Since starting this blog many moons ago, ranting about OASys has been one of my core missions, so I'm always up for the topic whenever the opportunity arises. As a consequence and especially as ever-larger numbers of brand spanking new probation officers are being trained up, it's a pleasure to see my ire is still as keenly felt by subversive elements within the increasingly authoritarian NPS. This from yesterday:-
"Every probation officer worth their salt knows that OASYS is not fit for purpose. That's not to say that writing an assessment, identifying a plan of action to address the issues concerned both from a "risk management" and "rehabilitative" perspective does not have any place - but WE ALL know that OASYS is clunky, repetitive and frankly doesn't make sense. So rather than admitting this, the service constantly invests more time and effort into it - tweaking little boxes here and there, constantly forcing staff to complete more and more of them, and then recruiting armies of QDO's to monitor it's completion to exacting standards which themselves make absolutely no sense.Frankly if someone gave me an A4 piece of paper, I'd be able to write a good assessment, identify the issues, and structure a risk/sentence plan - I'd be able to update this easily, and would have the time to engage my service users in that process. But no! Fearful that we can't be trusted, the service has chosen to continue to invest in a difficult to use system - even writing a sentence plan with all it's ridiculous drop down boxes and meaningless/crap non-SMART drop down objectives, takes absolutely FOREVEVER (constant error messages if an old sentence plan action is not closed down etc.)
And yes, as per the comment in this blog, the skills, time and effort and frankly professionalisation it takes to develop those skills over time with the service users, has no priority at all. London NPS solution to this? Chuck a whole load of resources on a website and constantly tell us to complete the WEB (which is basically another sentence plan). The Head of Operations briefing the other day was embarrassing - being told "complete a WEB, it improves engagement", "use all these resources, and do exercises", and "use CRISSA recording convention" was frankly so embarrassingly out of touch it actually made me angry. I'd love to hear what others thought of that?"
--oo00oo--
A reminder:-
"So much emphasis is put on OASys and not enough on rehabilitation. We rush supervision because of the paperwork and high caseload. Our cases outweigh the hours. An offender can’t expect an hour from his officer. To get a hour, others have to suffer. I joined to make a difference. But I can’t make a difference... the service won’t let me."
"The whole OASys & endless paperwork is now a joke. No business could operate efficiently like this."
MoJ press release today stresses that more hostel places means work for local tradespeople!
ReplyDeleteCommonly known as probation hostels, approved premises (APs) provide a temporary, yet vital base for offenders upon release – allowing probation staff to closely monitor and support them in the community and boosting public safety. APs are staffed all day, every day by trained probation staff and offenders living there are subject to night-time curfews and regular drug and alcohol testing.
An extra 200 new bedrooms will be created by extending and reconfiguring existing approved premises – an increase in places of 10 per cent. By providing stable accommodation to prison leavers, APs help lower the risk of reoffending and, in turn, reduce crime rates.
A further £10 million will be spent on refurbishments and security, including upgraded CCTV systems and personal alarms for staff. The construction and renovations will generate millions of pounds in work this year for tradespeople across England and Wales, from plumbers and electricians to roofers and builders.
Prisons and Probation Minister Lucy Frazer QC MP said:
"Approved Premises are vital for monitoring prison leavers - reducing the likelihood of them reoffending and helping to cut crime. They provide a stable base helping them access services, find jobs and start to turn their lives around. This extra investment in building and renovation, along with the improvements we’re already making to prisons and courts, will also put millions of pounds into the pockets of local tradespeople across the country."
The plans have also been welcomed by police chiefs, who work closely with the Probation Service to manage high-risk prison leavers in the community. National Police Chiefs’ Council lead for the Management of Offenders, Chief Constable Michelle Skeer, said:
"The UK has some of the most effective tools in the world to manage offenders when they are initially released from prison. It is a joined up effort across many services and agencies and the police work very closely to reduce risk. Approved Premises play a vital role in offering stability, support and supervision that helps prevent reoffending, which ultimately keeps the public safer."
In partnership with the local council, we are also building a new, replacement approved premise in Southwark, which will be open in early 2021 and house 24 prison leavers at any given time.
Offenders will have the chance to carry out some of the renovation work through a Handyman Scheme, helping them learn new skills and boost their chances of finding a job. A trial at St Catherine’s approved premises in Guildford, saw an offender shadow local builders when they renovated its kitchen, residents’ lounge and bedrooms. The project gave him a new-found focus and confidence, and could inspired offenders to seek work in construction.
