Handbook of Probation

Loraine Gelsthorpe, Rod Morgan, Loraine Gelsthorpe, Rod Morgan

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781843921905
• eBook ISBN: 9781134014989
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Criminología

This Handbook provides a comprehensive, authoritative and up-to-date source of information and analysis about all aspects of the work of the Probation Service.

It takes full account of the many changes that the Probation Service has undergone over the last few years, and is currently undergoing as probation becomes part of the broader National Offender Management Service. Contributors to the book are drawn from leading academics and practitioners in the field, drawing upon the best expertise available. Running through the book is a concern with a range of key current issues such as addressing the diversity of offenders and creating effective links with other criminal justice agencies, and it includes perspectives from both probation service staff and from offenders and victims.

This book is an essential text for practitioners, trainees and students of probation and those studying it as part of a wider criminology or criminal justice course.

Part 1
The Story of Probation in England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland

The chapters in this opening section trace the origins and development of probation in the United Kingdom and the manner in which, over time, it has taken different forms in Northern Ireland, Scotland, and England and Wales. Consideration is also given to the changing character of probation staff and the governance of the service in England and Wales with the onset of the National Offender Management Service (NOMS).

In Chapter 1 Mike Nellis chronicles the growth of the Probation Service to 1972, the year in which a major Criminal Justice Act brought to fruition a period which he characterises as one of probation ‘modernisation and diversification’. Nellis emphasises that much of the history of early probation practice remains to be written, local sources and offender perspectives having been little drawn on. Further, he points out that the Probation of Offenders Act 1907, generally taken as the major administrative starting point, nevertheless drew on a common law tradition of ‘preventive justice’. Moreover, although the reformist movement of the early twentieth century promoted welfare measures as a means of ensuring greater public safety, the Probation Service’s role to ‘advise, assist and befriend’ also represented a toughening up of traditional court recognisances. By the 1930s probation had emerged as a branch of a broader social work profession, secularised (separated from its police court mission origins), with psychology and casework methods at its core. However, it was in the 1960s that the Service emerged from an organisational struggle between welfarism and criminal justice with a cultural tradition of what Nellis characterises as ‘humanised justice’.

In Chapter 2 Peter Raynor and Maurice Vanstone take the probation story forward from the early 1970s to the present day. The paradox of the 1970s was that having established for itself what appeared to be a firm, distinctive professional foundation, the Probation Service was almost immediately faced with empirically based doubts about the validity of its ‘treatment’ approach. The offences which provided the rationale for officers’ caseloads scarcely figured on what Raynor and Vanstone describe as the Service’s radar screen. The authors describe in detail the evidence behind the infamous ‘nothing works’ debate and chart the lead-in to the 1984 Home Office Statement of National Priorities and Objectives (SNOP), the first major sign of growing government interest in the cost-effectiveness of the Service, the background to which was the increasing party politicisation of the ‘law and order’ debate. From then on every criminal justice agency, Probation included, operated in an increasingly politicised limelight. Raynor and Vanstone chart each stage of the Service’s response to this challenge from the adoption of ‘What Works’ to the ‘New Choreography’ statement put out by the National Probation Directorate (NPD) following the creation of a national service in 2001. The optimistic high point of ‘What Works’ came and went rather soon in the new millennium. Raynor and Vanstone critically dissect exactly what went right and what went wrong operationally, assess how the probation caseload was changing, what led to the Carter Report and how the proposal that there be a NOMS was received and, during a period of devastating uncertainty, was reacted to. They conclude with a summary of the critical choices now facing the Service.

