snorted the same effect as heroin was achieved and totally undetectable by drug testing. Tests were developed to identify subutex, and the choice of drug moved to legal highs such as spice as tests didn't exist to identify it.

As long as drugs exist in society, they will also exist in prisons. It's NOT the drugs that's killing people in our prisons or causing the levels of unrest and violence that we see today. It's naive understanding and the bad policies that comes from that understanding that's the real killer in UK prisons.

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I have just watched 90 min of discussion on net, 'parliamentlive-tv' of the Select Committee - subject - Justice Committee, work of Parole Board, with a lot of time spent discussing IPP, and backlog of pre-release parole Board meetings. Solution - taking 100 more members on Parole Board, and prisons struggling with high cases, and Probation working on having their reports ready in time. (no suggestion of more NPS staff)!

Not much more mention of probation, mainly prison, although external PO's always played a crucial role in the parole report, with info that the prisons were unlikely to have. I recall that in the 'good old days', prison and probation worked together to assess risk, prison PO's relying on external information to help assess level of risk in the outside world, info from families, setting up accommodation (hostels, home), employment options, and licence conditions. Internal PO's would assist external PO's with info of progress and plans for release. This would have been ongoing throughout the sentence, not just pre-release.

How far has it moved since then? How much time is made available to NPS staff to visit their cases throughout the sentence and produce timely reports? Or, like PSR's, have detailed quality parole reports become a thing of the past?

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Maybe as in the 'good old days' there's a role to be played by reconstruction of something akin to the LRC (local review committee) where a paper parole is considered prior to an oral hearing? Those who have not been granted release by paper application, could still retain the right to an oral hearing before the parole board.

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A Tory Govt (& yep, that includes Blue Labour) will NEVER admit they are wrong, in the wrong or heading in the wrong direction - even when driving into oncomng traffic on a motorway. Grayling, Wright, Cameron & Osbourne fucked us over - with the willing helping hands of the civil servants now languishing in luxury as reward for their complicity.

The financial cost of the centralist NOMS/TR debacle over the last 20 years has been a scandal in its own right, let alone the social impact of pisspoor justice policies which have seen prison populations expand to new record highs, reoffending rates increase & the numbers of deaths in custody accelerate.

The killing-off of the Probation Service was a premeditated act of social engineering, an Agatha Christie-esque murder expedited initially by stealth (remove social work value, Howard; introduce enforcement, Boateng), accelerated by the imposition of Trusts, the '07 Act then Grayling brazenly finishes the job by bludgeoning the now weak & feeble Probation Service to death with a blunt instrument.

And No-one will ever be held accountable for this crime.

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Service users are getting such a raw deal. I am ashamed sometimes. We try to do our best in my shrinking team but we can't manage their needs and expectations. They are turned away now when they come in with a crisis or just needing support because some days there are hardly any staff and they have caseload to see and being bullied by targets. That isn't right. We always had time for people before TR. That could be a suicidal service user or maybe they fear they are going to re-offend but they get turned away by staff who are close to breaking point and have no more to give..burned out! Shameful. 

I am ashamed to be part of it now and taking action to get out. I won't end up as a robot, ticking boxes and being emotionally distant. No wonder crime is rising. Service users need a proper relationship and support to make any real positive changes..so many desperate people now facing tax credits nightmare and homelessness. Coming out of prison further brutalised. Makes me want to cry some days..what an uncaring society we have become.

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What's achieved by highlighting a lack of references to probation in a submission that is rich in ideas and full of good sense? On IPPs, the probation service gave them a red carpet, foamed about being centre-stage in risk assessments and was infatuated with flawed accredited programmes – which have been shown to not work. Probation supporters should really get off their high horse and be a bit more humble about their part in the IPP fiasco.

The same applies to recalls: probation too trigger-happy. Of course, individual probation officers sought to mitigate the risk averse reflexes of corporate probation, but these efforts were isolated in an otherwise robotic work environment. Everyone knows that having an independent mind in the probation service is tantamount to being an insurgent. Probation may at one time have been a force for good and rooted in humanitarian values, but times have changed for the worse.

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I don't think we disagree. Fair points well made, especially about needing to be "a bit more humble about their part in the IPP fiasco. The same applies to recalls: probation too trigger-happy." I agree that was more the role of risk-averse management eager to kiss NOMS's arse as opposed to the choice of skilled practitioners trying to work meaningfully with complex cases. Numerous examples in my experience alone of being DIRECTED to "discuss but not propose" IPP in PSRs.