The scheme follows swiftly on from plans to recruit 1,000 new probation officers this year to further boost public safety. Probation officer numbers are now approaching a 4 year high.
Part As - BLUE - with all the client information at the front -
ReplyDeletePart Bs - PINK - Initial Assessment - and reviews at intervals with a closing summary.
Part C - WHITE - Follower and contact sheets,
- worked pretty well in my era - though it was always difficult to find the time to keep the records up to date and do all the other umpteen tasks needed to be a probation officer.
My best record was my diary - I took to providing my own - so that the employer could not claim it from me in the event of difficulty - not that I ever had it claimed.
Just a thought.
ReplyDeleteBut if building new prisons and extending the AP estate is so great for the local economies and local Labour markets then why would you want to stop people offending?
Is offending a good thing because it facilitates economic development in local areas?
'Getafix
Crime/Criminal Justice is an industry all on its own - police, security, courts, lawyers, judiciary, prisons, probation... its bigger than the coffee shop economy apparently.
DeleteHave all those 'excellent leaders' returned from their Peloponnese/Provence/Tuscany summer homes yet? No worries getting flights via X or Y to avoid quarantine (a la Johnson's old man) when you're pocketing a very generous monthly working-from-home allowance on top of your not-too-shoddy salary. Just make sure the worker bees are hard at it in the office.
DeleteOAsys, the risk assessment tool that nobody ever reads thereby increasing risk but keeping the ‘cut and paste ,’ business fully occupied.
ReplyDeleteAdd more layers and other tools that nobody looks at, take more time to fill in, include loads of interventions that can’t be delivered, tick all the boxes, pass the QA test, apply for promotion, become SPO then tell minions how to engage service users.
Sound familiar?
Said it before - OASys was a good idea in theory, i.e. collate the various & differing risk assessments from each probation area, distill the most relevant/most effective aspects into one combined tool that can travel with each case if/as/when they move area, e.g. prison, release, transfer, etc.
ReplyDeleteOASys was corrupted in practice by being designed & implemented by prison service psychologists under orders from "The Centre", i.e. it was an exercise in anticipation of the (original) NPS choreography and its subsequent subservient relationship to the soon-to-be realised, prison-service-led NOMS.
It was, in essence, a staff-control tool that politicians approved of:
"Danny Clark OBE is Head of Substance Misuse, Cognitive Skills and Motivational Interventions at NOMS. He was previously the Head of the Attitudes, Thinking and Behaviour Interventions Unit at NOMS. He was responsible for the research on and development of the Offender Assessment System."
See also:
http://probationmatters.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-final-insult.html
"Anonymous" is correct that in principle OASys was a good idea - partly for the reasons mentioned, and also because in theory one would be able to 'measure' Likelihood of Reoffending at start and end of sentence, and gain a sense of the 'distance travelled'. I designed a system in 1999 that did this on a single four-page 'pink sheet' that would serve for the whole sentence, and Berkshire staff used it for nearly two years. It was assessed alongside two other assessment systems by the Home Office at that time - they considered it much too simple, and plumped for the option of OASys, which was at that time a 33-page document. Mine (still available if anyone wants a look) was designed to do the essentials for the majority of cases by practitioners who are pressed for time.
ReplyDeleteAndrew,
DeleteMany thanks for responding and especially for filling in a bit more detail as to the genesis of OASys. It keeps cropping up as an issue and as we all know the discussion is not academic, negatively affecting everyday practice as it does.
I'm very keen to help foster some further serious dialogue on the subject and I'd certainly like to to take up the offer of sight of the four page alternative you offered the Home Office in 1999. Is it available online and could we persuade you to pen a Guest Blog on the subject?
You have my email details and it would be good to hear from you further on the matter.
Cheers,
Jim
Having a covid-clearout & found some ancient documents recording work done in a pre-OASys office, in the days when we had to submit forms with our monthly workload.
ReplyDelete18 months' worth of PSRs written as courts team PO - 376
Plus 19 'other' reports (breach, addendum, deferred sentence, and something called 'specific sentence' - the precursor to the short format/fast delivery/oral/on the day...)
... and yes, I still had cases on my workload whilst averaging 22 reports a month as a courts team PO - for that period, three lifers, two further cases indefinitely detained in secure hospital and two others in secure units out of area. And we had 36 days' annual leave. And we had regular training days, team meetings & supervision.
