Innocence and Risk

Clients who maintain innocence have always posed a particular challenge, and the following from InsideTime highlights some of the issues involved, particularly around 'risk':-   

My 10 probation officers cared about ‘risk’, not progress

I was on probation from 2018 until 2026. My main conclusion is that the experience you have in this bizarre process is entirely dependent on your probation officer (henceforth PO). Sadly, I had 10 different POs over these years. The focus of this female-dominated workforce is now entirely on ‘risk’, a long way from the ‘hand to hold on release’ which probation was originally set up for over 100 years ago. This ‘risk’ is monitored by something called an OASys report, which is updated after meetings.

Two of my 10 POs were men, the other eight women, and the ‘churn’ was unbelievable to witness. In prison the POs generally monitor progress and how the prisoner is doing; on the out, they are there to make sure the person they are supervising keeps on the straight and narrow. Many people on probation appreciate this oversight, recognising there is something in them that needs this kind of support. But many don’t, including those like me who maintain their innocence and don’t see the requirement for ‘rehabilitation’ or such intense scrutiny.

It is counterintuitive for POs to endlessly monitor their charges according to a risk criteria based on police or court records, when those records may have been fabricated or otherwise manipulated. This is the Probation Service ‘cleaning up’ after the individual has been put through the wringer of a broken justice system. When this purgatorial waste of time is put to the PO, their training is to say ‘We need to treat you based on the findings of the courts’ – which is the victory of Starmer-era bureaucracy over the humanistic founding principles of probation in Britain.

While nine of my POs may have been objective, care-focused professionals of the old school, I felt that one or two had a specific animus against the crime of which I had been convicted. This suspicion was confirmed when I made a Subject Access Request (SAR) for all notes about me and my case. It made for illuminating reading. While all the POs were reasonably polite to my face, any complaints I made about the system were minimised and even ridiculed in notes going back years.

Early on in my time on licence, I was offered a job as a magazine editor. The employer didn’t ask about convictions. But when I told my PO, she said I had to disclose them voluntarily. When I did, the offer was withdrawn. Just before this happened, in another early probation meeting I reported that I had been in contact with a well-known justice reform campaigner, and had done some media interviews and podcasts about my own case. The next week I had two new, extra conditions added to my licence – not to be in contact with people with certain criminal convictions (how would I be able to know that?), and not to talk in the media about my case. The reason given was that complaints had been received, but I could find no evidence of these complaints in the SAR response.

A year or so into my time on probation in the community I made a new friend via social media, who came to visit me once, staying overnight. She was splitting up with her partner at the time, and he accessed her phone while she was sleeping after she got home, investigated who I was, and reported it to probation. Without being asked, I was given another licence condition requiring me to take polygraph tests, even though I had disclosed to the friend as a matter of course (and we weren’t ‘romantic’ anyway).

I complained about this, and was then in a months-long struggle session with probation about the legality of polygraph tests – which don’t measure ‘lies’, just emotional responses. Still, other POs were excellent, professional and understanding. My time eventually came to a more peaceful, less scrutinised end.

As a result of these sanity-testing, counter-intuitive experiences, I am determined to push that people consistently maintaining innocence be released with NO licence conditions, only having them added if, after proper investigations, it can be proved that there is a real ‘risk’ factor. Because as it stands, while there are good people within probation, it suffers from a victory of bureaucracy over humanity. While people like former Prisons Minister Lord Timpson – who replied to none of my emails – may say that all cases are judged on an individual basis, probation is very much failing to ‘hold the hand’ of the released prisoner.