It's all gone a bit quiet recently, no doubt as we all enjoy the election shenanigans and civil service purdah is in full swing. There will shortly be a new government and as it's most unlikely to be a Tory one, now is the time to be giving serious thought and voice to doing things differently. As this fairly recent article from the Irish Times shows, they do over there and we could over here.
‘We deal with horrific crimes. We have to consider the victims but we have to look after ourselves too’What I Do: Probation officer Jessie Flood on misconceptions about the role and influencing positive change
I’m a probation officer on the homeless team in Dublin. I’ve met a lot of people who don’t know that mostly all probation officers are social workers.
There’s a lot of misconceptions around what we do. Many people think we are gardaí or that we work directly for the court. We are officers of the court, but it’s important to know that we are social-work trained, and a lot of our work is to support people to get their lives back on track and ensuring that they are reducing their risk of reoffending.
Some of my family and friends don’t understand why I do the job I do. I’m from a small(ish) town in Co Wexford but enjoy living in the city, and getting to meet people who want to change and don’t know how.
I was obsessed with trying to figure out why people got into crime and addiction from a young age. For my Junior Cert art project, the theme was “the big clean-up”, and instead of doing it on a natural disaster like the rest of my class, I did it on cleaning up your life after drug addiction, a figurine depicting life before and after rehab. I thought I wanted to study criminology, but while speaking with my guidance counsellor, he mentioned probation. I hadn’t a clue what it was until he went through what it and social work involved, and so I studied social work with the sole purpose of getting into probation.
Even people who receive a probation order in court often don’t know what we do. Yes, we have to bring people back to court if they’re not complying with their order or the conditions the judge set out, but for the most part, we’re there to help and influence positive change, and to listen to and support them.
A lot of people we work with have been through an awful lot in their lives and, as their probation officer, we act as an agent of change for them, trying to do as much as we can to address the factors that got them to where they are today, be that addiction or mental health.
Living in a homeless hostel can be really institutionalising. Residents must ask permission for everything, and it’s really important for our team to bear that in mind when we’re setting expectations for our clients. They’re sharing rooms with other people, may not have slept well the night before, there’s a lot of intersectionality when it comes to their criminogenic behaviours. We try to be an advocate for them and point them in the right direction.
We have conversations with people who may never have thought about why they committed a crime in the first place, working in conjunction with community-based organisations to give clients as much of a wraparound service as possible. But our clients put in the work; we just facilitate it.
Probation is community based. We have teams in the prisons too but would get referrals directly from the court that would request an assessment or report, or either request that we supervise someone in the community instead of a custodial sentence or after completion of a custodial sentence.
If someone has really challenging mental health difficulties, being locked in a cell is not the most reparative place for them to beWe come across all types of offending, from minor offences up to murder and sexual offences, and as social workers we’re always open to the fact that people can change. We must hold hope for them because they often don’t have hope themselves. It’s a challenging job but it can be really rewarding when you see people get out of the cycle of criminality and start to turn their lives around.
We rely a lot on our case management plans. We meet with the clients and plan for them to address their risk factors in the community, and work with other agencies in their life to make sure that someone’s doing what they’re supposed to, or that they’re doing okay. There can be a lot of triggers that could cause someone to relapse or stop taking their medication. It’s about keeping an overall lens on it, that we’re not the sole contact person for our clients either.
It’s a lot of diary management, phone calls, sending appointment letters ... But it’s flexible. If someone is unwell and can’t come into the office, I’ll meet them in their hostel, or day programmes, or work. It depends on how far along they are and how much they’ve progressed. I’d meet most clients weekly, but the minimum in-person contact would be once a month. It depends on the risk that person poses to society.
We go into the prisons to prepare clients for getting out into the community, because it’s daunting coming out of custody and going back into the chaos of homelessness and the unknown.
They don’t know what hostel they’ll be in, who they’re sharing the room with or the level of drug or alcohol use that might be there.
It’s really important for us to look after ourselves, too. We hear a lot of traumatic stories and deal with horrific crimes in some instances, and we have to consider the victims of our cases. We’re only as good at our job as we are to ourselves.
We must balance the difference between how much work we can do with someone in the community and how effective a custodial sentence would be for them. If someone has really challenging mental health difficulties, being locked in a cell is not the most reparative place for them to be.
I think judges are starting to weigh that up and see a lot of work can be done in the community. But probation is not a get-out-of-jail-free card. If they aren’t doing what they’re supposed to, they can go back to prison, and that’s what we’re trying to avoid.
In conversation with Ellen O’Donoghue
https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/jun/04/the-radical-changes-that-are-needed-to-fix-the-failings-of-our-prison-system
ReplyDeleteLetter to Guardia:-
DeleteThe radical changes that are needed to fix the failings of our prison system
It is undeniable that the justice system is in complete disrepair (The Guardian view on prison overcrowding: a justice system in meltdown, 24 May) and that both victims and the accused deserve better. But the answer is neither to develop a more “efficient” way of processing offenders nor more prison-building.
Sadly, in the context of a general election, politicians of any stripe are even less likely to admit the truths we all know, not least from a stream of reports and recommendations from the prisons inspectorate, investigation and monitoring boards, reviews, inquiries, coroners’ reports, and testimony from prisoners and their families. That is: there is no evidence base for the claims that prisons keep “us” safe; nor that they deter; nor that they rehabilitate.