In Chapter 3 Rod Morgan provides an overview of this century-long probation history as far as the governance of the Service is concerned. He describes how, under the 1907 Act, probation officers were appointed locally by the courts and were officers of the court, and how their work came to be overseen by local probation committees comprising magistrates elected by their peers. He also describes how there came into existence within the Home Office a succession of offices to oversee the development of the Service and which gradually enhanced the powers of the Secretary of State. This included from 1936 an inspectorate which, during the 1990s, began operating as a sort of surrogate probation directorate before the NPD was created in 2001. In the post-War years the responsibilities of the Service were broadened and the control of the Secretary of State correspondingly strengthened. This included control over the purse strings. From the 1980s onwards the Home Office began to prescribe in ever greater detail what work probation officers would do and how local services were to be amalgamated. From the early 1990s onwards there was more and more talk of creating a market in the provision of probation services, an approach already being adopted in the management of prisons. The creation of the National Probation Service (NPS) in 2001 and the adoption of the Carter Report proposals for the creation of a NOMS-based purchaser–provider split was thus the culmination of a long process. Morgan analyses closely what the implications of the NOMS and the formation of probation trusts might be for the accountability of the Service. He concludes that the model currently proposed by the Government cannot, despite the emphasis on ‘contestability’, be interpreted as other than one of Home Office control centralisation with little or no local accountability for services that may be substantially fragmented.

Roy Bailey, Charlotte Knight and Brian Williams ask in Chapter 4 whether the Probation Service is currently ‘fit for purpose’, a question which the multiple changes and uncertainties of the last few years suggests others have answered in the negative. They focus on the aspects of management, the changing roles of practitioners, and staff performance and training in the light of the emphasis now being given to risk assessment and management and public protection. In light of the dwindling proportion of probation staff now comprising probation officers, the authors emphasise the importance of graduate-level professional training, the need for postgraduate programmes to foster senior management skills and the importance of developing a comprehensive in-service programme of training for Probation Service officers whose development and career prospects has so far been relatively neglected despite their growing number. Bailey Knight and Williams also consider the implications of the gradual feminisation of the probation workforce given the increasing emphasis on the ‘management’ of offenders and tighter ‘enforcement’ of their court orders. They suggest that questions must be raised about suitable role models for the predominantly young, white, male caseload with which the Service works. More attention, they argue, needs to be given by senior probation managers to the relational aspects of probation work and rather less emphasis placed on targets.

The contrasting form taken by probation work in Scotland is the subject of Gill McIvor and Fergus McNeill’s Chapter 5. Despite probation origins in Scotland not dissimilar to those in England and Wales, there is no separate probation service in Scotland. Probation work is undertaken by criminal justice social workers employed by the local authorities. McIvor and McNeill chronicle the fact that whereas moves in the 1960s to remove juveniles in trouble from the jurisdiction of the criminal courts largely failed in England and Wales, parallel moves in Scotland following the 1964 Kilbrandon Report largely succeeded and had an impact on provisions for adults in the Social Work Scotland Act 1968. Probation and after-care work was integrated in generic social work departments, representing the triumph of a penal-welfarist approach. However, as the authors go on to describe, probation work subsequently lost out within this framework such that the quality of supervision and the confidence of sentencers arguably declined. The result was growing control of probation services, through standard setting and the ring fencing of budgets, by the centre in a manner similar to that south of the border. Yet, McIvor and McNeill argue, the influence of correctionalism has been more attenuated in Scotland than in England and Wales. The number of community-based sentences has been broadened and ‘What Works’ has become a theme as elsewhere. But proposals to merge probation work with that of the Prison Service in Scotland have been abandoned in favour of a management of offenders organisational framework which has left probation work within social services subject to direction by regional community justice authorities. This framework, the authors suggest, has reinscribed Scotland’s welfarist commitment within a new emphasis on public protection, that is the public is best protected by helping offenders solve their practical problems.

