Handbook of Public Protection

Mike Nash, Andy Williams

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781136842245
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Public protection has become an increasingly central theme in the work of the criminal justice agencies in many parts of the world in recent years. Its high public profile and consequent political sensitivity means that growing numbers of criminal justice professionals find their daily work load dominated by the assessment and management of high risk of harm offenders. Developments such as sex offender registers and (in the UK) Multi Agency Public Protection Arrangements (Mappa) have made this issue not only a core activity for police, probation and prison services, but to a range of other organizations as well, in particular social work and the health services. Partnership has become central to the concept of public protection. At the same time the concept of public protection has occasioned increased political debate. Protecting the public from high risk or dangerous offenders has become an international issue and has increasingly shaped criminal justice policy.

This text brings together leading authorities in the field, providing authoritative coverage of the theory and practice of public protection, both in the UK and internationally. It provides a critical review of contemporary public protection practice as well as up-to-date research and thinking in the field.

Part One
The Context of Public Protection

Introduction

Mike Nash and Andy Williams

This first section is intended to set the scene. The aim is to open up debates that transgress practice and theory, which in turn are covered further on in this volume. It is also intended in a way to underline why we decided to ask so many people to contribute to this handbook. It is our view that public protection, risk and dangerousness have assumed a position of very considerable influence within the wider criminal justice process. This is obvious in the more overt developments in legislation such as the introduction of indeterminate sentences for public protection (IPP), but we would argue that its influence is far more widespread. For example, the creation of multi-agency public protection arrangements (MAPPA) has not only led to closer working relationships between previously quite distinct agencies (police and probation), but has also drawn in a much wider family of agencies as those having a ‘duty to cooperate’. From employment services, to victims’ groups and housing authorities, the public protection network has spread its tentacles far and wide. In so doing there have inevitably been signs of cultural transference between them, none more so than between police and probation. We would argue that the public protection ethos is a powerful one, fully supported by governments and, of course, a constant source of interest for the media. It is a difficult agenda to resist and indeed has spread its influence to other areas of criminal justice practice. The probation service, for example, has significantly shifted its focus over the past two decades, and while this is not entirely due to the growth in public protection it has probably facilitated and accelerated that change. The chapters in this first section are therefore intended to explore the significance of the public protection agenda including a historical overview, a theoretical analysis and an exploration of its politics.

We start with Herschel Prins’ insightful overview of dangerousness, risk and public protection. He is uniquely placed to write this chapter having been a probation officer, psychiatric social worker and academic. He has been writing in this field for over five decades and been a member of many important committees. He has been awarded numerous honorary professorships and his work is hallmarked and underpinned by his work with offender-patients, with practitioners from a variety of disciplines and as a trainer in multi-agency approaches to risk and dangerousness. His expansive chapter covers several decades of developments in assessing and managing risk and is punctuated by reference to key case studies of some of the most notorious offenders of recent times. In a world that increasingly appears risk averse, Prins takes us to a discussion on the acceptability or tolerability of risk, the difference between the two perhaps reflecting the type of society in which we live. Many of his case studies offer insights into how vital clues about the offender’s behaviour were missed, overlooked or not given the significance they merited. Indeed, he makes the important point that often those ‘lower down the pecking order’ may have the most to contribute – if they are listened to. Prison officers in particular might come into this category as people who get to know offenders well but whose observations often fail to appear in official reports. What is striking about these cases is that, changes in legislation aside, the ‘lessons to be learned’ still appear in inquiries into tragedies today. Systems have undoubtedly improved but the operation and interpretation of those systems by various professionals continues to appear to cause difficulty.

Prins reminds us that human judgement is fallible and system failure is almost inevitable – as such it is important that false assurances of safety and risk minimalisation are not given. Those who choose this route (politicians might be tempted) should remember that pride comes before a fall. But perhaps Prins’ main message has to be the importance of information, notably about the offender and his/her offending behaviour. Gathering this information is a painstaking process and requires an enquiring mind. His chapter might go some way to helping practitioners to think along these lines.

