Rubbish In - Rubbish Out

A couple of comments on here recently by a magistrate made me realise that it might be instructive if I explain how court Pre Sentence Report's are written nowadays, or should I more correctly say 'generated'. Because of course they are all produced from OASys, but this has never been explained either to judges or magistrates. Just for clarification, I am talking about what are now termed Standard Delivery Reports for either the Crown or Magistrates Court.

Many years ago these were called Social Enquiry Reports which I think pretty well described what they were about. Following a guilty plea or finding of guilt, the judge or magistrates requested a report from a Probation Officer before passing sentence. They wanted to know something about the person, their home situation, any problems, why the offence was committed, what the likelihood of repetition might be and finally a suggestion as to a possible sentence.

An absolutely core part of the job requiring a high level of skill, insight, perception and communication ability in being able to convey an often complex story in a cogent fashion and all in about three pages of A4. I have to say one of the best parts of the job in my view. But before I leap straight in, I need to explain how they used to be written and before the introduction of OASys, the Offender Assessment System, first in paper format and then in electronic form, the so called E-OASys. 

All reports start in the same way, namely at least one interview. This is normally conducted in the office, or in an interview room at the local remand prison if the defendant is remanded in custody. In the case of the former, normally three weeks are allowed and in the case of the latter, normally two weeks. An additional home visit used to be the norm, but this has generally fallen by the wayside. An essential pre-requisite is a full copy of the prosecution disclosure, including statements and a complete print out of previous convictions from the Police National Computer. In complex cases involving any areas of concern, it would be my practice to conduct additional interviews and contact other agencies with knowledge of the defendant. This not only serves to test the person's motivation, it also adds to the report being more authoritative.

In the very early days, reports were handwritten or possibly dictated to a shorthand typist in the luxury of your own office, but for many years my practice was to use a small portable dictating machine, typically whilst pacing around a quiet interview room. Once transcribed, it would be corrected and tweaked, ready for signing and sending off to court. There were a number of forms to complete, which increased over the years of course, but essentially that was it. A skilled officer, in an emergency, could complete the whole task from beginning to end in about two hours. Many a time I have been dictating either long into the night at home, or very early in the morning before dropping the tapes off at work. Productivity was high in my view and each report was prepared with pride in a job well done.

Things started to go wrong when the paper version of OASys came along. A massive document amounting to some forty pages, it had to be filled in before you started writing the PSR. There were seemingly never ending questions to be answered about education, employment, drug use, alcohol, relationships, accommodation, offending, mental health etc etc etc, but all linked to possible risks the person might pose. To be absolutely frank, when introduced I could not believe that no thought appeared to have been given as to how long it would take to fill in. I once asked the Chief at an open forum if she had any idea how long it took to fill in and she admitted she didn't. "How long does it take Jim?" she asked. "About three hours" I replied to gasps of "and the rest!" So at one stroke the time to write a PSR more than doubled and our productivity halved. Not surprisingly, for busy probation officers, the temptation was to write the PSR first and sometimes forget to do the damned OASys. Disciplinary action followed of course. 

But even this option disappeared when E-OASys was introduced. Now you have to be tied to the damned computer in order to fill the electronic version in and it does not let you start on the PSR until it has been completed fully. In my experience this takes between two and three hours even for an experienced officer and in the process numbs the brain completely. There's no longer any option of working at home. You have to complete the process in a noisy open-plan office, in between seeing clients. As a consequence, there is precious little intellectual energy left in order to move on to the PSR itself. But this is the really clever bit - you push a button labelled 'create report.'  

I believe there is a saying in computing that goes something like 'rubbish in - rubbish out.' If you are a sentencer, ponder on that statement next time you are reading a full SDR. As you try to make sense of it, consider the following:- 'why does it seem so formulaic?' or 'that's the fifth time the author has told me they have a drug problem' or 'it does seem repetitative' or 'it doesn't seem to say anything constructive' or 'surely there's a word missing here?' or 'that doesn't make sense' or 'I'm sure that contradicts what it said earlier on.' You see, no matter how careful you've been in completing the OASys in full grammatically correct sentences and not text messages, the computer still has difficulty welding all the information together into a coherent, intelligible whole. But then that shouldn't be too surprising should it? After all 'writing' is a human activity requiring a degree of intelligence.

If you are reading an SDR and any of the above appears familiar, then what you are reading is the result of a modern day computer-generated OASys PSR, complete with a silly little graph or chart. All reports have to be completed in this way, but it's something probation management have been loathe to explain to sentencers for some reason. It might possibly be because of another little annoying aspect of the damned system - the inability to make any corrections because OASys locks the document once completed. I cannot tell you how frustrating it is to be a Court Duty Officer, realising there are major errors in a report, but powerless to correct them because it's locked. Pre-OASys, last minute alterations were easily made at court on a remote computer terminal - but not any more, so reports are regularly submitted riddled with wrong or misleading information in addition to missing or mispelled words.

Now before anyone is tempted to say 'oh our reports aren't like that'  I will explain why that is. Officers like myself, who might have been around for some time and believe in doing a good professional job for the Courts and the benefit of our clients, at the point when the report has been computer-generated, throw it away and start again. 

Can you see why so many of us are stressed and depressed? The work load has doubled for conscientious officers who take pride in the job. No one likes filling in pointless bureaucratic forms for no purpose, and OASys does not even deliver the sound assessment of risk it was designed to do. As a method of writing PSR's, it beggars belief that people of sound mind thought it was a good idea. How can a computer be expected to write a report that makes sense, but more importantly make a cogent and convincing argument for a particular course of action? Well the answer is simple. It can't of course. Management have slowly begun to realise this and hence the now widespread use of vastly inferior Fast Delivery Reports. You see the real benefit of FDR's is that they don't require OASys in order to be completed.