So, How's it Going?

There’s an enormous part of today’s story that seems to be getting lost in all the coverage about early release.

The headlines are understandably focused on how many prisoners are being released and whether probation has sufficient capacity to manage them. But 1 October isn’t simply an early-release date. A whole series of operational changes are landing in probation at the same time: OFPS, new tiering arrangements, Supervision Packages, the Progression Model, changes to licence supervision and all the processes sitting underneath them. And some of those changes create work before they create any of the capacity they are supposed to release.

Take Supervision Packages. Existing cases can now have a package tier identified, but during this transition period an OASys review is required to actually move a case into its Supervision Package and allocate the appointments. Regions are apparently being asked to prioritise particular reviews until a future digital change automatically transitions cases that haven’t already moved across.

I’m not convinced every PP yet appreciates the potential significance of that. It is very easy to hear “new tiering” and “Supervision Packages” and assume the system simply calculates something in the background. But if reviews are required during this interim period, that represents potentially significant additional practitioner activity across an already enormous existing caseload.

And an OASys review isn’t just pressing a button. If it is going to mean anything, somebody has to look properly at the case, consider what has changed, review risk and needs and make sure the assessment actually reflects the person being supervised. Otherwise we are simply generating another administratively compliant document to make the new system work.

That work lands alongside everything that was already there. Existing appointments still happen. New court orders still arrive. People continue to be released from prison. Risk changes. Safeguarding concerns emerge. Recalls happen. Enforcement happens. Assessments and reviews already due still need completing. And now practitioners have to understand and implement an entirely new architecture for supervision while doing all of it.

This is why I don’t think we’ll understand the impact of 1 October by counting how many people walk through the prison gate today. Watch what happens over the days, weeks and months that follow.

Watch caseloads as courts continue sentencing and prisons continue releasing. Watch the number of assessments and reviews practitioners are carrying. Watch how much additional work is generated simply by transitioning the existing caseload into the new arrangements. Watch what happens to appointment lengths, recording, risk work and the time available for actual supervision.

Because there is a rather extraordinary contradiction here. We are introducing changes partly on the promise that they will create probation capacity, while relying upon an already overstretched workforce to provide the additional capacity required to implement them. And once again, the question nobody seems particularly interested in answering is the most basic one:

Where are the practitioner hours supposed to come from?

That, rather than the number released on day one, may turn out to be the real story of 1 October.

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Even with the early release scheme there is over 80,000 people in prison. The crown Court backlog stands at over 80,000 cases too. Probation is supervising over 240,000 people. That is the equivalent of all the number of Crown Court backlog cases and the total prison population combined plus another 80,000, and there is more people going to prison through reall then are being sent there by the courts! Surely the answer is not how many can be released early from custody, but how can we get people to exit the CJS as early as possible? I think the universal imposition of post sentence supervision is one of the major contributors to the state of the CJS today. The capacity crisis is not just about prisons, it's the whole of the CJS thats bursting at the seams.

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Getafix raises what may be the bigger question underneath all of this. We keep talking about the prison capacity crisis as though probation exists somewhere outside it, waiting to receive whatever solution is devised. It doesn’t. Probation is part of the same system and is carrying an extraordinary volume of people in its own right.

The latest published figure is actually over 258,000 people under probation supervision. Put that alongside a prison population of more than 85,000 and a Crown Court open caseload of more than 80,000 and perhaps we need to stop talking about a prison capacity crisis and start talking about a criminal justice system capacity crisis.

And recall surely has to be part of that conversation. In January–March this year there were 13,193 licence recalls and 12,977 releases from custodial sentences. Those figures aren’t directly opposite sides of the same equation, but they illustrate the extraordinary churn now taking place between prison and the community.

So what exactly are we trying to achieve? If somebody leaves prison, enters an overstretched Probation Service, receives increasingly rationed contact, struggles with housing, drugs, mental health, relationships or whatever else brought them repeatedly into the system, breaches or deteriorates, is recalled, occupies a prison place, is released again and comes back to probation — where exactly is the saving?

We seem obsessed with finding ways of moving people around an overloaded criminal justice system rather than reducing the number of people who need to remain in it.

That is why the prevention argument matters so much. Success surely isn’t getting somebody out of prison slightly earlier so another person can occupy the bed. Nor is it keeping somebody technically compliant with probation for as long as possible. The real success is helping somebody reach the point where they no longer require prison, probation, police, courts or endless commissioned interventions at all.

And Getafix’s point about post-sentence supervision deserves proper examination in that context. If supervision is genuinely reducing reoffending and protecting the public, demonstrate it. If particular forms or lengths of supervision are instead increasing the opportunities for breach and recall without producing a corresponding rehabilitative benefit, we ought to be prepared to examine that too.

Because there is something fundamentally circular about responding to prison overcrowding by releasing people earlier into an overloaded probation system, then recalling large numbers of people back into the prisons we’re desperately trying to empty.

Perhaps the measure we should become genuinely obsessed with isn’t how quickly we can move people through the criminal justice system, but how successfully we can help them leave it.

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So its now just after 6pm & all I've heard on various news channels ALL DAY is "prisoners walking free", "victims are terrified", "prisoners set free by Labour", "Probation have had £700million to assist them".It's all utter bollocks. Not one report that I've heard has offered any sort of assessment, context or factual analysis - not even Casciani on the beeb, who repeated the £700million mantra, the additional numbers of staff and the amazing new hi-tech tags.

Dominic, everyone - it's all fucking lies. None of what this (or any previous) govt is saying about justice, jails or probation is in any way based in reality. It's political fluffing, prepping the public for the unholy fucking that's heading our way... "at pace", no doubt! They - the politicians & the advisers & the whitehall moneypits - haven't got a fucking clue what to do.