DeleteWouldn't have stood a chance with OASys & all those other duplicate/triplicate now-fill-in-this-as-well-repeat-within-3-days-10-days-14-days...
So its always been a hectic juggling-priorities kind of job, but now it seems the priority is completing interminable forms to please the micro-managers rather than actually doing the job.
Comment from a colleague today "When I retire" (Our retirement is all we ever talk about) "I am going to write this: I have in decades of probation work supervised thousands of offenders. They all had thousands of excuses and reasons to give me for their offending, but never once did anyone say that they did it becuase the OASys wasnt up to scratch"
ReplyDeletehttps://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/sep/08/ex-g4s-executives-charged-with-defrauding-uk-government
ReplyDeleteuk govt covid-19 data tues 8/9/20
Deletetesting: still 175,000-ish
cases: 2,420 (without Northen Ireland data)
week to date (Sun, Mon, Tues) = 8,356
deaths within 28 days of 1st +ve: 30 (excl NI data)
new hospitalisations: 124 daily (again?)
FranK.
OASys - the perfect burdensome 'tool' for micro-management of wild-card staff, bullying others & manipulating data to suit the political climate. Its clunky, its crude, its NOT objective, its pseudo-pscience; its ersatz-psychology, the worst excesses of dumbing-down perfectly respectable risk assessments into a fudge-pie.
The same team (Danny Clark et al) also designed 6-page PSR audit forms - they took longer to complete than a full PSR. We used to have a rota of POs on 'gatekeeping' duty at our courts. Completed reports would need to be submitted 3 working days before the scheduled hearing. ALL reports were read and any queries or areas of concern were discussed with the author of the report. This meant reports were assessed in the context of local knowledge of sentencing practices & the quirks of local justices/judiciary. No hours of form-filling, just good old professional judgement from very experienced staff.
??? sorry Jim - my mistake ???
Deleteuk govt covid-19 data tues 8/9/20
ReplyDeletetesting: still 175,000-ish
cases: 2,420 (without Northen Ireland data)
week to date (Sun, Mon, Tues) = 8,356
deaths within 28 days of 1st +ve: 30 (excl NI data)
new hospitalisations: 124 daily (again?)
FranK.
OASys - the perfect burdensome 'tool' for micro-management of wild-card staff, bullying others & manipulating data to suit the political climate. Its clunky, its crude, its NOT objective, its pseudo-pscience; its ersatz-psychology, the worst excesses of dumbing-down perfectly respectable risk assessments into a fudge-pie.
The same team (Danny Clark et al) also designed 6-page PSR audit forms - they took longer to complete than a full PSR. We used to have a rota of POs on 'gatekeeping' duty at our courts. Completed reports would need to be submitted 3 working days before the scheduled hearing. ALL reports were read and any queries or areas of concern were discussed with the author of the report. This meant reports were assessed in the context of local knowledge of sentencing practices & the quirks of local justices/judiciary. No hours of form-filling, just good old professional judgement from very experienced staff.
R4 FileOnFour - "long covid" - a look at the impact of the virus beyond the recorded figures, including those never hospitalised but affected, & the long term post-hospital effects. One medical professional estimates 60,000 to date are suffering enduring long-term effects.
DeleteFranK.
Anybody got anything to say about North Liverpool NPS?
ReplyDeletewhat's happened - i'm intrigued. I've lost track of Merseyside NPS - Falkner St got closed didn't it then staff moved to Green Lane?
Deletea new bone of contention is the amount of oasys reviews that are required. it's bad enough doing a Start ISP but now we're having to review all medium risk at the 12wk stage and thanks to the software management have got there's no chance of ignoring the fact otherwise you get an excel spreadsheet sent to you. The problem being is they are time-consuming and as i'm in a CRC and on 60+ cases (Resettle staff are on average 100) i am on a constant treatmill. We've been told low risk can be done via a delius entry but everything else has to have the full review. How the hell are you meant to get the time to do this - if you saw the queries i've got to deal with on top of new Orders etc etc you would be surprised and i'm only getting through things by cutting corners and working overtime for free. I've tried and failed to pass queries to volunteers to help with but they've no access to Delius and it's all just a waste of time.
ReplyDeleteFrom Twitter:-
ReplyDelete"We need to look at the evolution of oasys. Originally designed to be used as a dynamic tool to remove bias from assessments. Yes it’s now unwieldy and far from user friendly. It’s a shame that innovative tools like omnia used in London and Thames valley are likely to be lost."
