But I’m not “indifferent” - my interest is simply in seeing Probation work done well; I don’t like seeing it done not well. Do I like the present TR arrangements? – No. (Were previous arrangements perfect? – No.) Are the arrangements going to be changed by this Government before 2020, or even by an alternative Government before or after 2020? – I can’t see it. So what is still achievable in terms of doing Probation work well in the meantime?
As Chief Inspector I did see, and reported, some excellent work being done under the various ‘old’ arrangements, and I saw some pretty shoddy stuff too. Now, under TR, I’ve little doubt that it’s tough for many practitioners, especially with nDelius and some doubtful management practices, but recent inspection reports show that good practice is certainly still being carried out some of the time. So although I wouldn’t have chosen the current arrangements (understatement!) I have some idea about how I would make it work well/better. I have written elsewhere about how to make this happen– see my website http://ambridges.wix.com/mysite - but for this blog I’ll just focus on the practitioner perspective, and on one element in particular this time, picking up on March’s discussion on this website about acceptable v unacceptable absences.
The key thing I would ask you as a practitioner to do is to focus on achieving three things (the Three Purposes of Probation), by asking yourself regularly with each case:
- “Am I holding this individual to the terms of the Court sentence or licence?” – that’s promoting compliance, and enforcing if and when needed, to Implement the Sentence
- “Am I helping this person to become less likely to reoffend in future, and how will I evidence that?” – that’s using principally constructive interventions measurably to Reduce Likelihood of Reoffending
- “Am I taking all reasonable action to protect others from harm from this individual?” – that’s using principally restrictive interventions to minimise the individual’s Risk of Harm to others – i.e. Manage Risk of Harm to others.
The next and crucial key point is that as long as you are conscientiously working towards achieving (as far as you can) each of those three purposes, then how you go about doing that is up to you. Although almost all the sets of instructions / manuals / rules / protocols that have been devised over the last thirty years have been written with the very best of intentions, often at one time by groups of enthusiastic practitioners, they simply don’t work as a way of managing frontline practice by using detailed instructions. Instead, for the skilled practitioner, planning and carrying out how each of the purposes is going to be achieved, or at least progressed, is where the individual’s initiative comes into play – it’s the rewarding part of the job. Yes, to help you there has to be training, coaching, old-fashioned supervision, and even the occasional advisory (short) guidance document, but the decisions about how you do your work are yours provided they are clearly aimed at achieving the Three Purposes.
(Incidentally, if you simply don’t agree with the aim of achieving the Three Purposes, and are not prepared to work towards them then I don’t think you can work in this service – for me it would be the bottom line of what you are being paid a salary for, whether in the public or privatised part of the service.)
Obviously there’s lots to be said about what it means to achieve the Likelihood and Risk purposes – some is already on my website – but here I will on this occasion focus on Implementing the Sentence. It struck me when reading the discussion of Acceptable and Unacceptable absences in March that the object of the whole exercise was missing. [For new readers, an officer wrote in and said that that s/he wanted to mark a third absence in a month by a current case as Unacceptable but s/he didn’t want to breach – the manager told him/her to change the absence to Acceptable.] Yes the employer had a target to achieve – to breach on second/third unacceptable absence - but the practitioner(s) didn’t own it. There wasn’t a shared understanding between employer and employee about what this piece of practice should be aiming to achieve.
My first instinctive thought at the time was one shared by one of the other contributors: surely if an absence is ‘potentially breachable’ it’s Unacceptable, and if you don’t think you should breach then by definition it must be Acceptable? But of course, as with most things in Probation practice, on reflection it’s a bit more complicated than that. I can think of at least two theoretical scenarios in which one might quite properly mark an absence Unacceptable, and then might make a separate and yet quite reasonable decision to refrain from breach action. One is the classic case of the second Unacceptable absence being in the last week of the Order/Licence, and the other is if, after the unacceptable absence, the person concerned is rushed into hospital. There may be others, but nevertheless they should be very rare, because a system of prompt breach action when required means that the service can carry out that initial breach action before the complicating factor has arisen. (Yes I know that in practice it’s a complete pain to do, especially with the current nDelius.)
However, in this particular case on this blog, it wasn’t one of those types of instances. The practitioner had phoned the person, and on that basis decided that the individual was still ‘in contact’, and that s/he therefore didn’t want to take action on the third unacceptable absence in a month. There was some online discussion about whether s/he should have chased up the person under supervision in this way, and in this and in other respects this seemed to me a not unusual case that was causing so much heat.