I don't think I had attacked the article at all... I had simply highlighted the significant shift in terminology, the changes imposed such that the term 'probation' - and thus the concept - is eradicated. The lack of use of the term 'probation' in the article is merely symptomatic of the efficacy of the Tory's disenfranchisement of Probation, in principle & in practice.

I would also agree that "having an independent mind" used to be a pre-requisite; having relevant life experience, including previous convictions, used to be embraced. Now the Tory social engineering project is simply excluding diversity of knowledge, diversity of experience & diversity of thinking.

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I apologise for misconstruing your intentions. I think I tend to recoil when I perceive defences of probation - which obviously is not what you were about. I suppose, for me, there are two probation's - Old and New. Like the Labour Party probation was stuffed with modernisers and it's their legacy that I reject and thus I have no instinctive sympathy for the today's probation: I don't trust it anymore to do the right things.

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In 2005 I attended a briefing from NOMS and they clearly stated that IPPs were designed to get the most dangerous and difficult people on long licences IN THE COMMUNITY...breach would be dealt with by short period on recall and then back out again..unfortunately no-one told the parole board this....IPPs stuck in the system as a direct result of parole boards ignoring what many officers were proposing because they knew better...probation management were instructed to do this just as they were instructed to sell us down the river...I think that the chickens have bought their tickets and are queueing at the station as we speak.

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The objective was an indeterminate lock up for the 'dangerous', I don't think the primary focus was on community supervision. As the lawyer writes, there is an 'institutional approach' to IPP releases that are dependent on completion of accredited programmes, as these provide the pseudo-science to defensible decision-making. Terrible that risk assessments became so dependent on flawed programmes. Personal change gets reduced to going through the motions of programmes. For IPPs prisons became re-education camps.

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Probation officer became a non profession when C.Q.S.W social work qualification was replaced by the diploma in probation studies. It is no longer a recognised profession in England/ Wales. Scotland and N.Ireland sensibly kept the social work qualification and have been spared the travesty of TR. That and the belief that PSO's could do the same job as qualified social workers was the slippery slope. The PO training is now a joke..cheap on the job training from staff who are already stressed to hell and then have to study for bogus qualification in own time. PO numbers are set to plummet along with morale. It is a complete shambles.

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Top end of the food chain are now quite motivated to reduce the number and frequency of recalls, as well as move out IPP cases into the community. Trouble is, both government and probation leaders have focused obsessively on risk management and not rehabilitation. Splitting off the "high risk" NPS from the rest and simultaneously chucking it into the civil service has led to a craven risk-averse culture. We really should have - probably will have at this rate - a "Risk of Causing a Frisson of Unease at Management Level" box to tick.

I noticed the Chief Inspector commenting somewhere recently that the NPS needs to pay more attention to rehabilitation. It is just about feasible that this may yet gather some momentum, but popular opinion aka the Daily Mail isn't ever going lend much support, it needs courage and conviction in the identity and role of Probation at the top to give this any traction.

Backawhile during a consultancy/assessment exercise leading up to those "Excellent" ratings we enjoyed, the consultant in his summing up said that the greatest risk the Service had was that it did not have a clearly articulated Mission and Values: so it's mission, by default, was to jump through whatever hoops it was given. With a clearly stated identity, he argued, "Probation" could then CHOOSE what it did, by selecting only those hoops which correlated with its identity and purpose, and this would actually be a strength, not a risky strategy. I thought it was a great analysis. Sadly unheeded.

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Hmmm. Here's a thought - what if Probation had a gatekeeping role where they were responsible for making detailed professional assessments of cases coming their way at the point of sentence or release/potential release?

The Courts & HMPPS could ask professionals trained in undertaking such assessments for their informed opinion, perhaps in a report which offered a view as to an effective way for working with each case in question - a bit like the way in which a specialist psychiatric or psychological report (prepared by a qualified professional) indicates how & when an individual might benefit from intervention.

Its not an exact science but it allows for a professional gateway through which the circumstances of cases are thoroughly & individually assessed, where all options for progression are explored & concluding with the suggestion of an agreed, appropriate pathway of intervention.

Would such an idea work?