Look Where 'tick box' Got Us

Thanks go to the reader for reminding us of this from the Guardian 10th June 2009 and the aftermath of the notorious Sonnex case. Of course it's from the days when probation had autonomy and a distinct voice:-

Is the probation service in crisis?

In the wake of the Dano Sonnex case, we get insider views from four senior figures within the beleagured probation service

Diana Fulbrook, chief officer, Wiltshire probation area and public protection lead, Probation Chiefs Association

I think London is a special case simply because of the size and scale of the area. We manage some very difficult and dangerous people, so at any point in time something can go wrong – occasionally because we didn't do our job properly, but more often because, despite what we do, offenders choose to act in that way. You cannot eliminate risk but you can contribute to managing and controlling it in many cases.

Resources are a key issue. The challenge for chief officers is to make the right decisions to manage those resources to best effect. There are severe financial pressures on the service, which means we are unable to recruit as many people as we would like. Retention is not so much of a problem in my area but it is in others. Morale can be pretty low among staff because of uncertainty and negative public opinion, and a case like this doesn't help.

The death of Baby P has exacerbated the recruitment and retention issues for social workers, and there's a danger that cases such as the Sonnex case could make this a real issue for the probation service too.

Unlike prisons, we can't close the doors to cases. We have to take whatever the courts give us, and managing demands is a real challenge.

We are very successful at managing high-risk offences. The majority of serious reoffending comes from those who are medium risk, so it is absolutely essential we get better at assessing and managing this.

Resources follow risk, so everything depends on getting that first assessment right. Our resources dictate that we therefore concentrate more on the most risky group of people. That means there will be some in the medium group of offenders who have got the potential to commit very serious offences. It comes down to being able to spot this early enough to move them into a higher risk category and manage them accordingly. Sometimes this is easy to spot but at other times it is not.

If you want to have fewer people in prison, you do need to grow the capacity of the probation service longer term to manage people effectively in the community, and you need the public to have confidence in our ability to do this.

Our fear as chief officers is that cases like this one undermine that confidence, and that without longer-term committed funding and growth, the probation service will be increasingly unable to deliver the level of public protection required.

Dino Peros, national vice-chair of Napo (the trade union and professional association for family court and probation staff), Devon and Cornwall probation area

People employed in the public sector feel really angry, extremely betrayed and let down by the Labour government, and what will likely be seen as failing criminal justice policy.

We are looking at 25% overall budget cuts in the south-west. Our projected cuts are £1m this financial year, £1.5m next and a further £1m by April 2011. These cuts will potentially create more cases like Sonnex. It is an unacceptable risk to take.

Caseloads in Devon and Cornwall are managed through a workload weighting system. If an officer has too much work, their line manager will sign off on what work can be left or taken away from the practitioner.

Cases are often very complex and officers need proper time to deal with the unique circumstances of each one. No two people are the same and all have different assessed needs. What is obvious is that if you decrease resources, and that means staffing, then inevitably it will increase the workload.

By doing that, you compound the problems and increase the risk. The public won't take long to work out that stretched staff, lack of resources and an over-burdened, target-driven culture is not tough on crime.

There is nothing consoling in the words we hear too often these days that we will draw from lessons learned. What will it really take for politicians to stop playing roulette with people's lives? The system failed.

Steve Collett, vice-chair, Probation Chiefs Association, and chief officer, Cheshire probation area

The difference between London Probation and the other 41 areas in England and Wales is the scale. It is 10 times the size of my area in Cheshire. London's budget is £150m, Cheshire's £15m, yet Cheshire is a medium-sized area. London has about 20% of the total workload of the National Probation Service, ie 40,000 cases out of the 200,000 we supervise.

London Probation is facing a number of similar issues to other public sector agencies in the capital that set it apart from most other areas:

1) An increasingly diverse population.

2) A more transient population: an offender without a fixed address who commits a further offence, for example, is much more difficult to track down.

3) Recruiting staff is much more difficult.

4) It is subject to far greater scrutiny because it commands the greatest proportion of resources and is much closer to the seat of power, Westminster, and the Ministry of Justice.

Caseloads are only one part of the job. Probation officers also write court reports and conduct prison visits. In Cheshire, probation officers typically have 40-60 cases comprising higher-risk offenders among their total caseload. It's relatively easy in Cheshire to take contingency action to make sure workloads are not excessive.

The problem for probation is that we have no control over the inflow of work. This is largely determined by the courts and the sentences handed down. For example, community payback is a very popular sentence with magistrates and judges in low-level offences, where before they might have historically handed out fines. This means we have to divert resources, which could have been spent on medium-risk offenders.

We have been very successful at reducing reoffending. Some 59% of those sent to prison for less than a year will be reconvicted within 12 months of their release as compared with a reconviction rate of 38% for those given community orders.