So let’s step back from the sets of instructions and targets and review this in the context of a Purpose to Implement the Sentence – a purpose in its own right. If the person was serving custody, the prison would be required to keep him/her locked up; if on community service, work a set number of hours (quite complicated itself at times, so we won’t go there this time); and if under supervision they should keep appointments as required. In bare terms the task for the practitioner is to set appointments for the person under supervision, behave in a way to promote compliance by the person with the appointments, and to take enforcement action if compliance is not achieved.
Most people who have never been a probation practitioner, or forgotten the experience, don’t realise just how messy this simple-sounding process can get. Unlike prison, where the constraint is directly physical (until you get to open conditions), although probation is now a sentence it is a conditional sentence: the offender is ‘subject to rules’ and a return to Court or custody is the sanction for breaking the rules. This still sounds fairly simple, but with many cases messy reality can make it really difficult for the practitioner to manage, and sets of instructions and ‘process targets’ have ultimately not helped. For me the key question, for this Purpose, is “Is this person serving their sentence?” It’s a qualitative question, requiring a series of qualitative judgements, and in each instance my main stipulation would be not to issue a whole set of instructions but to advise, “Please don’t be silly about it, as you ask yourself: Would a reasonably sane member of the public find my actions credible?” when answering each of the following questions:
1) “Have you set enough appointments?” – (This is in order to achieve the Compliance purpose; you might set additional appointments for other purposes such as to manage Risk of Harm to others.) Personally, I can’t see how any case where the Order or Licence is active could credibly be ‘serving their sentence’ if they don’t have at least one appointment every month as an absolute minimum.
2) “Has the person under supervision complied with each appointment?” - I can think of hundreds of scenarios which can complicate this: arriving late (how late?), coming early and then not waiting, coming on the wrong day, ringing up saying “I forgot, shall I come in now?” etc. As now, you are making judgements about whether a failed or mucked-about appointment is Acceptable or Unacceptable.
3) “If the person is starting to ‘slip’, what action can you take to promote compliance?” It has to be appropriate to the case – your judgement. With some, going to their home might be experienced as helpful and caring; with others, that you are a complete ‘soft touch’. Even if an absence is acceptable (and especially if unacceptable), why not set an additional appointment to make up for the one they missed? Some will become more responsive when this is done; others will for whatever reason push you further.
4) “Has the person now slipped into ‘not serving their sentence’?” Look at the pattern by this individual: Think of 100 Daily Mirror readers – members of the public who are not inherently hostile to public services - and in your head ask them the question (for example): Is a person who has without reasonable excuse failed three appointments in a month serving their sentence of the Court? Answer: Probably Not.
5) “If they’re not ‘serving their sentence’, why wouldn’t you take breach action?” The instances of this would be very rare indeed. The sanction (for Orders) is the taking them back to Court – in principle at least the Court’s action is a separate matter, so an electronic tag with Order to continue might be suitable in some cases.I’ve documented my general approach to managing Probation practice in more detail elsewhere, and it stems from my practice as Chief of Berkshire 1998-2001. It wouldn’t be everyone’s cup of tea I know, and when something similar was introduced in New Zealand at my behest in 2010 one of the ‘costs’ for practitioners was that they found they needed to make fuller entries on the case records in order to ‘account for their decisions and actions’. I should have foreseen that more quickly, but I don’t retreat now from the position of wanting to offer practitioners much more discretion about how they achieve the Three Purposes – and be accountable for that – while offering no discretion about what I believe they should be trying to achieve.
Andrew Bridges
I would have preferred to have read your views on practice and the current state of probation. Maybe something around the impact of the ongoing deprofessionalisation of probation officers, the NPS strategy to replace us with non-qualified staff and tick-box style Pre Sentence Reports, or the CRC strategy of heavily cutting staff and replacing interview rooms with American diner style areas. Instead we get the badly worded "Three Purposes of Probation" and an analysis of what I recall as a pointless discussion about enforcement. Considering TR and the recent Offender Management Act which did away with "supervision" as we knew it, maybe it would have been better to analyse whether Grayling and Gove have a view on what the purposes of probation should be, or maybe the probation chief officers that helped them do away with probation as we knew it. I've always found the HMIP idealistic about what probation practice should be, and blinkered to the climate it is practiced in. In reality, the "Three Purposes of Probation" have been displaced by TR and made impossible by the CRC drive for profits and the NPS drive for "more for less". Now the distorted purpose and culture that is forced into us is 1. Meet targets, 2. Meet targets, 3. JFDI.
