Some Saturday Reflections

It's Saturday and I'm up very early again because we seem to keep returning to a regular and alarming theme. This from yesterday:- 

You are right @ 18:13 and last night at 9.25pm I fired up the computer, and sent the email resigning with immediate effect. It has been a long time coming. I awoke this morning, not feeling a sense of jubilation or a desire to turn cartwheels of joy as one would expect but a profound sense of rage and sadness at the whole sorry state of affairs and the disgraceful way staff are treated. More surprising was the reaction of friends and family who were rejoicing that at last I had got rid. You are worth more than your situation which sounds unsustainable and your health and family cannot replace you or you them or gain back precious time. This machine will roll relentlessly on without us. A fact. sad but true. I think I was actually bereaved and grieving for a while there, but where one door shuts......and I send you every good wish.

The above was in response to this:-

I thought last week was bad but this week was even more punishing. I literally don't stop, don't have time for even a quick lunch most days and often come home dehydrated and completely exhausted physically and emotionally. It feels inhuman at times. It reminds me of the photos of firefighters or NHS workers during pandemic, hunkered down exhausted and having a rest, except there is no rest and no recognition of how hard pushed we are. No one seems to notice or care. It has become normalised.

And the Minister comes out with the normal guff. This from HoC Justice Committee session 23rd October 2023:-

Edward Timpson: Minister, can I take you back to one of the announcements made last week by the Lord Chancellor that we have referred to—the presumption against short sentences? The measures of success are, from the Government’s point of view, a reduction in the demand on the prison estate, but also, I hope, a reduction in reoffending rates by the use of effective community sentences and orders. Taking that as one of those measures, clearly there will be more potential workload for the probation service.

Damian Hinds: Yes.

Edward Timpson: What assessment have you made as to the impact these changes will have on the probation service and its ability to provide sufficiently resourced, high-quality opportunities for rehabilitation around education, housing, sobriety and a job—all the key areas that we know make a difference and help to reduce reoffending rates?

Damian Hinds: You are absolutely right about the central role of probation and the huge difference that probation officers make in the lives of those individuals. As you know, we have put more money into the probation service—£155 million a year—and we have recruited quite heavily. There had been—and, as you will know, in some parts of the country there still are—significant staffing challenges. Because we have recruited a lot of people in the last two to three years, there are quite a lot of people who are, effectively, going through their training and development. They will of course become experienced probation officers in time, but right now, as we speak today, there is on average a relatively shorter time in post.

Your question was about what assessment we have made. We have absolutely made an assessment of the impact of these changes. The probation service is looking very carefully at how to make the most effective use of the time of its professional resource.

Q31 Edward Timpson: Can you help us in understanding the workload of an individual probation officer, accepting that every case is different, so an absolute number does not necessarily tell the whole story? Is there an accepted level of case load for a probation officer? Is the assessment that that will still be met with these changes?

Damian Hinds: There is such a view. You are absolutely right that situations vary by the exact type of case, by risk level and so on. Because of what I was saying about staffing challenges and how they have been different in different parts of the country, there have been a number of places where workloads have been too high and need to be made more manageable. What I was saying about the service—and the service itself is looking at this—is that we need to make sure that resource is being most effectively directed to where it makes most difference.

--oo00oo--

I was particularly struck by this observation from a few days ago:-

Operation Protect: we are now often in the situation where we have more in common with our clients than our employers. The machinery grinds on requiring us to fulfil often meaningless tasks and expectations beyond our capacity to do them, and to require us to require that of our clients. So two humans in the face of the relentless machine work out together as best they can, how to navigate through the process unscathed.

This came in a few weeks ago, (edited to remove identifiers) but gained little notice having been left on an earlier blog post:- 

I am just about to complete my training as a PQiP. 50 year old with lots of experience, motivation and compassion for those in crisis. Absolutely love the exchanges and change I strive for with the offenders. To be honest, I receive more respect, honesty and civility from the offenders than I do from management. Been belittled, set up to fail, bullied, demoralised and intimidated by management. I am extremely good and conscientious in my job. Counts for nothing. Probation full of people desperate to climb the grading ladder. Any complaints and they all close ranks. The most incredibly corrupt and failing service I have ever worked for.