When things have gone wrong, this is usually due to poor risk assessment and risk management decisions, but in circumstances and an environment that may not be entirely supportive. Typically, it will be the result of a combination of factors that may include a lack of support and good line management, inefficient resources or IT systems.

Geoff Dobson, a former chief probation officer and deputy director of the Prison Reform Trust

Many questions have been raised in the media about pressures on probation staff, and the performance of police and probation in dealing with recalls to prison. At a time when we are locking up more and more children and young people, this examination of the time Dano Sonnex spent in custody from the age of 17 raises a number of concerns about the effectiveness of the young offender estate such as: why was a highly disturbed young man transferred frequently within the young offender estate, preventing continuity of care and attention; what was the impact of repeated periods of separation; and how did he manage to access drugs so readily throughout the early years of his custodial sentence?

As we seek to learn lessons from this horrendous and, thankfully, unusual case, it is important that we do not overlook the years that Dano Sonnex had already spent in our custodial system.

--oo00oo--

Lets contrast the above with something contributed on here from yesterday:-

Just sent this to NAPO. I don’t expect anything back, but enjoyed the vent.

I wanted to write to you, my union, to express my utter frustration, anger and huge regret at the state of the probation service and the terrible impact on victims of the inevitable SFOs that are starting to come to the public’s attention.

May I ask what is your strategy for moving forward to really engage employers to move to improve the experience of operational staff and stop the misery?

From my perspective the response by the MOJ to recent events looks like “same old”. In my 30 years of working in the service I fear what is coming down the line is another political sticking plaster on a weeping wound. “If we make them look over here, no one will notice that nothing has actually changed” more victims and more frontline careers in tatters.

I am begging the Union to push back on any proposed “MOJ solutions” that equate to bolt ons in the maelstrom of probation data bases. There are no answers there to the problems we are facing.

History tells us that is where they will go hunting. It therefore raises the question do we really need additions to ever lengthening drop down lists and yet more questions in OASys? All that appears to do is spew out stats and keep operational staff on the task of recording, not necessarily doing. The employers actually need to interrogate data bases and recording tools. Strip out time wasting tasks, endless inputting and inputting.

We need time for one to one contact with those we supervise and meaningful multi agency working in the local area and the communities we live and work. Activities that actually aid monitoring, control and skilling up offenders.

If yet again, operational staff are instructed to do more IT tasks I would encourage NAPO to tell it’s members not to engage. Instead ask the employer what their contingency plan is as the main plan could well fail.

Also with spending cuts coming down the line again, perhaps NAPO could encourage the service to consider moving “experienced” seconded staff back into operational posts for a time to help stabilise the relentless failings of the service? Invest in the front line, start getting the basics right again and stop the ridiculousness of the facade that all is going so well we can afford to have significant numbers of qualified staff seconded into non operational roles.

--oo00oo--

The Sonnex case examined in Centre for Crime and Justice Studies:-

The conveyor belt of criminal justice: the Sonnex case, risk, and de-skilling in probation

Wendy Fitzgibbon explores recent high profile probation cases

The murder of two French students last year by Dano Sonnex is the latest of several recent cases involving murder committed by an individual on parole licence for previous violent offending. Some of the key issues have already been given a public airing: resource pressures in probation, and the failure of multi-agency and risk assessment procedures.

Coming so soon after the high profile ‘Baby P’ case in Haringey, the Sonnex case has, despite the differences (a social services child protection issue, where none of the adults concerned were on parole), inevitably reinforced a popular image of institutional failure. As with Baby P, the high profile ministerial response forced the resignation of senior managers. Justice Secretary Jack Straw claimed probation was not using its resources effectively and threatened David Scott, Chief Officer for the London Probation Area with a ‘performance capability review’ (Straw, 2009). Scott resigned and hit back accusing Straw of hiding behind lack of clarity about what was an acceptable workload for individual probation officers.

The London Borough of Lewisham where Sonnex was supervised was found to be in ‘meltdown’ and severely lacking in resources. Sonnex was supervised by a probation officer who was inexperienced, and only qualified for nine-months, with a caseload of over 127.Ten years ago the caseload for such an officer would have been around 30-35. Moreover only one out of the 22 probation officers in Lewisham had more than two years experience. The official inquiry reports into the Sonnex case noted high sickness rates due to stress and anxiety and missing risk assessments in 650 out of the 2,500 cases supervised by the Lewisham office.

There was confusion over the risk of harm levels regarding Sonnex. He was placed as a tier three (i.e. medium) risk when on probation supervision. This assessment should in hindsight have placed him at a higher level of risk as some other databases (OASys – Offender Assessment System) consistently assessed his behaviour as a high risk. This had implications for resource allocation and the progress of the Multi-Agency Public Protection Panel (MAPPA) referral. This panel is made up of interested agencies (probation, social services, police, mental health services) who meet to discuss and manage cases referred to them on the basis of assessment of high risk of harm to others. Although referred to MAPPA this case was not followed up due to administrative errors and the level of assessed risk (medium) recorded. Neither were other incidents, which should have changed Sonnex’s risk level, notably his attack on a pregnant woman and her partner to extort money. These were not included in the risk evaluation due to the charges being dropped but, as it later transpired, this was due to victim intimidation. Finally, when the order did go out for a recall to prison, the police delayed acting on it and a police officer has been disciplined for this.

