Reducing Reoffending

Fergus McNeill, Bill Whyte

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781843922186
• eBook ISBN: 9781134042708
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Reducing Reoffending provides a critical overview of social work and community justice in Scotland, taking full account of recent developments. The book is divided into three comprehensive sections. Part one of the book provides a critical analysis of the challenge of reducing reoffending in Scotland and locates this challenge within its historical context. Part one also reviews the available evidence about when, how and why people stop offending; about desistance from crime. This analysis exposes not only the complexities of desistance processes, but also the many difficulties that offenders face in making the related transition. Part two of the book provides an account of the legal contexts of criminal justice social work services in Scotland analysing both the role that social work plays in the sentencing process and its role in supervising offenders in the community. The final part the book addresses questions of how the practice of supervision might be best developed so as to support desistance and reduce reoffending, though the books final conclusion is that reducing reoffending requires a much broader commitment to promoting and realising justice in the community.

Part I

Analysing the Challenge

1. The history of social work with offenders in Scotland¹

Probation has been described as a process of social reconstruction under the guidance of the Court and the Probation Officer. It is much more than a gesture of leniency. Properly applied the conditions of Probation differ in sufficient degree to meet individual needs. It means supervision, firm and friendly understanding and guidance of one human being by another. (City of Glasgow 1955: 8)

‘… Now listen Joe, I’m here to be trusted

But mess me about and your probation’s busted!’

As time passed by, we began to talk

My days were over of running amok …

(‘The Social Worker’, Joe, HMP Barlinnie 1996)

Introduction

This chapter provides a brief outline of the history of social work with adult offenders in Scotland. Though it might seem irrelevant or even indulgent to reflect upon the origins of the service in the context of the important contemporary changes that are occurring within criminal justice social work in Scotland, we would argue that it is precisely these changes that make analysis of the past essential. In similar vein, Nellis (2001) has recently warned us of the dangers of the ‘forced forgetting’ of the past that often accompanies centralised modernisation. Commenting on developments in England and Wales around the time of the establishment of the National Probation Service, Nellis wrote:

In the midst of these changes, someone, somewhere should ensure that the probation contribution to the penal heritage is properly remembered … [probation history] needs to be remembered because conscious acts of remembrance and reflection — proper analytical history — could remind the contemporary service of its roots and achievements, its turning points, its lost opportunities, its past ambitions and its unrealised possibilities. In short, a historically tutored memory may help us to realise that the centralised, highly managerial, and potentially short-lived future into which the service is being drawn is not the only — or the brightest — future that it might have had. (Nellis 2001: 35)

This chapter lays no claim to being a ‘proper analytical history’ but it is intended as a conscious act of remembrance of probation’s origins. Though the links between probation, juvenile justice and the child-saving movement would allow us to begin this history in the nineteenth or even the eighteenth centuries, our focus on social work services for adult offenders allows to begin with the advent of probation in Scotland in 1905. The subsequent history of probation is then divided into three periods: early probation (1905–1945), post-war probation (1945–1968) and probation in the social work departments (1969 to the present day). We then move on to discuss the contemporary shift towards ‘offender management’, exploring to what extent these developments represent significant continuities or discontinuities with the past. As a preface, however, it is necessary to make some comments about probation histories themselves.

Revising probation histories

The history of probation in England and Wales has attracted significant recent attention. In particular, Maurice Vanstone, by building on the critical work of Bill McWilliams (1983, 1985, 1986, 1987) and focusing on practice-related discourses, has significantly challenged and revised the traditional story of probation’s origins as an essentially altruistic endeavour, characterised by humanitarian impulses linked to religious ideals. As Vanstone (2004) notes, Young’s (1976) earlier account of the history of probation stressed the role of charity in confirming middle-class ideas about society. Charity maintained the position of the middle classes by confirming that where unfortunates failed to capitalise on the opportunities that charitable endeavours provided, they confirmed their own intractable individual degeneracy, deflecting attention from broader economic or political analyses of social problems. Among a broader range of philanthropic activities, probation emerges in this account as a class-based activity that justifies the existing social order and defends it through its mechanisms of persuasion, supervision and control.

