Time For Probation Reform

With the new government getting to grips with the many problems left by the previous administration, this recent article in the Times highlights the head of steam that's building for urgent probation reform:-   

Plans to re-professionalise probation service are urgently needed

Staff spend a disproportionate amount of time in front of computers instead of engaging with offenders, writes Ian Fox

Any analysis of the complex arrangements and relationships that form our justice system should include a debate on how to deploy, manage, resource and support the probation service.

This issue has never been more necessary — the service is in a parlous condition as a consequence of the last government’s mismanagement and neglect. The increase in the size of the prison population and its apparent imperviousness to attempts by successive justice and home secretaries to reverse the trend is the elephant in the justice system’s waiting room.

Courts in England and Wales proportionately send more adults to custody than other western European countries, yet few commentators have included the role of the probation service in their analyses of this crisis, or rehabilitation per se.

In his in-tray as a new justice minister, James Timpson has to consider both a strategic review of probation governance and the opportunities offered by devolving both youth justice and probation to the Welsh government. Any terms of reference for the former should take into account the learning from both the disastrous merger of prisons and probation and the privatisation debacle that has left the service with only a vestige of its former professional reputation, visibility, respect and experience base.

The traditional top-down command and control structure in prisons has gradually built virtual walls around a service whose social justice and rehabilitation ethos is all but lost in a blizzard of processes and algorithms, reducing critical judgments to paper exercises. Consequently, staff spend a disproportionate amount of time in front of computers and in offices instead of engaging in valuable face-to-face contact with offenders and their families.

Plans to re-professionalise probation are urgently needed to separate it organisationally from the prison service in England, with its own director-general and governance arrangements that are geographically coterminous with police force areas, with a strategic focus on locally commissioned and delivered services. Relationships with the magistrates’ and crown courts also need to be reset.

Given that the Welsh government already has responsibility for employment, housing, education, and drugs and alcohol services, devolving probation and youth justice heralds the prospect of a structurally joined-up approach to crime reduction services in the principality.

With more than 100 years of history and once described as “the jewel in the crown” of the justice system, UK probation expertise was until a decade ago exported to many countries in the form of community programmes, services to courts and victims, and local partnerships. For the service to regain its rightful place at the heart of our justice system, the role of probation in delivering social justice and rehabilitation must be incorporated into the terms of reference of forthcoming reviews.

Ian Fox is a visiting fellow at the University of South Wales and a retired chief officer and regional manager of probation