Our Roots

It's always wise in my view to have regard to the past when considering the future, so it's probably worth taking a closer look at the Inside Time piece from 2014 and referred to recently:-  

A short history of the Probation Service

With the passing of the Probation of Offenders Act in 1907 by the reforming Liberal government of the time those who had merely been volunteers, otherwise known as ‘Court Missionaries’, were given official status and thus became the first Probation Officers. On 8 May 1907, the Liberal Home Office Minister Herbert Samuel moving the short second reading debate in the House of Commons told MPs that the measure was needed so that offenders whom the courts did not think fit to imprison on account of their age, character or antecedents might be placed on probation under the supervision of these officers whose duty would be to, ‘advise’, ‘assist’ and ‘befriend’ them.

This last phrase about ‘advise’, ‘assist’ and ‘befriend’, which to many in the current climate of the Probation Service is viewed as a profanity, continued to ring down the decades until it was dispensed with in favour of ‘public protection’, ‘enforcement’ and ‘rehabilitation’ in the late 1990s when probation officers willingly signed up to the forces of conservatism.

The probation service has its origins in the late nineteenth century when Hertfordshire printer and philanthropist Frederic Rainer, a volunteer with the Church of England Temperance Society (CETS) wrote to the society of his concern about the lack of help for those who came before the courts. He sent a donation of five shillings towards a fund for practical rescue work in the police courts. The CETS responded by appointing two "missionaries" to Southwark Court with the initial aim of "reclaiming drunkards". This formed the basis of the London Police Courts Mission (LPCM), whose missionaries worked with magistrates to develop a system of releasing offenders on the condition that they kept in touch with the missionary and accepted guidance.

By 1886 the Probation of First Time Offenders Act allowed for courts around the country to follow the London example of appointing missionaries, but very few did so. The emphasis at that time was on religious mission and temperance.

The big change came in 1907 when the Probation of Offenders Act gave the missionaries official status as "officers of the court", later known as probation officers. The Act allowed courts to suspend punishment and discharge offenders if they enter into a recognisance of between one and three years, one condition of which was supervision by a person named in the ‘probation order’.

The 1907 Act also provided for the statutory foundation of the probation service and made it possible for Magistrates’ Courts to appoint probation officers who were paid by the local authority.

The 1909 Departmental Committee of the Home Office stated that the success and efficiency of the new probation system primarily depended upon the person and character of the probation officer. Paragraph 28 makes it clear that; ‘It is a system in which rules are comparatively unimportant, and that personality is everything. The probation officer must be a picked man or woman, endowed not only with intelligence and zeal, but, in a high degree, with sympathy, tact and firmness. On his or her individuality the success or failure of the system depends. Probation is what the officer makes it’.

By 1918 and with juvenile crime increasing during and after the First World War, the Home Office decided that probation work should not be left to philanthropic bodies and local magistrates and that state direction was needed.

However, it wasn’t until 1938 that the Home Office actually assumed control of the Probation Service and introduced a wide range of modernising reforms.

From thereon, the Probation Service underwent many changes until finally in 2000 The Criminal Justice and Court Services Act renamed the probation service as the National Probation Service for England and Wales, replacing 54 probation committees with 42 local probation boards and establishing 100% Home Office funding for the probation service. It also created the post of director general of probation services within the Home Office and made chief officers statutory office holders and members of local probation boards.

For most of the twentieth century, probation officers underwent the same professional education as social workers, but this was set aside in the mid-1990s when the Government decided that social work was an inappropriate way to understand the work of the service; the emphasis of the profession, reflected in the training curriculum, changed towards enforcement, rehabilitation and public protection. This was further cemented in the Criminal Justice Act 2003, which defined the purposes of sentencing as: the punishment of offenders; crime reduction; the reform and rehabilitation of offenders; the protection of the public; and the making of reparation by offenders to persons affected by their crimes. Nevertheless, staff continued to emphasise the original values of probation, especially a belief in the possibility of personal change, scepticism about the value of prison as the way to reduce crime, respect for diversity and the importance of professional relationships in enabling change.

Charles Hanson