Probation’s charitable roots, however, form only part of the story of its origins. Vanstone suggests that:

although the evangelical humanitarian mission is an important element in the story of early probation, the emergence of the study of individual psychology, the shift from individualism to individualization in the application of punishment, and political and societal concerns about the maintenance of social order have been neglected or at least underplayed. (Vanstone 2004: 34)

Vanstone (2004) draws on the work of Rose (1985, 1996), which describes the emergence of psychiatry (in the broadest sense) as a political science and its increasing influence in the penal realm. Though earlier ideas of Christian charity endured, probation became progressively more closely aligned to this new science. In effect, probation officers became the caseworkers of these new ways of understanding or diagnosing the aetiologies (or causes) of offending and of how best to ‘treat’ offenders.

The emergence of this more scientific discourse and its role in the professionalisation of probation was not entirely benign. For example, Vanstone (2004) notes the ‘silences’ in traditional histories concerning the less palatable aspects of the new science, including the fondness for eugenics evidenced by some of probation’s early patrons and practitioners. However, Vanstone also draws attention to a perhaps more significant silence in traditional histories concerning the role of probation in justifying the use of imprisonment. Although, as we see below, probation seems always to have been about diversion from custody, the process of selecting ‘suitable’ cases necessarily provided rationalisations for punishment as well as leniency. Thus, just as in the missionary era the precursors of probation officers discursively constructed some as deserving and some as undeserving of ‘mercy’, so in the scientific era probation officers differentiated amenable from incorrigible offenders by deploying narratives of suitability for ‘treatment’.

Most accounts of probation’s early history, whether traditional or revisionist, draw primarily on policy discourses as their main sources. The originality of Vanstone’s recent work rests in his determination to seek, wherever possible, evidence of practitioners’ views about the modes of penality that they were constructing or enacting and of how these constructions shifted over time. Thus he aims to move beyond official accounts of penal purposes and practices and to expose areas of consonance and dissonance in the parallel histories of policy and of practice. Frustratingly, the prospects for producing such a rich analysis within the Scottish context seem bleak. There are very few sources for a Scottish history of probation. First, there is no established traditional history to revise by contextualising it within broader social and cultural changes. Second, there is no comprehensive account of the development of probation policy in Scotland. Third, even if these traditional or official histories did exist, there are precious few surviving accounts from early practitioners with which those histories might be compared. In this chapter, all that can be offered is the exploration of a few sources to sketch out some preliminary analysis of some interesting or distinctive features of social work with adult offenders in Scotland.

Early probation: punishment, supervision and treatment

Glasgow was among the first parts of Scotland (and of the UK) to establish a recognisable probation service delivered by a state as opposed to a charitable agency (Scottish Office 1947). The Glasgow service was established as early as 1905 and a very brief history of its first 50 years was published by the City of Glasgow Probation Area Committee in 1955 (City of Glasgow 1955). This document suggests that the origins of probation in Glasgow were linked to public concern about the excessive use of custody for fine-defaulters. The authors note that a report on judicial statistics for Scotland revealed that 43,000 people were received into prison on these grounds in 1904 (16,000 from Glasgow alone) at the rate of 800 per week and that in Scotland at that time one person in 75 of the population was sent to prison compared to one person in 145 in England and Wales (City of Glasgow 1955: 9).

Probation emerged in Glasgow as a response to this penal crisis largely because of the efforts of Bailie John Bruce Murray, a local councillor who had taken a ‘great interest in the treatment of offenders and who had studied the workings of the Probation Service in various parts of the United States of America’ (City of Glasgow 1955: 9). Murray persuaded the Glasgow Corporation (or Council) to appoint a special committee (in June 1905) to investigate establishing a trial for a system of probation. On 14 December 1905, the committee submitted a report, which was approved by the Corporation, recommending that the chief constable be invited to select police officers for each District Police Court to act, in plain clothes, as probation officers of the court. Their duties were to include daily attendance at the courts to receive instruction from magistrates in cases that they deemed suitable for probation; to make enquiries as to the offenders’ circumstances and their offence, for the guidance of the courts; to observe and supervise the probationer in line with the method suggested by the magistrate during the period fixed for continuation, caution or otherwise;² and to make reports to the magistrate. Six police officers of the rank of detective sergeant were subsequently appointed. Shortly afterwards, three women were appointed as probation officers to work with child offenders. By 1919, there were eleven (male) police officers working as probation officers and five women probation officers.

