Guest Blog 112

Who is listening to who?

Prison overcrowding, probation capacity, tagging, victims, AI and being “tough on offenders” — there is so much to take on board that my head is going to explode. I have completed the e-learning and learned the “new ways of working”, but I’m not quite in the zone of “new probation” yet.

I have been reading this blog forever, and it has become a source of therapy and support. The last few weeks have become intense once again. The changes being imposed on the service have created a flurry of activity, both within and in the media. What saddens me is the apparent absence of real discussion within the profession. There does not seem to be any space where we can properly discuss the impact of these changes, talk openly about what they mean for practitioners and “punters”, or propose better ways of doing things.

I cannot help but hark back to the history of Advise, Assist and Befriend, which has been discussed so often on this blog, or the historic trust placed in probation officers. The difficulty is that we all know the journey that followed, through the degradation of probation qualifications, then NOMS, Trusts, privatisation, nationalisation, unification and reset.

I sometimes wish a real probation leader would appear, someone who could help light the way. I do not particularly care whether that is Napo, the Probation Institute or something else, as long as they genuinely speak for probation and create a credible space for the profession to have a reputable voice and future.

There are already many voices out there, calling for a return to social work, for the rehabilitation of probation and for actively renewing probation. There is discussion on hope, burnout and fatigue. Even questions about who should take responsibility for prison overcrowding, early release and the impact these pressures have on probation services.

The worry: When history looks back, will this decade’s response be any better than the last? We have objected to the implementation of parts of this latest sentence act, which is no different to the probation history I’ve already described. Even if we delve into extreme pre-history, when previous generations faced prison hulks, a notorious government response to prison overcrowding during the eighteenth century, or transportation to Australia. Whatever the outcome, we the people are the ones that live and work with the consequences.

Of course, nobody is suggesting sending anyone to the other side of the globe, well not unless the pint-swigging nasty party takes root, but the “tough on offenders” rhetoric remains the same. We need no reminder that there are practitioners, academics and pracademics doing important work to understand and protect our honourable profession. If anyone needs further convincing, a quick search of the Probation Institute reveals many; practitioners sharing experiences about how probation operates in the prison environment, practitioners sharing innovative approaches to working with young adults and creating toolkits, practitioners discussing how community service can work better, and multiple practitioners trying to help us better understand much of what we do.

For those working in leadership, policy units and workforce planning, finding and considering this kind of information is surely part of the job. The leaders and policymakers have good ideas, but if there are better ways of doing things it’ll be lost if we do not have a credible forum for discussion. We might even avoid remaining perpetually in crisis, simply by taking notice of the risks being identified?

The fear: If “they” can do away with the WMT, ignore the unpaid overtime and hold-up decent pay, then is there any hope they’ll listen to the practitioners? But do they want to listen to those who scrutinise the new changes, oppose a UK Corrections and Aftercare Service, and challenge reliance on dashboards and metrics? We need a probation service that listens to its workforce to meet its true aims, helping people lead offence-free lives, primarily focused on changing individual circumstances and behaviour for the better.

The problem is that this service has become very good at creating new policies, new models, and new ways of working, while becoming less good at listening to the people who have to make them work. There are practitioners across the country who understand what helps people change, what gets in the way, what creates unintended consequences, and what could be done differently. So the question is not what the future of probation should look like, but who should get to shape it. Because if nobody is listening to the practitioners, then what exactly are we reforming probation for?

I cannot answer this question, and none of us can. Ironically, as I got to the end of typing this post and switched from watching the Justice Minister on the news to an old black-and-white western, I heard a phrase that we could perhaps apply to every Justice Minister from Grayling to the present day:

“Never trust the eyes of a man running away.”

Anon