Bellend Norris - a man of many years experience of the justice system? No! - had the brass neck to say: "we've been preparing for this day for the last two years." BULLSHIT, you utter arse.

If only for once in their terribly comfortable lives would these wet farts slide down from their ivory chamber pots & see what's really happening, hear it, smell it... feel the fear, the despair, the pointlessness of their empty words about "seven hundred million".

Sorry for the many expletives, Jim, but today has been a calamitous shitfest of utter fuckwittery. The Grand Shafting (I liked that term, thanks) & the CRC debacle were mostly hidden from public gaze. Today's headline blog, I think, neatly sums up how the X Factor had her dabs all over the scene of so many crimes. They were NOT crimes of passion, but crimes against COMPASSION.

As an old skool PO, I'd love to know why. What was the motivation to cause so much damage & pain to so many people, particularly probation staff & those subject to supervision, but also the £billions of public funds re-directed away from public service provision & into the pockets of fatcat multinationals & their shareholders? It must have been one hell of a trauma to want to hurt so many so badly!

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Anyone else noticed the complete bait and switch they've done with OASys reviews? Everyone is now being expected to review their entire caseload.

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That comment about OASys reviews has just made my blood boil. Whether reviewing an entire caseload is the national expectation or something being interpreted differently locally almost misses the point. Why, after the endless communications, briefings, guidance, presentations, cascades and mandatory learning we have been bombarded with, are practitioners apparently still discovering the scale of what is actually expected of them on the day it goes live?

We have been absolutely drowning in information. Emails about emails. Guidance explaining guidance. PowerPoints. FAQs. E-learning. Briefings. Cascades. Yet somehow something as fundamental as the amount of reviewing required to get existing cases correctly tiered and onto the appropriate Supervision Package has not landed clearly with the people who actually have to do it. And if significant numbers of existing cases now require reviews, when exactly are we supposed to do them? Seriously. When?

The appointments are still in the diary. People still need seeing. New cases are still being allocated. Courts haven’t stopped sentencing. Prisons haven’t stopped releasing. Recalls, safeguarding, MAPPA, enforcement, risk management, home visits, referrals, recording, assessments and everything else haven’t conveniently disappeared while we implement the new model. So where are these extra hours coming from?

I am becoming genuinely furious with this constant assumption that practitioner capacity is infinitely elastic. Another requirement arrives and somehow we are simply expected to absorb it. Then another. Then another. Nothing meaningful comes off the other side. Apparently there is always another little bit of us available to squeeze. 

What are they trying to do, break us? Because I genuinely don’t know how much more people are expected to absorb before somebody at the top accepts that there are only so many hours in a working day and only so much pressure human beings can carry.

And please don’t tell us we have been “prepared”. Completing an e-learning package is not capacity. Receiving a cascade is not capacity. Reading another 30-page document is not capacity. A 98% completion rate on mandatory learning does not magically create the practitioner hours necessary to implement what people have been trained to do. That distinction seems to have been completely lost.

I can already imagine the assurance going upwards: staff briefed, tick; learning completed, tick; implementation commenced, tick; Progression Model successfully launched, tick.

Meanwhile at practitioner level the real question will be: how the hell am I supposed to do all of this as well? And this is only day one. That’s what people outside probation need to understand. The danger was never that the service would dramatically collapse at 9am on 1 October. Practitioners will do what they always do: scramble, prioritise, stay late, worry, improvise and somehow keep the plates spinning.

It’s the days, weeks and months after today that concern me. Because the courts will keep sentencing, the prisons will keep releasing, new work will keep arriving and all of this implementation work will be sitting on top of the caseloads people already had. You cannot keep solving a capacity crisis by taking more capacity from the people who have none left.

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Something else troubles me reading these comments. Look at what this is doing to us as a workforce. When people are under relentless pressure for long enough, empathy starts disappearing not only from the organisation but sometimes between colleagues. Someone is struggling and instead of asking what has happened to make an experienced practitioner reach this point?, it becomes well I’m managing, why aren’t they? That is a very dangerous culture for probation.

This work already asks us to carry things most people outside the job never see. We hear traumatic histories, make decisions involving risk and people’s liberty, deal with crises, worry about victims, worry about the people we supervise and occasionally go home wondering whether we’ve missed something important. There has always been pressure in probation. But there is a difference between a demanding professional job and an environment in which people are repeatedly prevented from doing that job to the standard they know it deserves. I think that’s the bit we don’t talk about enough.

It’s not simply being “too busy”. It’s knowing the home visit would be useful but having three other things that have to be done. Knowing somebody needed longer than the appointment you could give them. Knowing an assessment deserved more thought. Knowing you should chase something up and watching another urgent task land on top of it. You constantly make choices about what won’t get your time.

For people who came into probation because they actually care about doing the work well, that takes a toll of its own. And then scarcity starts turning practitioners against one another. Who has the easier caseload? Who isn’t pulling their weight? Who gets protected? Who works from home? Who leaves on time? Who is off sick? Who has managed and who hasn’t?

Meanwhile the much bigger question quietly disappears: why are highly trained professionals being placed in circumstances where doing the job properly has become something they have to fight to find time for? That’s why some of these accounts of people finally leaving and feeling an enormous weight disappear are so sad. We aren’t just losing a number from a staffing spreadsheet. We’re potentially losing experienced people who once cared enormously about this work.

A service can recruit another trainee. Replacing years of judgement, confidence, relationships, local knowledge and experience is considerably harder. And if the people who remain eventually protect themselves by caring a little less, giving a little less and emotionally detaching from what they cannot possibly fix, perhaps nobody should be surprised. You can't indefinitely run a profession on people’s goodwill and then wonder where the goodwill went.