ReplyDeleteAnd as I said in detail in Guest Blog 52, the probation qualification and professionalism has been slowly eroded over the past two decades. This is what the HMIP, the Probation Institute and every other "expert" seems to ignore!
DeleteAs I heard an academic recently say, the only solution for a probation service and "Work" (to truly rehabilitate) is to sever the MoJ control, to reduce the extent of privatisation and to absorb the probation officer training back into social work.
Thank you, a good read. However, as a practitioner I have never had any problem with negotiating and compromise, but I think what is becoming a huge problem is the lack of autonomy to make such decisions v dictates which feed the monster- target driven practice. I never really had any problem when targets promoted best practice, for worker and client, but the worst kind of target are those rigidly organisational or financially driven targets! CRCs are in a no win situation, they have no time to develop the kind of relationship that promotes compliance,and I must say it, positive change in people! Their employers demand staff provide a facade of respectability and integrity but their financial targets trump those of integrity and decency, so colleagues are in a no win situation and our clients confused and disenfranchised by the targets!
ReplyDeleteAn interesting blog but very simplistic and doesn't account for what's happening in probation now Those of us who endeavour to work to the aims are severely disabled by managerialism Also can't see the purpose of the prescriptive monthly minimum especially after 2 years supervision it can become counter productive
ReplyDeleteThe 'imperfections' of TR cannot be compared to previous imperfections. There is a massive difference between something being fundamentally wrong and the negatives arising out of that, and something being fundamentally cohesive with problems that can be worked on and resolved. TR creates its own unique problems which push good practice way down the list of priorities. My priorities now are carrying out insane IT tasks in order to meet targets, while the associated work which requires those old fashioned notions of thought, reflection and decision making gets neglected resulting in a rushed, poor quality outcome. OMs don't seem to have the discretion to manage their own cases resulting in Judges asking 'what does the case manager really think?'It's a pile of shit and it's those who go around telling us it isn't that seem really creepy, as if they don't have their own minds any more.
ReplyDeleteHe does not like TR. Yet in considering the previous arrangement, the bar is immediately raised and we are told they were not 'perfect'. Fairer to say that the previous arrangements were better, open to improvements and preferable to TR. But when not 'taking sides' you need a clever verbal formula to stay above the fray. If not taking sides you have to try and be even-handed.
DeleteA compelling argument why the youth justice board is not fit for purpose.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/17/officials-failed-protect-children-g4s-youth-justice-board-medway
The improvement board said YJB senior management could not even articulate what it expected of G4S in terms of delivering its contract. It also noted that Nick Hardwick, former chief inspector of prisons, described the YJB monitoring model as “weak and ineffective”.
DeletePerhaps this is most apparent in its willingness to defend G4S. The improvement board was shocked that after a damning report about Rainsbrook secure training centre last year by Hardwick, which found evidence of degrading treatment and racist comments from staff, the YJB chose to publicly endorse an alternative report written by former chief inspector of prisons, Martin Narey, that concluded “very challenging children” were treated “overwhelmingly well”. The Guardian revealed that G4S had commissioned this report, and though he stressed its “independence”, G4S paid Narey for it.
The Medway improvement board’s report also states that the YJB failed to deal with complaints from children appropriately. It cites the examples of a boy whose complaint to the YJB monitor was passed straight back to G4S staff. “Instead of supporting the monitor to resolve the problem, G4S staff told the trainee that the monitor had been talking about him, prompting the young person to confront the monitor and to avoid asking for help again.”
At the heart of the YJB’s failings is a confusing dual function – to monitor the children’s safety and to ensure contractual compliance. The report to the justice secretary states that this is further complicated because “accountability for outcomes appears to sit uneasily between G4S and the YJB.” In other words, when G4S fails the YJB fails, so it is in the interest of both parties to mask failings. (In 2014, for example, the Guardian reported that both G4S and the YJB had to pay compensation to former trainees who had been unlawfully restrained.) The report says: “There is too much emphasis on control and contract compliance and not enough on the best interests and mental wellbeing of the trainees.”
Violent restraints often happened away from CCTV cameras. But even when they occurred within the scope of cameras, the YJB monitor did not have free access to CCTV footage to review incidents, nor did she have her own login code. Thus she was reliant on someone else logging in before she could view CCTV. The report also notes that the monitor’s office faced the outside of the building instead of internally to the “Greens” where activity regularly occurs.