Mark Brown sets out to make us think about and rethink our perceptions of dangerousness. By working with the notion of the sex offender as monster he explores why certain offenders enter the realm of dangerousness and why other, equally serious offenders do not – with the more recent exception of terror suspects. Brown utilises the ‘black box’ model of the human mind (into which one cannot see) to try to understand why people make quite specific demands that quite specific sorts of offenders be subject to an equally specific set of measures of control and prevention. By utilising the work of Michel Foucault, Brown concludes that it is not the difference of sex offenders (or indeed terrorists) but their very ordinariness that leads to calls for these measures. He refers to Foucault for whom the monster was ‘the spontaneous, brutal, but consequently natural form of the unnatural’. ‘It is’, Foucault said, ‘the magnifying model, the form of every possible little irregularity exhibited by the games of nature … the major model of every little deviation … [and] the principle of intelligibility of all the forms that circulate as the small change of abnormality.’ Brown argues that the regulation of these individuals is an extension of the self-regulation that ordinary men operate, and indeed are forced to operate, in their everyday interactions with vulnerable groups. It is this connectedness with ‘ordinary’ populations that elicits such widespread support for the precautionary measures that are in so many ways illiberal. If we can understand why we conceptualise dangerousness as we do then there may be hope that we can not only reconfigure our approach to dangerousness but also think more constructively about who these measures need to be targeted at.

The final chapter in this section is Mike Nash’s review of the politics of public protection. We have indicated above that we consider this to be a highly politicised agenda and a number of chapters in this volume allude to the influence of politics at periods of key change. Perhaps one of the major points to be made is how public protection policy, even in its formative phase, did so much to shape the law and order politics of the Labour Party. It served as a catalyst for Labour’s transformation from being labelled soft on crime to being ‘tough’ under Tony Blair. The then Home Secretary Michael Howard had worked tirelessly on developing his populist policies, not least in the hope of smoking out the soft underbelly of the Labour opposition. This he singularly failed to do, and in opposition and in power Labour has almost seamlessly assumed the Conservative law and order mantle.

The focus on policies aimed at protecting the most ‘innocent’ and vulnerable members of society brook little opposition in or outside of Parliament. These measures have, however, grown at an almost exponential rate to the point where huge powers can be deployed against the potentially dangerous or high risk of harm offenders. The political message given out to an anxious public is that these measures are necessary for their protection, at the same time giving a sense that the problem continues to grow and that governments are giving the agencies the powers they need to protect us. Within this debate, which is based on a more than slight distortion of reality, the rights of offenders are incrementally being reduced (see Eric Janus’ chapter on how this scenario has developed in the United States). It has to be said that in some recent cases there have been successful legal challenges to certain government policies in the field. However, and again mirroring the United States, these challenges have been defeated on appeal to the higher courts. Protecting the public has assumed a dominant position in British politics which appears to continue to sweep all before it. We hope that this volume will encourage readers to pause and take stock.

Chapter 1
‘Dangers by being despised grow great’^*

Herschel Prins

Introduction

When the editors of this volume invited me to contribute I began to think about how long it had been since I first became interested in what is generally called dangerousness in both the criminal justice and forensic mental health fields. I suppose it stemmed originally from my very early days as a probation officer in the 1950s. To some extent my interest could be seen as somewhat dormant until 1977 when, in my view, two seminal papers appeared in the literature. The first was a fascinating article written from a criminological perspective by Professor Tony Bottoms (now Sir Anthony Bottoms) on the basis of an inaugural professorial lecture at Sheffield University (Bottoms 1977). The second was a most thoughtful (and thought-provoking) clinical contribution by my friend the late Dr Peter Scott. His paper was published a short while after his too early demise (Scott 1977). From then on I attempted to take a more focused interest in the phenomenon, and have written and lectured pretty extensively about it. Having said that, readers of this volume might well ask whether I have anything to say that’s new. In my defence I will try to place the issue of so-called dangerousness in perspective; what follows might be deemed to be a summary of some of my previous work (for a more extended treatment of the topic see, for example, Prins 1999). The present contribution attempts to deal with the following aspects: first, a very brief historical context; second, a comment on the background of a society obsessed by ‘danger’ and ‘risk’; third, danger and risk defined; and fourth, clinical aspects.