Tasks and admin jobs impossible to complete without working way beyond hours. Pushed me to the brink. Personal issues and eventually pushed to an emotional breakdown. Cue to manager dishing out an unacceptable absence improvement plan. 

Impeccable work record from me but it counts for nothing. I stood up to bullying and illogical and impossible management requests and now I am out. Pushed me to the edge and now can barely manage a day without breaking down emotionally. Breaks my heart as I love the job, as in I strive to make a difference for those on probation and the wider public in general. But that’s not what probation service want. They want scapegoats, yes people, subservient robots who will pander and pant to their every whim while those in management just keep standing on their backs to line their pockets and polish their egos! It stinks.

Napo doesn't exactly inspire confidence:-

Operation Protect Fringe at AGM – writing to Jim Barton at HMPPS

As part of Operation Protect, we held a fringe meeting with Jim Barton of HMPPS, regarding members’ extreme workloads. Jim was happy for those present to follow up from this fringe and email him further questions. If you were there and have more questions to raise as a result of the discussion and as part of further meetings and our campaign Operation Protect, please also email us at info@napo.org.uk and we can continue to follow up on important queries.

Then I notice a recent academic paper confirms what has long been suspected, namely top Whitehall mandarins haven't really got a clue about probation and what its for:-

Abstract

This paper provides insights into the predominant styles of political reasoning in England and Wales that inform penal policy reform. It does so in relation to a particular development that constitutes a dramatic, perhaps even unique, wholesale reversal of a previously introduced market-based criminal justice delivery model. This is the ‘unification’ of probation services in England and Wales, which unwound the consequential privatization reforms introduced less than a decade earlier. This paper draws on in-depth interviews with senior policy makers to present a narrative reconstruction of the unification of probation services in England and Wales. Analogies with desistance literature are drawn upon in order to encapsulate the tensions posed for policy makers as they sought to enact this penal policy reform.

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UNIFICATION, POLITICAL REASONING AND THE ‘BATTLE FOR PROBATION’S SOUL’

[A story is interesting] not because of what truths it can tell us about a person’s past but rather what it might say about the person’s future. (Maruna and Liem, 2021: 128)

We have seen, in the preceding analysis, that the unification of probation was widely recognized as being a success (in the context of attenuated expectations for government reform projects). That said, such efforts could not overcome the brute fact of prior history:

We’ve pretty much lost seven years for the probation service as a result of all the effort, investment going into that structural reform and then having to come back out of it the other side. (PP2)

Additionally, the service and staff bore the scars, the ‘organisational trauma’ from TR (Robinson 2023; Millings et al, 2019). At a public event reflecting on the unification programme, the Director of the Reform Programme stated that he was ‘under no illusions about the scale of the challenges that lie ahead’ (Institute for Government 2022). These challenges include recruitment and retention of staff, workload, improving, and ensuring consistency of practice, building stakeholder confidence, and resolving longstanding IT and infrastructure issues. But more fundamentally, unification was recognized to have brought to the surface foundational questions about what probation is and what it is for. A number of respondents reported actively thinking about probation’s future identity, with one respondent describing it as bringing to the surface the need for a ‘fight for the soul of probation, what is probation?’ (PP1).

In thinking about this, we can reflect on our analysis of the constructed narrative for the probation unification reforms, the core justifications for policy participants, and how these align (or do not) with wider possible narratives about probation. We saw above that the consistent government justification for probation renationalization was that unification would provide ‘a sustainable long-term model for probation services that provides public protection, visible and credible options for sentencers, deals effectively with individuals who have offended repeatedly and gives the right rehabilitative support to address offending behaviour’ (HMPPS 2020: 10). Within the Target Operating Model, the strapline ‘Assess, Protect, Change’ (APC) was proffered as a distillation of probation’s aims (HMPPS 2021: 6–7):

Assess: Undertaking accurate, timely assessments of an individual’s risks and needs that take into account protected characteristics and specific considerations arising from these.

Protect: Managing an individual’s risks and needs in conjunction with other relevant agencies. Taking effective action…and safeguarding victims.

Change: Empowering supervised individuals to make lasting changes to their lives through building good and trusting relationships with them that help motivate them through any rehabilitative activities and support them in integrating into the community. Working closely with other agencies and community services to facilitate this.