Perhaps partly because it was located at the outset within the police service the initial emphasis in practice seems to have been on delivering supervision, albeit of a caring sort, rather than ‘treatment’. Mahood (2002) captures the paternalistic tone of supervision well in discussing the early use of probation with juveniles:

Ideally the probation officer would be a Sunday school teacher, or someone connected with the Boy Scouts or some other youth club, ‘so that the officer may have his ward as much as possible under his care, and give him the best possible attention’. (Mahood 2002: 445)

The Glasgow history, despite the praise that it reserves for some of the early police-probation officers, implicitly characterises this model of practice as being limited, noting that it was the Probation of Offenders (Scotland) Act 1931 that (following the report of a departmental committee set up by the Secretary of State to review the Protection and Training of Children and Young Offenders) ‘completely revolutionised the Probation Service in Glasgow and the idea of treatment, training and reformation of Probationers superseded that of supervision’ (City of Glasgow 1955: 11).

As well as effectively creating a comprehensive set of local services by establishing probation committees in each local authority, the 1931 Act created a Central Probation Council to advise the Secretary of State. In terms of the governance of practice, however, one of the most intriguing provisions of the 1931 Act was that it expressly prohibited the appointment of serving or former police officers as probation staff, indicating that this may have been a common practice in Scotland beyond Glasgow and that it had fallen out of favour. This change in staffing arrangements seems closely associated with the transition from supervision to treatment. The significance of the new ‘science’ for the authors of the Glasgow history is evidenced, for example, in the assertion that ‘treatment’, although evidently combining social and medical notions, nonetheless required an individual process following on from some kind of selection (if not diagnosis). Their discussion of selection reflects the assumption that only some offenders are ‘reclaimable’; probation ‘should be applied only to those in whom wrong-doing is not habitual and whose age, record, or home circumstances, give reasonable hope of reformation’ (City of Glasgow 1955: 7). The discourse of scientific practice continues in the description of the officer as someone who through interviewing and home visiting,

studies the habits and surroundings of the Probationer and, by the impact of his personality, ever-ready advice and the force of example, tries to influence the offender towards the normal in life and conduct. The Probationer is helped to sustain natural relations with his fellows — relationships of employment, of friendships and of home ties. (City of Glasgow 1955: 8, emphases added)

In the development of a treatment approach to probation practice, it is likely that women officers played a pivotal role. Though their work was initially limited to juvenile offenders, it seems significant that, in Glasgow, the five women officers recruited in the police-probation era were the only survivors of the 1931 Act’s proscription of police-probation officers. The Glasgow history acknowledges that ‘the knowledge and experience of these women were of great help in setting the stumbling feet of the newcomers [one women and six men] on the right road’ (City of Glasgow 1955: 13). In the light of other sources, this role as experienced staff in a reconfigured service after 1931 may have given these women (and others like them throughout Scotland), the opportunity to advance the treatment ideal; an ideal that had been developing in and through their work with juveniles even before the 1931 Act:

According to Mary Hill, JP, the first female probation officer in Scotland, the probation system ‘introduced a new era in penal treatment, because it recognizes man as an intelligence to be reformed by methods directed to the inner self, rather than a machine to be tinkered at externally’. (Mahood 1995: 58–9)

Indeed, Mahood (1995) locates the emerging probation service primarily among a range of evolving institutions associated with the child-saving movement. She draws on the accounts of early probation officers and their contemporaries to describe the role that probation played in extending the reach of the state into families’ lives:

According to one probation officer in 1925, ‘It often happens that a child is put on probation and the probation officer had to shoulder the whole family’. Thus under the probation system, surveillance clearly did not stop with the offender. ‘There is frequently a reacting benefit to the other members of the household and a higher sense of responsibility introduced into the home. It is frequently found that there is a laxity of parental control in the home and the visits of the probation officer tend to strengthen the control.’ (Mahood 1995: 59–60)

Moreover, in some circumstances probation officers were...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures and tables
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• Introduction: challenging times
• Part I: Analysing the Challenge
• Part II: The Legal Context
• Part III: Towards Effective Practice
• Conclusion: reducing reoffending and community justice
• Appendix: study guide
• References
• Index