During our dealings with the YJB we sometimes felt it was more interested in protecting itself than the children. The YJB urged us not to name Moss and Xhemajli when asked to confirm certain aspects of their accounts. Its spokesperson said the board was concerned that “although the girls were now adults, they may not be fully prepared for the piece appearing in the media”. This was despite the fact that both women repeatedly said they wanted to go public “to help ensure that other children would not suffer as we did”. Would that the YJB had such courage and conviction.
Since the furore over Medway began, G4S, by surrendering its children’s services contacts, has questioned its role. The MoJ, by accepting fully the contents of this important report, has done likewise. Thus far, the YJB has not followed suit, although it did issue a curmudgeonly statement saying, “As a matter of urgency, we enhanced our existing monitoring.”
The report says this about the children abused by those who were employed to protect and care for them: “At the heart of all this are some of society’s most vulnerable young people, frequently victims themselves of previous experiences of abuse and neglect, whose complex needs are not being met.”
The YJB, in particular, has failed these children, and failed the society from which it assumes responsibility in loco parentis. And it appears to be unrepentant. It should be disbanded, now.
I suspect that for years Government has kept the YJB as a dog with no bite - I include the former coalition and Labour Governments,
DeleteI do not remember the detail but I did have some direct contact with them first when I was so shocked to read not just the circumstances of Adam Rockwood’s death but also his placement as a disabled boy needing care, so relatively far from his mother’s home. It took years for the reports to be finalised and there was never the public outrage that would have been reasonable - say in comparison to the outrage of the recent Hitler talk form various polticos or the nonsense from Trump, which keeps the public conversation going for days at a time. Not so poor Adam Rickwood or his family. Presumably because he had attracted the label of criminal, like all these folk dying in prison of untimely deaths partly consequential on inadequate provision of trained staff and other resources, ultimately by us the taxpayers and folk who vote the MPs into office who sustain the Government that our strange system selects.
Then when Lord McNally had done the dirty work of the Liberal Democrats and Conservative Government by introducing to parliament the offender rehabilitation Bill and along the way rejecting amendments that might have prevented the worst of the consequences of the rapid probation split and part privatisation he is appointed by Grayling as chair of the YJB. Incidentally, when questioned on the detail of the ORB or other MOJ questions by knowledgeable folk like Lords Ramsbottom and Beecham and some Conservative Baronesses whose names I cannot recall, he was incapable of giving a direct answer, frequently needing to say he would write.
McNally was replaced at the MOJ by Clegg with Simon Hughes, presumably because Hughes did not wanted a turn on the ministerial pensioned gravy train before the Lib Dems were cast into obscurity. McNally was not just thanked for doing the dirty work of the coalition he was paid off by Grayling with another job at the YJB. If he could not answer for the MOJ about Probation without a Civil Service script was he likely to understand all the nuances involved in running the YJB especially with privateers like G4S having their hands in the government purse.
No one can really be surprised at how it has all played out. Meanwhile G4S are next going to run some branch banking they hope, according to my reading this week.
It is time for some proper decent controls on public services and commercial business or our country is heading into ever greater disasters!
Typo - Adam Rickwood - NOT Rockwood - sorry.
DeleteThere is a saying I can't recall verbatim but is along the lines of 'for evil to triumph, it does not require evil men to do evil but good men to do nothing'. The trouble with 'reasoned' debates on Probation practice under TR, they fail to acknowledge the starting point which is that the profit motive in Probation and other forms of social services undermines the very purpose of those services and compromises all forms of intervention in favour of profit or the minimisation of loss.
ReplyDeleteI agree: the underlying motive is fundamental and if making a profit is fundamental then this will be secondary to the public good. And if they cannot make a profit, they will, as we have have seen in other sectors, walk away.
DeleteOn the Guest Blog, I see in the YJB case, an independent report by Martin Narey was prefered by G4S to one prepared by a public body. Is is possibly the case that our Guest blogger is at pains to preserve his independence by not taking sides because he is open to consultancy work?
This is the problem. 'Independence' is available to the highest bidder. Whilst the Government colludes with this and, equally important, whilst the media do not hold these Ministers to account, the practice of self funded advocacy will remain a corrupt force with which the money-makers will be able to justify their actions. If one remains opposed to the fundamental profit motive in CJ, the debate rages on. If we accept that 'we are where we are', the debate is ended and the dysfunction remains in place.
Delete“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
Delete“But what is liberty without wisdom and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint. Those who know what virtuous liberty is, cannot bear to see it disgraced by incapable heads, on account of their having high-sounding words in their mouths.”
“Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.”