From Twitter (former CPO):-
Delete"Put simply, an organisation’s professional case management tools should always be designed from the bottom up, not the top down. The defining objectives are different. OASys was top down."
From Twitter:-
Delete"Oh gosh I remember PSR gatekeeping. I learnt a lot from colleagues and hopefully vice versa. So important to have the time and space to discuss your clients thoughtfully. Sigh."
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8710525/amp/G4S-executives-charged-defrauding-Ministry-Justice.html
ReplyDeleteuk gang-of-six govt covid-19 data 9/9/20
ReplyDeletenew cases: 2,659 - week to date sun-weds incl = 11,015
deaths within 28 days of 1st +ve: 8
FranK.
Forgot:
Deletetesting: still below 180,000/day
Daily hospitalisations: 124/day, HOWEVER... this now has an annotation to state its a fixed figure for one day, i.e. 26 Aug 2020, so hasn't been updated for the last two weeks.
Sources elsewhere suggest (from incomplete data, so this is a low guesstimate) that daily hospitalisations have increased to around the 150 mark over the last two weeks.
FranK.
Brazen Buffoonery?
ReplyDelete"Donald Trump admits he played down coronavirus risk
Donald Trump has admitted he played down the Covid-19 pandemic, claiming that he did not want to create panic. On 7 February he told the journalist Bob Woodward in a phone call that coronavirus was “more deadly than even your strenuous flus”, but the message he gave to the public was very different.
By 27 February he was telling the public:
"It’s going to disappear. One day – it’s like a miracle – it will disappear."
The president admitted to Woodward in March:
"I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic."
Source = Guardian.
190,00+ deaths in the US to date; 6.3 million cases
"It’s going to disappear. One day – it’s like a miracle – it will disappear."
Buffoonery in the UK:
Boris Johnson believes a mass testing programme is “our only hope for avoiding a second national lockdown before a vaccine”, according to leaked official documents setting out plans for “Operation Moonshot”
Source = Guardian.
Completely off topic, but even as a left wing newspaper I find the language used in the following article pretty strong.
ReplyDeleteI happen to agree with it too.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/10/uk-corrupt-nation-earth-brexit-money-laundering
'Getafix
Fear, shame, embarrassment: these brakes no longer apply. The government has discovered that it can bluster through any scandal. No minister need resign. No one need apologise. No one need explain.
DeleteAs public outrage grows over the billions of pounds of coronavirus contracts issued by the government without competition, it seems determined only to award more of them. Never mind that the consulting company Deloitte, whose personnel circulate in and out of government, has been strongly criticised for the disastrous system it devised to supply protective equipment to the NHS. It has now been granted a massive new contract to test the population for Covid-19.
Never mind that some of these contracts have reportedly cost taxpayers £800 for every protective overall delivered. Never mind that at least two multi-million pound contracts appear to have been issued to dormant companies. Awarding contracts to unusual companies, without advertising, transparency or competition now appears to have been adopted as the norm. Several of the firms that have benefited from this largesse are closely linked to senior figures in the government.
Every week, Boris Johnson looks more like George I, under whose government vast fortunes were made by political favourites, through monopoly contracts for military procurement. Any pretence of fiscal rectitude or democratic accountability has been abandoned. With four more years and the support of the billionaire press, who cares?
The way the government handles public money looks to me like an open invitation to corruption. While it is hard to show that any individual deal is corrupt, the framework under which this money is dispensed invites the perception.
When you connect the words corruption and the United Kingdom, people tend to respond with shock and anger. Corruption, we believe, is something that happens abroad. Indeed, if you check the rankings published by Transparency International or the Basel Institute, the UK looks like one of the world’s cleanest countries. But this is an artefact of the narrow criteria they use.
As Jason Hickel points out in his book The Divide, theft by officials in poorer nations amounts to between $20bn and $40bn a year. It’s a lot of money, and it harms wellbeing and democracy in those countries. But this figure is dwarfed by the illicit flows of money from poor and middling nations that are organised by multinational companies and banks. The US research group Global Financial Integrity estimates that $1.1tn a year flows illegally out of poorer nations, stolen from them through tax evasion and the transfer of money within corporations. This practice costs sub-Saharan Africa around 6% of its GDP.