The internal processes of policy development, the ‘puzzling’ through to satisfactory policy solutions (Weller et al. 2021: Chapter 8), thus reflected the multi-faceted roles and expectations placed upon probation. It is notable, in August 2022, that senior leaders felt able to remind all staff that the ‘mission’ to which probation (and prisons) were working was ‘public protection’ (HMPPS 2022). This suggests an envisaged dominance of the ‘assess’ and ‘protect’ aspects of APC. One which connects with the longer history of probation’s increasing alignment with a public protection agenda that elevated functions of ‘surveillance, control, and exclusion’ (Nash 2000: 211), treating people on probation primarily as ‘risk bearing subjects’ (Robinson 2008: 440).

At the same time, the APC points to probation’s envisaged role in supporting rehabilitation. The notion of rehabilitation as the central ethos for probation has deep roots, emerging in the post-war period as a secular incarnation of the original mission to ‘save the souls’ of the sinful (McWilliams 1983; Mair and Burke 2011). One must recognize, however, the extent to which rehabilitative policy, and its underlying justification, has shifted across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (Garland 1985), being capable of eliding into public protection (Robinson 2008) or standing as its distinct other (Burke et al. 2019).

This speaks to the widespread sense that probation’s purpose is far from settled (at time of research interviews, and at time of writing). This is due in part to the focus on organizational restructuring in recent years, which has led to a relative neglect of questions relating to what probation is and what it is for. It also speaks to probation’s history, which has been marked by debates about its values and its nature, its essence much contested.

In discussions about probation’s future trajectory, respondents found succour in different strands of its self-identity. One explicitly drew connections back to probation’s social work past in discussing what good probation work looked like, and the challenges in achieving it:

[Probation officers] want to try to change behaviours and achieve better outcomes. It is very specialist, complex type of social work. But [there is] the expectation on them to also provide those protection duties. (PP4)

This connects with the historical emergence of the ‘scientific’ iteration of probation’s self-identity (McWilliams 1985, 1986), casting probation as ‘a social work service with a long and proud tradition’ (Mair and Burke 2011: 115).

Reflecting the historical notion of probation as being rooted in its locality (e.g. McWilliams 1985), some respondents recognized the force in the view that probation practitioners are (or should be) ‘local people, rooted in local communities, and local services’ (PP8). One senior civil servant considered, 1-year post-unification, that ‘I think we’re still trying to find that sweet spot now’ (PP2), between regional empowerment and centralized control, but fundamentally ‘the only way to get brilliant delivery is for those [probation] regions to be driving it’ (PP16).

Similarly, many respondents recognized that there was force behind concerns that unification was pulling probation into civil service structures, processes and cultures that ‘can feel very disempowering to people’ (PP10). Some respondents, contemplating the Probation Service’s structural alignment as part of the centralized state, could not predict how this would develop:

I can’t, still, work out whether this operating environment will allow us to settle in in two or three years’ time, or whether this is just a square peg in a round hole. I can’t tell you, yet, which one it is. (PP17)

During the period in which our research interviews were conducted, near-uniformly negative inspection reports by HM Inspectorate of Probation grew in number (HM Chief Inspector of Probation 2023), which while anticipated (given the time that would be required for reforms to bed down), were not easy reading. More recently, a number of Serious Further Offence (SFO) investigations were published (see HM Chief Inspector of Probation 2023), which, coupled with high profile media coverage and challenge from the opposition Labour party, put the Probation Service under sustained critical focus.

Recognition of concerns were reported in more coded terms during our research period, with many policy participants speaking to the need for the service to focus much more on ‘the basics of probation practice’ (PP8), ‘quality of practice’ (PP10), ‘good probation practice’ (PP4): ‘we have had at least 7 years where it’s all been about structure… We’ve got to move on and make the next few years about practice’ (PP2). However, the ongoing reforming impulses did not cease. One respondent remarked that ‘the pressure of change in probation…One HMPPS being a great example, it just hasn’t stopped’ (PP9). Another respondent described it as ‘another change in an already change-saturated area’ (PP17).

I'll leave the final word to something a reader reminded me of:-

Probation is very much like the poorly understood ligament in the body. It joins muscle and bone, has a bad blood supply, is difficult to see with x-rays or ultra-sound and, if ruptured, takes years to repair, about 7 to be exact. A final total rupture can still be avoided." Joe Kuipers in 2014