But if the discussion remains at the level of case loads and interagency risk assessments, important as these issues are, more systemic problems indicative of a more general malaise in the probation service will remain unexamined. By far the most important of these is the issue of deskilling of probation officers combined with an automated ‘tick box’ approach to risk assessment.

Sonnex was in fact in many ways a model client – his attendance at supervision meetings was punctual; he was well-turned out and cooperative. He ticked all the boxes. Problems might have been identified earlier if he had been more closely scrutinised by a more experienced probation officer. But the combined effect of resource constraints and the new division of labour in the probation service, has led to a concentration of skilled and experienced probation officers on very high risk cases while low or medium risk offenders (80 per cent of all offenders) are (according to the goals elaborated in Home Office circular PC08/2007) to be supervised by the newer grade of semi-skilled Probation Service Officers (PSOs).

This allocation of cases on the basis of tick-box risk assessments continues despite research by Ansbro (2006) and Craissati and Sindall (2009) showing that low/medium risk offenders can go on to commit serious further offences and that risk is a dynamic evolving phenomena. The predominance of ‘tick-box’ risk assessment tools such as OASys sustains management belief that risk assessment and the management of the majority of offenders on probation can be effectively undertaken by deskilled operatives.

Robinson and Burnett (2007) found that older skilled staff felt marginalised: like ‘dinosaurs’. They were trained to deal with the offender as a whole person in contrast to the correctional model in which the new recruits to probation are trained. Experienced, long-serving staff felt alienated from their role and distanced from the values of the new management bureaucracy.

This anxiety and stress is compounded by the concentration of work with high risk offenders within the more qualified staff group. This was also shown, in a small research study I recently undertook, (Fitzgibbon, 2009 forthcoming) to have a detrimental effect on a group of highly qualified probation officers. Asked to identify the most difficult part of working in a public protection team they all indicated the intensity of workload and pressure of scrutiny. The National Probation Audit in 2006 found that a third of sickness in the probation service was due to stress and anxiety. Oldfield and Grimshaw (2008) found that main grade staff on average worked five hours extra per week to get work finished! A clear example of this practice was the fact that the overworked probation officer supervising Sonnex had to go into the office out of hours to complete the recall papers in time, despite, ironically, the police failing to arrest Sonnex when the papers were submitted.

Oldfield and Grimshaw (2008) showed that a fall of 9 per cent in qualified staff in probation over a five-year period was accompanied by a 35 per cent rise in workload. They also found that there had been a 77 per cent increase in the recruitment of unqualified staff, and a parallel 70 per cent increase in management grades during this period.

Qualified staff feel that their ‘professional territory’ has been encroached upon by unqualified staff. They were overwhelmed by ‘change fatigue’ regarding the pace and number of changes their role as a probation officer has been subjected to (Robinson and Burnett, 2007).This has led to rapid staff turnover. Lewisham is an example of this with their high proportion of inexperienced staff.

The lack of morale and professional identity is heightened by confusion regarding the future of probation training and the probation service in general. The drawing up of the proposed new probation training qualification has been a complex and lengthy process, which many fear will either lead to a shortening of the training or a reduction of the academic content or both. Already Treadwell (2006) feels the ‘core curriculum’ is too narrow and not academically focused enough.

Justice minister Claire Ward in July 2009 said the rate of serious further offence convictions was low at 0.3 per cent last year, and paid tribute to frontline officers. She said this was due to ‘hard work and dedication of probation officers, who deal on the frontline with some of the most dangerous and unpredictable people in our society’ (Ward, 2009).This was following the publication of official figures showing that criminals on probation committed more than 1,000 serious crimes over the last two years, including nearly one murder a week in England and Wales.

The vast majority of serious further offences are committed by offenders given a community order by the court having been convicted of less serious offences. In most cases, nothing in their previous offending histories has indicated that they would be capable of such serious offences. (my italics). (Ward, 2009)

This final statement would again support the fact that having unqualified or inexperienced officers supervising offenders of medium to low risk is inadequate and fails to recognise research and statistical findings.

When I conducted interviews with newly qualified probation officers in 2008 I found them to be more concerned with managerial processes, targets, and tasks than with the offender or their relationship with the offender. Again this could indicate distancing of practitioners from their offenders, allowing the possibility of not accurately reading or following up worrying risky behaviour or seeing risk in a contextualized way.

More cases like Sonnex may just be waiting to happen.

Wendy Fitzgibbon