In the Middle Ages, and even earlier, the term ‘dangerous’ seems to have been applied in a general way to those persons or groups of persons who were considered to compromise the survival of the State. Rennie (1978) reminds us of the extent to which the poor and the disadvantaged were frequently referred to as the ‘dangerous classes’. Indeed, such an assumption seems to be

*Edmund Burke, 1729–97. Speech on the Petition of the Unitarians. 11 May 1792.

implicit in English Poor Law legislation from the time of Elizabeth I onwards, namely that the poor were not only idle but dangerous. As Rennie states, ‘For nearly four hundred years, from the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries, the English criminal law was obsessed with vagrants and beggars, who were viewed as a great danger to society’ (1978: 38). It was not until the eighteenth century onwards that the so-called psychiatrisation of delinquency occurred (Foucault 1978). The results of this trend were far-reaching and powerful resonances can be seen in today’s society when the mentally ill are deemed by the media to be particularly prone to violence. They conveniently forget that the severely mentally ill (such as those suffering from some forms of schizophrenic illness) may be much more likely to harm themselves than others. However, in equity it must be said that there does seem to be a raised risk of violence associated with some forms of schizophrenia, but this is only most likely when the disorder is compounded by illicit drug use and social disadvantage.

So much for the brief history. I now move on to consider the current context in which we consider and deal with so-called dangerous behaviour and the risk of its occurrence. Readers will be quick to note that I have not yet attempted to define these terms. I remedy this shortly.

A risk-obsessed society

In 1992 the Royal Society made a sobering comment (1992: 3): ‘Risk is ubiquitous and no human society can be considered risk free’. Human beings are made anxious about ambiguity and uncertainty and will sometimes engage in dubious and harmful practices to avoid them. Much recent and current concern about so-called dangerous people has its roots in such phenomena; unless they are properly understood, many of our efforts aimed at dealing with such people will fail. Beck puts an eloquent gloss on the matter, as follows: ‘Calculating and managing risks which nobody really knows has become one of our main preoccupations. That used to be a specialist job for actuaries, insurers and scientists. Now we all have to engage in it, with whatever rusty tools we can lay our hands on – sometimes the calculator, sometimes the astrology column’ (Beck 1998: 12).

Crucial to our understanding is the uncertainty of risk prediction (see later). This is particularly important at the present time when blame is so quickly apportioned in a variety of hazardous and tragic circumstances, be they homicides, train, air or sea disasters, flood damage, or infections of one kind or another.

On not being allowed to swim

Sometimes our concerns about ‘risk avoidance’ assume such ludicrous proportions that it requires the courts to bring an element of good sense into the situation. A few years ago the Hampstead Heath Winter Swimming Club in London took the Corporation of London to court against their decision to close their three ponds on safety grounds when they were not being supervised by lifeguards. Apparently changes to the lifeguards’ duty hours meant that club members were not allowed to swim at their own risk. The doughty swimmers took their case to the High Court. The presiding judge – Mr Justice Burnton – decided in their favour, stating that in this case the law would ‘protect individual freedom of action … and avoid imposing a grey and dull safety regime on every one’. His Lordship relied in part upon a previous judgment in an earlier case in which the House of Lords found against a man injured when diving into a quarry pit. ‘If people want to … dive into ponds or lakes that is their affair’ (Independent 27 April 2005, p. 7).

One could, of course, quote many other examples of this excessive preoccupation with risk avoidance. Teachers are now reluctant to comfort children physically for fear of being accused of paedophilic inclinations. They are also reluctant to engage in adventure-type school trips for fear of being taken through the civil or criminal courts if accident befalls. Far fewer children gain from the healthy exercise of walking to school for parental fear of accident or assault. Overprotection of this kind ill prepares children for the Hobbesian view of life as ‘solitary, nasty, brutish and short’. In America it is said that it is becoming increasingly difficult to recruit doctors to the practice of obstetrics and gynaecology for fear of litigation whe...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Figures and tables
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• Part One The Context of Public Protection
• Part Two Assessing and Managing Risk
• Part Three Doing the Job
• Part Four A Comparative Perspective
• Part Five Contemporary Issues in Public Protection
• Index