In the Wake of the SFO's 2

I've just noticed that Frances Crook had something to say about things in the FT the other day:-

Probation failures have deep roots and horrific consequences

Minimal reorganisation could revive the public service and reduce such tragedies as Zara Aleena’s murder

The murder of Zara Aleena by a man just released from prison was a tragedy waiting to happen. Assessed by the probation service as not posing a high risk to the public, he killed her just days later in a gut-wrenchingly awful case raised by Keir Starmer during the last prime minister’s questions. This was the first time the dire state of the service has been brought up at PMQs for several years. It is about time. 

How did a public service dedicated to public safety get into such a state? As recently as 2013, the inspectorate assessed the service across England and Wales as delivering good or excellent provision. What happened to destroy this was three years with Chris Grayling in charge. During his time as Lord Chancellor and secretary of state for justice he was a man in a hurry. Grayling closed prisons and reduced prison officers but without reducing the population of prisoners, leaving more of them crammed into fewer spaces without adequate staffing. 

This set challenges for probation officers working in prisons and tasked with supporting the reintegration of former prisoners into the community. Some of these individuals have previously committed very serious and violent offences and could be a danger — especially after experiencing years of filthy, violent, drug-ridden prisons. 

For a hundred years, probation has benefited from local connections, autonomy and professionalism. Having someone to look after you, somewhere to live and something to do all day provides the best chance of leading a crime-free life and being able to contribute to the local community. In 2014, at a stroke, all this was destroyed by the government’s short-sighted desire to find something — anything — to privatise. 

Because the court functions could not be given to a private company that might be managing the very sentence it had recommended to the judge, this element of probation had to remain a state function. The rest was divided up and given to various private contractors with disastrous, and predictable, consequences. 

Overall, some 200,000 men and women are supervised by probation at any one time. The majority of those overseen by the service have been sentenced to a community penalty. 

This unpaid work — a success story when linked to local neighbourhood needs — has now became symbolic of the wider failures. Private companies sent men to sit in car parks all day to fulfil their hours. The profit motive took possession of a process once firmly linked to the decisions of the courts; staff struggled to find purpose with what they were supervising. In 2018 and 2019, the then chief inspector of probation, Glenys Stacey, published a series of excoriating reports. 

Eventually, even ministers had to recognise that the service was failing and it was brought back under state control in 2020. Unfortunately, instead of reinstating local links, the functions were squeezed into the civil service. The independence and ability to speak out about local issues has gone. On-the-ground contacts with voluntary organisations and essential services such as housing have gone. The very things that are proven to prevent reoffending are gone. 

We now have a service that the current chief inspector describes as “shockingly bad” in many places. Heavy workloads, high vacancy rates, newly recruited, young and inexperienced staff who lack managers to guide their complex work: all these factors lead to mistakes. Ultimately they endanger the public. This deterioration only makes more pointless deaths like Aleena’s more likely. 

Ministers repeat the familiar mantra that new staff are being recruited, but they are coming in to a service where colleagues have lost faith and direction. It doesn’t have to be like this. Minimal reorganisation could revive a service essential for public safety. We should reinstate the links to local government so that housing, health, police and voluntary organisations can play a part. Yes, strategic direction and inspection must be central but local management is the best chance for reviving the probation service. 

I have one final suggestion. We need an expert body similar to the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) to provide evidence-based guidance on what works and to make sure that future ministers cannot announce new punishments or big changes for their own self-aggrandisement. 

There will always be mistakes and there may still be tragedies — human beings can be unpredictable. Sometimes professionals fail and people who are already damaged and violent may go on to do something awful. But we can limit the chances, help offenders to change and save on the costs of reoffending. 

There is a body of research that shows how to help people who have committed crimes to atone for what they have done and turn their lives around. Let’s use it.

Frances Crook
The writer is former chief executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform

The first of a number of published comments makes an extremely valid observation and points us in the direction of something I was unaware of from 1999 :-

"I seem to recall that the architect of the privatisation of probation services was the former Labour Home Secretary Jack Straw who back in 1999 was busy centralising the local probation services into a national organisation (NOMS) converting local probation officers into civil servants. It was reported back on 13 September 1999, in the Independent* that Straw was planning to privatise the service, though it was the Conservatives would later implement this Labour plan." *see article:

Straw plans to privatise probation

JACK STRAW, the Home Secretary, is drawing up plans to privatise the Probation Service if standards of supervising offenders are not improved, insiders have warned.

Senior Probation Service staff believe that the "very existence" of the service is threatened, with Mr Straw ready to contract out its work to private security companies such as Group 4, and to professionals such as psychologists, teachers and healthcare workers.

The alarm was sounded by probation chiefs in Avon, after "grave" warnings from Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Probation that the service there was badly underperforming.

