Hijacking of a Good Idea

During the whole painful probation privatisation process of the last few years a number of myths were promulgated in order to try and support the process, one being the suggestion that the private sector would 'innovate'. In reality the only 'innovation' has proved to be in cost-cutting and precious little service delivery improvement, confirmation having been provided by a succession of negative inspection reports.

On the contrary, those of us who have been around for some time are fully aware that the probation service has a long and distinguished history of innovation, much of which having influenced criminal justice policy world-wide, such as the pioneering of 'community service'. My attention has been drawn to this recently produced BBC programme:-   

How Britain pioneered an alternative to prison

In the 1970s the UK tried to reduce its growing prison population. An experimental new punishment was introduced for convicted criminals. It was called Community Service. The scheme was soon copied around the world. Witness History speaks to John Harding, a former Chief Probation Officer, who was in charge of the introduction of Community Service in one of the first pilot schemes. 

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Unfortunately politicians just can't stop themselves tinkering with criminal justice policy for political gain and John Harding wrote this for the Guardian in January 2013:-

Forty years of community service

How did a measure that required offenders to carry out socially beneficial work turn into a form of punishment?

The first community service order was made in Nottingham crown court 40 years ago this month for Peter, a cannabis supplier.

On 2 January 1973, Mr Justice James ordered Peter to undertake 120 hours of community service. As the senior probation officer responsible for initiating a Home Office community service order pilot scheme in Nottinghamshire, I was summoned to the judge's retiring room before the sentencing decision was announced. The judge wanted to know what the new measure involved, where the offender would be placed and how accountable the service would be if Peter failed to respond. I told him that Peter would be working for an old people's home run by Nottingham social services, assisting staff and residents. If he failed to turn up for community service, Peter would have been returned to court for being in breach of the order.

This revolution in community-based sanctions was the creation of a subcommittee of the Advisory Council on the Penal System (ACPS), set up in 1966 by the then Labour government to advise the home secretary on "matters relating to the prevention of crime and the treatment of offenders". The ACPS non-custodial and semi-custodial penalties subcommittee was chaired by social reformer Lady Barbara Wootton.

Probation pilots

Following its recommendation, community service was piloted in six probation areas: Nottinghamshire, inner London, Kent, Durham, south-west Lancashire and Shropshire. Six senior probation officers/community service organisers were appointed by the pilot areas to negotiate a range of tasks with local public services and non-governmental organisations, set out criteria for the assessment and matching of offenders to work assignments, and prepare magistrates and judges for the new powers that, from January 1973, would be available to crown and magistrates courts.

I asked the only surviving member of ACPS, Sir Louis Blom-Cooper, where the idea of community service came from. He said that, by chance, the committee's attention was drawn to a newspaper article about an experiment conducted by a criminal court judge in Darmstadt, Germany, in the 1950s. The judge exercised his discretion by ordering an offender, convicted of dangerous driving, to work for a certain period of time under nursing supervision in a local accident and emergency hospital. The knowledge that the judge, under German criminal law, could impose a legal requirement on a convicted offender to carry out such work provided the spur ACPS needed to develop their thinking of community service as a court sanction in its own right, Blom-Cooper explained. Yet, without Wootton's inspired chairmanship and forcefulness, community service would not have emerged as a distinct penal sanction, he added.

ACPS believed that community service should be a constructive penalty whereby the offender took on the burden of social responsibility towards others. They saw great merit in merging the majority of offenders with non-offender volunteers so that the offenders could be inspired by the volunteers.

When ACPS published its report on non-custodial penalties in 1970, it took the view that community service would appeal to the punitive-minded because it involved deprivation of leisure; to the retributive, because it would compel the offender to make some repayment to the community for the damage that he had done; and to others, mainly because it would be cheaper and probably a more hopeful alternative to a short period of imprisonment, or because it would make the punishment fit the crime.

The pilot areas were left with relative freedom to develop community service in appropriate ways. I was much influenced by the New Careers movement in the US, which was part of President Lyndon Johnson's anti-poverty programme. It used some offenders as a community resource in the belief that, instead of becoming recipients of help, they could become dispensers of service and, in doing so, gain status and approval. Within three months in Nottinghamshire, we had hundreds of potential tasks for offenders in the community, from helping at clubs for disabled people or young people and at old people's homes, to canal preservation and supporting A&E units of local hospitals.

When the two-year pilots ended in 1974, the Home Office research unit's final report was a superb illustration of official caution punctured by unfettered enthusiasm. The researchers said the scheme was viable and, despite their doubt about its overall impact on the size of the population, revealed that, at its best, community service was an exciting departure from traditional penal treatment.

By the end of 1977, community service was rolled out across England and Wales. And over the next 20 years, Europe, Australasia, parts of Asia and the US all adopted community service orders.

In the UK alone, millions of hours of community service have been carried out by thousands of offenders at a fraction of the cost of imprisonment. The latest figures from the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) show that community sentences outperform prison sentences for 18- to 24-year-olds by 13% in terms of reducing reoffending. Even when offenders of all ages are closely matched in terms of criminal history and offence type, the performance gap remains 8%.

Yet, in a retributive age, the image of community service has been ratcheted up by politicians to match penal populism. And a demand for tougher community penalties has been paralleled by the rebranding of community service to community punishment, then community payback, and now to unpaid work. Today's offenders wear fluorescent tabards over their clothes to indicate that they are offenders, easily recognisable by members of the public. In reality, I suspect, despite the hardening rhetoric, nothing much has changed in terms of nature of tasks undertaken, though the rigid enforcement of orders leaves little room for discretion.

Further, probation staff have handed over responsibility for unpaid work schemes to private companies such as Serco, which in October was awarded a four-year contract in London. The justification for this is to ensure a more efficient and cost-effective service. There are no evidential grounds for this degree of optimism. Serco promises to cut costs. The probation union, Napo, warns that this will be achieved by changing the employment conditions of existing supervisory staff and cutting salaries.

The MoJ intends to put out to tender £600m worth of probation services, about 60% of the entire budget. It is a far cry from the Wootton committee's founding principles that a private company should not make profits on the back of offenders while they are repaying their debt to society. Blom-Cooper, for one, is saddened that we have moved to an acceptance that profit, not a sense of public service, is the prime driver for certain parts of our criminal justice process. "Penal reform," he remarked drily, "is not necessarily penal progress."

In addition, the government proposes, in its crime and courts bill currently going through parliament, to introduce a mandatory punitive element to every community order. This could include a fine or a curfew, which penal campaigners are warning may undermine community sentences' success in reducing reoffending.

Whether the foundation stones of community service, laid down over the past 40 years, will survive under fragmentation and privatisation is open to question. Those of us fortunate enough to have been involved in its conception and present at its birth, believed that probation could make a difference in offenders' lives, provided that hard work, and clarity of purpose and vision underpinned all our efforts.

John Harding was pioneer senior probation officer/community service organiser for Nottinghamshire, 1972-74, and chief probation officer for inner London, 1993-2001