And Mr Grayling could do a lot and did and despite every Tom, Dick and Harriette saying don't, slow down, he did anyway.
DeleteMr Berk you are !! What a load of heard enough already drivel, sanctimonious sermon takes us nowhere you all had your chance shut up and take it on you asked for it weak sycophants.
Delete12 :00 shut same same old same old drivel along with poor berk nothing original all too late you had your chance too.
Delete12:00 here. I lost my career through this folly (I was a first traunch redundancy). I now watch from the sidelines as the debacle unfolds. The flaws we predicted are there for all to see. Shutting up just allows those responsible to continue with their delusions. It's all been f***ed up beyond belief. Those still in the cess pool are too frightened to cry foul. I reserve the right to continue saying so. Repeatedly.
DeleteMy CRC (South West) seems to be asking officers to change non acceptable absences to acceptable absences to manipulate data and avoid breach to hit targets and collect payment. We have also been informed that our CRC has borrowed monies from the bank which causes us concern since they intend to cut our staffing levels by half across the whole south west region.
ReplyDeleteIf the Supervisors were firstly 'officers of the court' as in days gone by maybe their priorities could not be so perverted as by a CRC that behaves as is suggested here
DeleteA figure of around £10,000 per breach (or at least per breach that results in the order being revoked and thus counting as a failure) has been mentioned as a potential cost to the CRC...
DeleteA few years ago Mr Grayling said something like, 'I don't want to pay for a service I want to pay for results.' On the surface this sounds appealing. The author of this guest blog on his website / advertisement states something akin to, 'I don't care who does the job as long as they do it well.' Again this risks sounding appealing. For example, do you really care who comes out to the fire out if your house is ablaze as long as they arrive in the prescribed time and put the fire out. You might say, 'well I suppose not.'
ReplyDeleteIn theory we could have strategically placed fire hoses on each Street for residents to douse their own fires and community volunteers to oversee the equipment and be on call. Each resident could have a brief training input on how to operate the fire hose and the system could be rigged to alert an operator who could monitor progress and have a standby service ready to assist if needs. The cost savings could be reinvested in the health service. Appealing?
DeleteI can see my ol' Mum up a ladder with a hose, bless 'er.
DeleteApart from the mandatory UPW and programmes, CRC's are not offering anything that NPS can't do themselves or get for free elsewhere. Why on earth would I pay for Shelter housing or debt advice when I can send the client into the drop ins in town and they can get it for free. It makes absolutely no sense.
ReplyDeleteOn the surface that sounds appealing?
DeleteSums it right up. This is exactly what CRC's and TTG do. It's bad enough they charge for what's available for free via the NPS, charities and community services. What's worse is that the free services are usually better than what the CRC and TTG offer.
DeleteWhy do think that is? I work for a CRC and and could make a good guess but what is your theory?
DeleteIf you work for the CRC you probably haven't seen the Rate Card that NPS have got to purchase CRC services. It's a bit like the shiny brochure of extras you get in a posh hotel. An hour of a Shelter worker's time starts at £50 if you do it through the CRC. It's free if you go direct to Shelter. A programme costs £2,000+ per start. Victim Work varies but is around £200 for 3 sessions. It's complete madness to expect that NPS will pay for anything that isn't mandatory.
DeleteBuying volunteer mentors time is possibly the most unethical thing on the menu.
DeleteYou have stated the rate card but not answered how this came to be. The NPS or MOJ wanted to charge allegedly £9000 per desk per annum for CRC IOM PO / PSO to be co - located in an NPS building with NPS IOM and Police. CRC owners said, 'No, thankyou.' How did this all happen?
DeleteIt's the inevitable result of creating a market where none needed to exist. The principle behind the creation of the CRCs never made much sense for the private sector: the more successful you are with reducing re-offending, the less business you'll get in the future. So they had to invent a system whereby the CRCs could set themselves up as providers of service to others, hence the rate card. Wonky Links in particular are very taken with the idea of becoming a provider of a range of social interventions (though the taking out of a massive bank loan - ostensibly as back-up but who knows if it's really to keep the company afloat - suggests they're running into trouble with the stuff that they've got going at the moment). However this ran smack up against budget cuts for NOMS and the NPS, and refusing to pay the fees to CRCs (when similar services were available for free elsewhere) was an easy option. It also means that those managers who got sifted to the NPS get to play at being little business people too.
DeleteBecause the world is becoming increasingly insane, morally & ethically impoverished, knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing. The cjs is becoming corrupt, engineered by corrupt individuals.
ReplyDelete