In a letter to staff, the Avon probation chiefs said: "We should be in no doubt that time is running out for the service nationally and if we fail to deliver the Government's agenda then it is clear that the Home Secretary will find alternative means of addressing his crime reduction policy."

The letter, signed by Roger Poynton, the acting Chief Probation Officer, Jean Findlay, the chairwoman of the Avon Probation Committee, and her two vice-chairman, states that Mr Straw may turn to private contractors rather than the modest changes to the service previously discussed. It states: "We ... would predict that his legislation will be of far greater significance, not tinkering with amalgamations, 100 per cent funding and civil servant CPOs [Chief Probation Officers], but more radically creating alternative means of supervising offenders in the community."

The Probation Service is working with the Home Office to become a nationally run service, funded entirely from central government, with chief officers employed as civil servants. But the Avon letter said: "The Home Secretary is already on record regarding his view that a range of alternative professionals (psychologists, teachers, health-care workers) should be involved with offenders and the prospect of contracting-out major sectors of work under the Government's Best Value initiative is a very real possibility."

The warning follows a visit to Avon by inspectors who "castigated" the service for its "appalling record on service delivery". The probation chiefs admitted that "vast sectors of our work are significantly below standard and to an extent that threatens our very existence".

Last night the Home Office said "nothing is ruled in or out" regarding the options for modernising the service.

Harry Fletcher, a spokesman for the National Association of Probation Officers, said the service was an easy target for politicians wanting to be seen to be hard on crime. He described the leaked letter as "an extraordinary attack on the integrity of staff".

--oo00oo--

Clearly the Independent still has probation in its sights. This from today:-

Probation crisis: one person killed every three days by offenders under supervision

More than 600 reviews in six years for alleged murders by known criminals

A person is killed every three days on average by an offender on probation in England and Wales, The Independent can reveal, as the crisis in public protection deepens. The litany of errors leading up to the murder of Zara Aleena by serial offender Jordan McSweeney has shone a spotlight on dangerous gaps in the monitoring of people leaving prison.

McSweeney had been released just nine days before brutally attacking and killing the aspiring lawyer as she walked home in east London, and a review by the probation watchdog warned that the horrific case was “symptomatic of much broader issues”.

Figures published by HM Inspectorate of Probation show that 622 reviews were triggered over alleged murders by reoffenders over the six years to 2020. Some culprits were ultimately acquitted, or convicted of lesser crimes such as manslaughter, while the Ministry of Justice recorded 415 cases of people being found guilty of a “serious further offence of murder” between 2014-15 and 2019-20.

More recent figures have not yet been published, but will include the murder of Aleena and the 2021 Killamarsh killings, which saw violent offender Damien Bendall murder three children and his pregnant partner.

Justin Russell, the chief inspector of probation, told a press conference last week: “It’s a core function of the probation service to protect the public from these risks, and they’re not getting it right at the moment.” He warned that until standards improve, it is “impossible to say that the public is being properly protected”, adding: “It could happen again.” Mr Russell said heavy workloads and high vacancy rates are making it impossible to properly monitor released prisoners, with the unit overseeing Aleena’s killer having had less than two-thirds of the required staff last year.

Many probation workers blame the chaos in staff recruitment and retention on underinvestment by the government, following the botched part-privatisation of the probation service in 2014 and the decision to renationalise it five years later. Ian Lawrence, general secretary of the Napo probation union, said staff “welcomed the return of probation back to state control but didn’t see the investment” needed.

He told The Independent that although work to recruit more staff is under way, many are “packing it in” within just weeks of arrival because of high workloads and the harrowing demands of the job. “The system needs sharpening. To say we’re giving staff training is all well and good, but [not] if they’ve got 75 cases on their books and they barely have time to go to the toilet,” Mr Lawrence added. 

“The government has failed to invest properly in the systems we need to ensure that mistakes like [that which led to Aleena’s murder] don’t happen again ... our members are working hard to protect the public.” He called for improvements in the way prisons provide information to probation workers on people coming up for release, and for police to act faster to arrest people who have broken licence conditions so they can be sent back to jail.

Napo had requested a meeting with justice secretary Dominic Raab, who is currently embroiled in allegations of bullying civil servants, but the task was passed to a junior minister. Mr Lawrence will put his demands to the prisons and probation minister, Damian Hinds, at a meeting on Monday. “The government needs to repair this service to the level it was at before it was part-privatised,” he said. “I’m not saying mistakes didn’t happen, but nothing like the scale of what’s been seen since.”

The Ministry of Justice said it had recruited 2,500 trainee probation officers over the past two years and would bring in another 500 by the end of March. A spokesperson added: “Serious further offences are incredibly rare, and the justice secretary has set out plans to overhaul the parole process and ensure prisoners who still pose a risk are kept behind bars. “We are investing £155m more into probation to deliver more robust supervision, reduce caseloads, and recruit thousands more staff to keep the public safe.”