Probation has also followed a distinct course in Northern Ireland, though for reasons different to those in Scotland, as David O’Mahoney and Tim Chapman describe in Chapter 5. The early development of the service was similar to that in England and Wales, though few officers were appointed and probation orders were little used by the courts during the interwar period. Not until 1950 did the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland take responsibility for administering the Service which from then on was funded entirely by the centre. Yet, ironically, the ‘Troubles’ led to the Probation Service in Northern Ireland being granted greater autonomy from the civil service in the 1980s when the reverse course was being pursued on the mainland. A Probation Board representative of the whole community was established and granted considerable autonomy to engage community-based groups to assist in the supervision of offenders. The Service also adopted various means of disengaging itself from the political dimension of much offending behaviour in Northern Ireland. The corollary was that probation officers in Northern Ireland failed to challenge the sectarian attitudes rife within the province, though, ironically, the service engaged and developed partnerships with the divided Northern Ireland community to a greater extent than anywhere else in the United Kingdom. The peace process since 1995, as O’Mahoney and Chapman indicate, has seen the Northern Ireland probation service being drawn back into a mainstream debate similar to elsewhere – closer working with the prison service, ‘What Works’ programmes, a greater emphasis on public protection, etc. – but one legacy of the Troubles and the tradition of community engagement has advanced further in Northern Ireland than elsewhere – restorative justice.

Chapter 1
Humanising justice: the English Probation Service up to 1972

Mike Nellis

Introduction

There can be no doubt whatever that [the Probation of Offenders Act] will prevent crime and, to a large extent, empty our jails.

(Earl of Meath, House of Lords, 5 August 1907)

The great contribution of the probation service has been to the humanisation of justice.

(Joan King 1969: 15)

The Probation Service’s history and traditions are in stark contrast to the present political approach to offenders, with its emphasis on a punitive criminal justice system.

(Buchanan and Millar 1997: 36)

As the Probation Service of England and Wales commemorates its centenary in 2007, one might reasonably ask who, nowadays, apart from historians, might be interested in the early history of probation in England – and why? A somewhat mythic ‘origins and development of probation’ story focused on ‘police court missionaries’ has long circulated within the service (Coddington 1950; Jarvis 1972; Osler 1995; North and Smith 2001), and probation veterans might well assume they have ‘read it all before’. More recent employees and new trainees, on the other hand – unborn even in the year where this chapter ends – can have no prima facie reason for thinking that events prior to 1972 might have relevance to their present endeavours and ambitions. In their working world, the past few years have seen a concerted attempt by politicians and senior probation managers to distance the Service from what (in their terms) were unduly liberal and ineffective forms of practice. In the mission statement of the (then) newly formed National Probation Service (NPS), for example, its Director-General informed staff that she intended to ‘lead the Service against the grain of its past history and traditions’ (Wallis 2001: 5). To a large extent (and well before the advent of the NPS), incremental procedural and cultural ‘detraditionalisation’ had indeed been occurring, aided by generational change among service staff and wider social changes in British society. Thus, in spirit, style and terminology, the community supervision of offenders today differs substantially from what it was even 30 years ago, let alone a century ago (McWilliams 1987, 1994) – and it is still changing. Under the rubric of ‘modernisation’ – a New Labour watchword across the public services – ‘past practices’ in criminal justice, perhaps particularly in probation, have been variously represented by politicians as an anachronism, an embarrassment and a burden – never as a useful resource.

What is – or was – this ‘probation tradition’ that the new modernisers have set themselves against? Tradition in general is a mix of memory, myth, historical data, hallowed places, people and incidents, retold stories, practice wisdom and enduring institutional routines. It also tends to have a strong normative dimension – a sense of the way things ought to be, a distinctive ‘moral imagination’. In a seminal work Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) rightly argued that cultural, political and organisational traditions are invariably ‘invented’ to serve contemporary social and political purposes, while recognising that it is in the very nature of traditions to feel, not artificially constructed, but ‘natural’, ‘objective’ and ‘given’ ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of abbreviations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1 The Story of Probation in England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland
• Part 2 Probation Services: Impact, Prospects and Potential in Everyday Practice
• Part 3 What Works in Probation?
• Glossary
• Index