Guest Blog 111

Rhetoric v Reality

I write this from a position that perhaps doesn’t fit comfortably into the current political narrative. I am a probation practitioner. I am also a victim of crime.

So when the Government tells me victims are “front and centre” and that we now have the “toughest supervision in British history”, I want that to be true. But my professional experience makes me deeply concerned about the gap between the rhetoric and the reality.

I know what public protection looks like from the other side of the desk. It is rarely a slogan. It is having enough time to notice something has changed, join information together, recognise an escalating pattern, make the home visit, speak to police or children’s services, ask another question and act before another incident creates another victim.

Technology can assist with that. It cannot replace it.

And this isn’t simply a frustrated workforce saying so. On 24 September HM Inspectorate of Probation reported that persistent staffing shortages and workforce instability were directly affecting the quality and consistency of risk management. In 54% of inspected cases, critical information was not sufficiently interrogated, analysed or translated into robust risk-management activity. Days later, the electronic-monitoring inspection warned of a “false sense of assurance” if technology was not matched by effective professional practice. Then Government announced the “toughest supervision in British history”.

Please reconcile those things.

As a victim, I do not want a false sense of assurance. I don’t want to hear that somebody is being monitored if there isn’t sufficient professional capacity to understand and act upon what that monitoring reveals. And I don’t want victims used to justify increasingly restrictive measures while the professional infrastructure required to make those measures protective is struggling.

As a practitioner, I worry that probation is increasingly being redesigned around how many people the system needs us to absorb rather than what effective supervision actually requires. Please do not mistake control for public protection, surveillance for supervision, contact for intervention or administrative compliance for effective probation.

I don’t simply want the person who harmed me punished. I want fewer people harmed. That means meaningful rehabilitation matters to me too. Work around domestic abuse, drugs, housing, mental health, relationships and behaviour matters. Professional judgement matters. Having enough time to know the person you supervise matters. Victims and rehabilitation are not opposing interests. Effective rehabilitation is victim protection when it prevents the next offence.

So by all means tell me how many people are tagged, how much money has been invested and how many staff have been recruited. But also tell me whether practitioners have enough time to do the work properly, whether experienced staff are staying, whether workloads are manageable and whether the quality of risk management is improving.

You cannot solve a prison capacity crisis by quietly creating a probation capacity crisis. And you cannot protect victims by weakening the professional service upon which so much of that protection depends.

I say that as somebody delivering probation. I also say it as somebody who knows what being a victim means.

If victims really are “front and centre”, listen to this one.

Anon