Kind-hearted Probation?

Yet again our ace contributor 'Getafix was alert to the following article published yesterday in the Daily Telegraph. The pesky paywall makes it difficult to access, but due to its importance and 'Getafix's efforts at extracting it on his mobile, I think it's worth piecing it together here. PSR's used to be a vital part of a PO's job and their demise has been a shocking loss to the profession's usefulness.  

How Britain’s ‘kind-hearted’ probation service is letting killers go free.

Inexperienced officers with an aversion to imprisonment are fuelling a surge in serious reoffending. Is this soft system costing lives?"

Damien Bendall is one of Britain’s most dangerous prisoners. The 36-year-old is serving a “whole life” order for murdering his pregnant partner and three children. In February, he was given another life sentence for attempting to bludgeon a fellow inmate to death with a claw hammer at HMP Frankland in Durham.Given Bendall’s savage behaviour, it is almost impossible to believe that a few years ago, before his murderous spree in Derbyshire, he was classified by a probation officer as posing only a low to medium risk of reoffending – and was recommended for a non-custodial community order.

The catastrophic miscalculation of Bendall’s risk serves as a reminder of the underlying flaws within England and Wales’s probation service when it comes to public safety, and the apparent aversion to imprisonment.

A series of damning inspections has highlighted weaknesses in the advice given by probation officers to the courts when offenders are sentenced, in documents known as pre-sentence reports (PSRs). Public safety is often the greatest casualty under a probation system that is now facing acute additional pressures due to the early release from prison of thousands of offenders.

In 2024-25, a record 872 criminals under probation supervision were charged with a serious further offence (SFO), including murder, manslaughter and rape. The number of these repeat offences has climbed by an extraordinary 75 per cent in four years, adding to a sense that the service has become too soft on offenders.

Ministry of Justice (MoJ) figures show that non-custodial community sentences – often involving unpaid work – are 10 times more likely to be suggested by probation officers than imprisonment in the reports they write for the courts, with 85,376 recommended in the 12 months to September 2025, accounting for 88 per cent of the total number of probation reports. Custody was proposed in 7,571 cases (eight per cent).

Tellingly, in just over half of the cases where probation staff called for community penalties, judges ignored their advice, instead imposing a jail term, a suspended sentence or a fine. MoJ statistics also show that, over the past 13 years, judges have become more likely to jail offenders when a community punishment has been proposed.

According to some barristers, the frequency with which probation staff advocate against prison sentences has made judges dismissive of their recommendations.

“Every criminal practitioner will have had cases where probation has recommended a sentence which is wholly inappropriate,” says Thom Dyke, a leading criminal barrister. “The effect of that is that the PSR effectively loses credibility with the judge. So where there may actually be useful information in a report, if the overall conclusion is hopelessly unrealistic, the judge is going to pay less attention to the contents of the report overall.”

PSRs, which are typically up to 12 pages long, contain information about an offender’s background and criminal record, as well as a risk assessment and a proposed sentence. But the quality of the reports has been a source of deep concern for many years.

In 2018, defence lawyers at Forrest Williams noted a “worrying trend of completely unrealistic pre-sentence reports in cases where immediate custody is inevitable and yet the PSR recommends a community order”. The lawyers cited one case where sentencing guidelines had suggested a “realistic and fair” prison sentence of eight to 10 years, but where the PSR had recommended a community order.

It was described by the judge as “not worth the paper it’s written on”, the firm said. Although the reports are undoubtedly “written with the best of intentions by kind-hearted people who genuinely hope the decent individuals sitting before them are given a community order... they are dangerous”, they added.

An inspection of pre-sentencing probation reports in 2024 found “considerable gaps”, with fewer than half of those examined judged to be “sufficiently analytical and personalised to the individual”. The standard of the reports has deteriorated further since then, with a grading of “inadequate” in the six areas of England and Wales that were inspected, accounting for almost half the country.

Some of the problems are believed to be due to the greater use of “fast delivery” PSRs, which take less than a week to put together. But Dyke, who is based at Deka Chambers in London, believes magistrates are also to blame for giving probation staff instructions before they write the reports that are too “vague”.