DeleteThe looters rely on secrecy regimes to process and hide their stolen money. The corporate tax haven index published by the Tax Justice Network shows that the three countries that have done most to facilitate this theft are the British Virgin Islands, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands. All of them are British territories. Jersey, a British dependency, comes seventh on the list. These places are effectively satellites of the City of London. But because they are overseas, the City can benefit from “nefarious activities … while allowing the British government to maintain distance when scandals arise”, says the network. The City of London’s astonishing exemption from the UK’s freedom of information laws creates an extra ring of secrecy.
The UK also appears to be the money-laundering capital of the world. In a devastating article, Oliver Bullough revealed how easy it has become to hide your stolen loot and fraudulent schemes here, using a giant loophole in company law: no one checks the ownership details you enter when creating your company. You can, literally, call yourself Mickey Mouse, with a registered address on Mars, and get away with it. Bullough discovered owners on the Companies House site called “Xxx Stalin” and “Mr Mmmmmm Xxxxxxxxxxx”, whose address was given as “Mmmmmmm, Mmmmmm, Mmm, MMM”. One investigation found that 4,000 company owners, according to their submitted details, were under the age of two.
By giving false identities, company owners in the UK can engage in the industrial processing of dirty money with no fear of getting caught. Even when the UK’s company registration system was revealed as instrumental to the world’s biggest known money-laundering scheme, the Danske Bank scandal, the government turned a blind eye.
A new and terrifying book by the Financial Times journalist Tom Burgis, Kleptopia, follows a global current of dirty money, and the murders and kidnappings required to sustain it. Again and again, he found, this money, though it might originate in Russia, Africa or the Middle East, travels through London. The murders and kidnappings don’t happen here, of course: our bankers have clean cuffs and manicured nails. The National Crime Agency estimates that money laundering costs the UK £100bn a year. But it makes much more. With the money come people fleeing the consequences of their crimes, welcomed into this country through the government’s “golden visa” scheme: a red carpet laid out for the very rich.
DeleteNone of this features in the official definitions of corruption. Corruption is what little people do. But kleptocrats in other countries are merely clients of the bigger thieves in London. Processing everyone else’s corruption is the basis of much of the wealth of this country. When you start to understand this, the contention by the author of Gomorrah, Roberto Saviano, that the UK is the most corrupt nation on Earth, begins to make sense.
These activities are a perpetuation of colonial looting: a means by which vast riches are siphoned out of poorer countries and into the hands of the super-rich. The UK’s great and unequal wealth was built on colonial robbery: the land and labour stolen in Ireland, America and Africa, the humans stolen by slavery, the $45tn bled from India.
Just as we distanced ourselves from British slave plantations in the Caribbean, somehow believing that they had nothing to do with us, now we distance ourselves from British organised crime, much of which also happens in the Caribbean. The more you learn, the more you realise that this is what it’s really about: grand larceny is the pole around which British politics revolve.
A no-deal Brexit, which Boris Johnson seems to favour, is likely to cement the UK’s position as the global entrepot for organised crime. When the EU’s feeble restraints are removed, under a government that seems entirely uninterested in basic accountability, the message we send to the rest of the world will be even clearer than it is today: come here to wash your loot.
Mr Cummings wants you all to know that the article (see above) was written by - wait for it - a man who won't take out a National Trust membership!!!
Deleteuk calamity govt coid-19 data 10/9/20
ReplyDeletetesting: seems to still be below 175,000, but again a new annotation informs us this is only 2 /9/20 data, so who knows what the fuck is really happening anymore?
new cases: 2,919 - weekly running total = 13,934
deaths: 14
hospitalisations: 141 on 2/9/20 seems to be the best they can do
Promises, promises, promises - and all we get are lies, broken promises, no data, not up-to-date data, silence, offloading of blame & responsibility...
... its a shitshow.
FranK.
https://imperialcollegelondon.github.io/covid19local/#map
ReplyDeleteCOVID-19 Great Britain
* This site give estimates of the reproduction number of COVID-19 and projections of cases by Local Authority in Great Britain based on testing data and mortality data.
* All estimates and projections have uncertainty/probability measures associated with them. Central estimates should be treated cautiously: look at the range.
* Projections of cases assume that interventions (e.g. lockdowns, school closures) and behaviour patterns do not change from about a week before the end of observations onwards.
* An increase in cases in an area can be due to an increase in testing. The model currently does not account for this.
* A statistical model is used to estimate qunatities that cannot be directly measures, such as the reproduction number R. No model is perfect; see limitations in "Details".
Happy viewing
FranK.