Further, what we do know from all official reports is that prisons are dangerous sites of demoralisation, degradation, self-harm and death. They house people who, for the most part, have been failed by the state, those who in fact require support in terms of housing, employment, addiction and mental health. Prisons and the extent of our prison population are a national shame. The perilous state of prisons and their failure will only be stopped by a radical change in sentencing policy, a halt to prison-building, dramatic reduction in the prison population and investment in communities, community services and radical alternatives to custody.
Deborah Coles Executive director, Inquest, Joe Sim Emeritus professor of criminology, Liverpool John Moores University, Steve Tombs Emeritus professor of criminology, the Open University
If probation is not about change and rehabilitation it's doomed to always be just an extention of the prison service.
DeletePeople argue that they want to be free from HMPPS whilst at the same time arguing that they don't want to embrace the social work ethos that was the foundation that probation was built on.
You can't have both.
'Getafix
https://insidetime.org/newsround/labour-says-tories-have-broken-prison-system/
DeleteLabour’s shadow justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood has accused the Conservatives of having “broken the criminal justice system”, meaning “vulnerable victims pay the price”.
DeleteReferring to the Government’s 70-day emergency early release scheme, the End of Custody Supervised Licence (ECSL) scheme, she added: “Dangerous abusers and high-risk offenders are being let out of prison early under a cloak of secrecy. This could have dire consequences for public safety, with the probation service having to rush their release and struggling to keep survivors safe.
“They have failed to build the prison places required. Labour would change planning regulations to prioritise building new jails. We will move faster than this government on changes to planning so we can increase prison capacity.”
Hinting that Labour might act on sentence inflation, which has seen average sentence lengths grow longer year by year, and which experts say is the root cause of the current capacity crisis in jails, Mahmood also said: “You have to crack that tough nut of rehabilitation. If you’re doing better on rehabilitation, I think you can then think more creatively about the best use of your sentencing powers — in the context that you’re still cutting crime and reducing the number of victims. But there’s no doubt that, for some years to come, the justice system is in a bad way, and it is going to be extremely difficult.”
Labour released two sets of figures last week, uncovered in official data by party researchers, to illustrate aspects of the crisis in jails. They showed that prison and probation staff took the equivalent of 774 years off sick for mental health reasons in 2023, while the Ministry of Justice had spent more than £500,000 on “heavy duty equipment as a last ditch to prepare for a summer of riots”, including anti barricade door jacks.
The Ministry of Justice said that the security equipment purchased had been essential, adding that “we make no apologies for keeping our employees safe”.
Steve Gillan, general secretary of the Prison Officers’ Association (POA), said: “The prison crisis has taken its toll on POA members, with increased violence against them, an increase of prisoner drug taking, suicides, self-harm, and large-scale incidents. It is no wonder, given the pressure they are under with less staff and more prisoners, that it is having an effect on mental well-being.”
The POA has warned they it may take legal action if the crisis becomes so bad that overcrowded prisons are in breach of safety laws. Gillan added: “The last thing, though, that we need is political parties posturing. What we need are solutions to the crisis.”
From Twitter:-
ReplyDelete"Unfortunately true a CJS that has collapsed. NPS front line staff on their knees, staff writing OAYSIS on clients they wont supervise under their new mandatory guidance, what a waste. If the POs aren't supervising them then who is? No body."
From Twitter:-
ReplyDelete"The prison service was actually more helpful to my OH than probation have been since release. Probation have done absolutely nothing at all to rehabilitate."
That's strange because most people who work in Probation would see it the other way around. Prisons have primacy in most cases and are very good at shifting the risk onto probation as soon as possible. The ECSL has only increased their ability to talk down to probation in the community. These early releases are clearly not risk-informed and there is no rationale given and the prisons hide behind it using the dreaded Annex that community probation has to fill in whilst the clock is ticking until very short notice release. Resettlement teams, which are costed and funded, are next to useless but remain in the prison for giggles and show. I've had a prison tell me they don't resettle high risk offenders but house them, which makes no sense. They don't alert probation to changes of release dates and ignore pleas from probation to have offenders undertake offence-focused work. This offender (previous post) has had a unique experience if prisons helped him more than probation.Prisons do the bare minimum and then shove the risk onto probation and that's been made much easier because there's been no time to undertake offence-focused work and resettlement (they have access to the internet- so no excuses about local this or that) before countdown to yet another early release which has been a pick-n-mix of all kinds of risk levels, despite the public being told 'no high risk ECSL'. Why can't they just concentrate on the low and medium risk cases; be more risk-informed when these cases are chosen; be accountable in the form of a rationale; not hide behind an Annex which is the obligation of probation to deal with, and just be a bit more team orientated instead of thinking they're the kings of the castle and we're the dirty rascals. Prisons need to do and be much better. Probation is damaged and broken but as we get to little to no funding and it's harder to manage offenders in the community, frankly on what we get, which are crumbs, we perform miracles. Perhaps the £46K a year they save on shoving/imposing ECSL cases onto probation can be used to sort out some of the issues in probation. Just a thought. Oh, that's passed. Back to reality.
DeleteUnfortunately, you cannot run an efficient and effective public service when staff are routinely expected to work above capacity for an appalling wage and are expected to fill the gap where other public services are failing.
ReplyDeleteProbation reset has created a very problematic logical fallacy for the service:
ReplyDeleteIf it is the case that 1) probation supervision is not necessary for risk management or rehabilitation in the last third of sentence then 2) why does there also remain an assumption that disengagement from probation in the first 2/3rds , in the absence of further offending, means risk is inevitably assumed to be unmanageable and breach/recall actions initiated.