In Bendall’s case, when he was sentenced for committing arson in June 2021, a probation officer did not recommend imprisonment, even though he already had an appalling record of violence, but instead suggested he carry out unpaid work in the community, undergo treatment for an alcohol problem, and be tagged and subject to a curfew.

Three months later, Bendall murdered Terri Harris, 35, who was pregnant with his child; her son, John Bennett, 13; and her daughter, Lacey Bennett, 11, whom he raped as she lay dying. Bendall also murdered Lacey’s 11-year-old friend, Connie Gent. A review of the case said the probation service’s assessment and management of the former cage fighter were “unacceptable” and “far below what was required”.

There are few signs, however, that the lessons from the tragedy have been learnt, with fears that probation staff are still too often prepared to give offenders the benefit of the doubt.

David Ford, national chair of the Magistrates’ Association, says probation officers get it right “most of the time”, but he acknowledges that calculating the risk posed by defendants is far from an exact science. “You are taking a leap of faith with risk – it’s a real worry,” says Ford, a magistrate for 32 years.

Risk assessment has long been the Achilles heel of probation, not only at the point of sentence, but also when offenders are managed in the community. Among the most egregious cases was that of the career criminal, Jordan McSweeney, who raped and murdered 35-year-old Zara Aleena as she walked home from a night out in east London in 2022.

A review concluded that McSweeney, who had 28 previous convictions for 69 crimes, should have been categorised by probation as a high-risk offender when he was released from prison nine days before the murder. Had he been, he would have been more closely monitored by senior staff under more stringent licence conditions.

The chief inspector of probation, Martin Jones, has been so alarmed by the service’s failure to gauge risk and keep people safe from the 240,000 offenders under its supervision that he has launched a series of “dynamic” inspections to bring about improvements.

“What we see across all of our inspections is that public protection work is the lowest-rated area that we’ve assessed, and that’s driven, I think, by significant staffing deficits and the level of inexperience... the majority of staff have less than five years’ experience in the job, some only one or two,” Jones tells The Telegraph.

A probation recruitment campaign is underway, but the service is still 1,700 officers short of its target staffing figure, while most of those taken on tend to be young graduates. More than 10,000 staff are in their twenties and thirties – 46 per cent of the total.

“Quite often, it’s more experienced probation officers who spot those small warning signs that something may be going wrong in somebody’s life, and actually then act upon them, following their nose,” says Jones. “It’s the professional curiosity to say, ‘I need to pick up the telephone, talk to the probation service, talk to the police service, talk to social services about what may be going on, because my alarm bells are going off, given the history that this individual has.’ And there’s not enough of that happening at the frontline.”

The chief probation officer of England and Wales, Kim Thornden-Edwards, has said the service needs to employ more older people and those with different life experiences, and increase the number of male staff. Three-quarters of probation staff are women, despite recent attempts to recruit more male officers, including through advertisements on Sky Sports and gaming channels.

“It might be really good for a woman to be leading on a domestic abuse case, but it might also be good for a man to be challenging those kinds of issues around masculinity and power from a male perspective,” Thornden-Edwards said.

“The majority of frontline probation officers at the moment are young women... and they’re managing a complex group of men in the community, quite often much older,” says Jones. “And I think that makes part of the job challenging.”

There is no proven link between a female-dominated, largely inexperienced probation workforce and a service that underplays risk, and leans towards community-based punishments. But Jake Phillips, associate professor at the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge, says inexperience could make probation staff more risk-averse, as well as leading to “naivety”, which makes them less inclined to recommend prison.

However, Phillips, who edits the academic publication Probation Journal, believes there is also an ideological issue at play. For most of the 20th century, the service was regarded as a form of social work, helping criminals tackle their underlying problems. Although there was a greater emphasis on controlling and monitoring offenders after a moral panic about crime in the mid-1990s, the tendency of probation officers to favour alternatives to imprisonment still lingers to this day.

There has always been a fairly strong anti-custodial sentiment in the probation profession,” says Phillips. “Although I suspect that has shifted in the last couple of decades, it is probably still there strongly enough to dissuade some probation officers from recommending custody, or at least to make them think twice about doing so.”