Redemption, Rehabilitation and Risk Management

A History of Probation

George Mair, Lol Burke

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781843922506
• eBook ISBN: 9781136651977
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Redemption, Rehabilitation and Risk Management provides the most accessible and up-to-date account of the origins and development of the Probation Service in England and Wales.

The book explores and explains the changes that have taken place in the service, the pressures and tensions that have shaped change, and the role played by government, research, NAPO, and key individuals from its origins in the nineteenth century up to the plans for the service outlined by the Conservative/Liberal Democrat government.

The probation service is a key agency in dealing with offenders; providing reports for the courts that assist sentencing decisions; supervizing released prisoners in the community and working with the victims of crime. Yet despite dealing with more offenders than the prison service, at lower cost and with reconviction rates that are lower than those associated with prisons, the Probation Service has been ignored, misrepresented, taken for granted and marginalized, and probation staff have been sneered at as 'do-gooders'. The service as a whole is currently under serious threat as a result of budget cuts, organizational restructuring, changes in training, and increasingly punitive policies. This book details how probation has come to such a pass.

By tracing the evolution of the probation service, Redemption, Rehabilitation and Risk Management not only sheds invaluable light on a much misunderstood criminal justice agency, but offers a unique examination of twentieth century criminal justice policy. It will be essential reading for students and academics in criminal justice and criminology.

1 Origins

An Act of Parliament represents not only a beginning, but also a culmination. On the one hand, an Act sets out new legislation that will take effect from a specified date – it may be new forms of practice, new modes of allocation of services, new forms of control, new agencies – but the implication is that the Act is a starting point. But an Act is also the summation of activity that may have taken considerable time and energy to pull together and formulate. In this chapter, we will discuss the various ideas, individuals, initiatives and organisations that lie behind the 1907 Probation of Offenders Act. It is difficult enough today to try to elucidate the origins of recent Acts of Parliament; these tend to be complex, convoluted and all too often bathed in degrees of political spin. Looking back more than 100 years there is probably rather less spin to worry about (although it would be naive to claim that spin did not exist), but also less information in general. We do, of course, have the benefit of hindsight, which permits a more objective assessment of the factors that influenced the Act, but we do not have any real feel for what was considered at the time to be important.

It would be an artificial task – as well as an impossible one – to try to pinpoint a precise moment when the idea of probation began. As David Garland has consistently argued, there is very little evidence for concerted, carefully planned policy making in criminal justice; instead it is ‘a matter of fragmentary lines of development crossing and intersecting, or else being lost as they go off on implausible tangents’ (Garland 1985: 208). Probation emerges from a number of disparate ideas, developments and initiatives that can be found in the nineteenth century; a variety of factors that were not necessarily related to each other in any clear way at the time, although it is now possible to discern linkages. All of the factors examined in this chapter played a part in the emergence of probation, but it is important to emphasise that we do not list them in a simple chronological fashion or classify them according to their significance. The order in which they are discussed tends to move from the more general to the more specific. The key point to bear in mind is that while the various factors are discussed separately here, they certainly did not exist in separate silos. We have attempted to examine them individually only in order to simplify the analysis.

Religion

It is difficult today to appreciate fully the significance of religion in Victorian Britain. We now live in what is, essentially, a secular society, whereas mainstream Victorian culture was deeply embedded in a world view founded upon religion. And not just any religion: the Church of England or some of the sects that had broken away from it (Methodists or Baptists, for example) dominated the lives of the English. The works of the great Victorian novelists and poets – Charles Dickens, Robert Browning, George Eliot, Alfred Tennyson, Anthony Trollope – are profoundly concerned, either directly or indirectly, with issues of religious import. Politics, too, seems to have been driven to a considerable degree by religious impulses and the Evangelical movement in particular was especially influential.

Evangelical propaganda led to the suppression of duels and blood sports, evangelical drives to protect children in factories enjoyed some success, evangelicals played an important role in prison reform, and in their most impressive accomplishment by 1807 they had succeeded in abolishing the slave trade ... They played a dominant role in education: 55 per cent of children between 5 and 15 were enrolled in church-run Sunday schools. Every major figure in British political life from 1830 to 1870 with the exception of Palmerston was touched by evangelicalism ... The intellectual, moral and political cultures of Victorian Britain were based on evangelical Christian foundations.

(Allard 2005: 2–3)

William Wilberforce, one of the key individuals in the fight to abolish slavery, was an Evangelical Quaker; the Earl of Shaftesbury, who led the battle for factory reform and child labour, was proud to be an Evangelical (and was also involved in penal reform):

I think a man's religion, if it is worth anything, should enter into every sphere of life, and rule his conduct in every relation. I have always been – and, please God, always shall be – an Evangelical.

(www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/IRashley.htm)

John Howard and Elizabeth Fry, both significant figures in prison reform, were closely associated with Evangelicals (Ignatieff 1978), as was Mary Carpenter (Radzinowicz and Hood 1986). And the importance of the Evangelical movement in penal reform generally throughout the nineteenth century is demonstrated by Martin Wiener (1990).

The Evangelical movement was religion in action. Evangelicals were not content simply to sit in church on Sundays and worship God; they were concerned with going out and grappling with social problems in an attempt to ameliorate them. They had a profound concern for the souls and well-being of the poor and oppressed, and encouraged rescue work for those who deserved redemption. Salvation – the saving of souls – was central to their beliefs and this involved missionary work with sinners. But the redemption of sin, and, therefore, mercy ‘could not be extended to all’ (McWilliams 1983: 138); only those who were deserving of help could be saved. Thus, it was important to classify sinners into those who could be saved (or reformed) and those who could not, and mercy would be extended to the former group. It is somewhat ironic to consider that classification (admittedly based on clinical judgement rather than actuarial assessment) is so deeply rooted in the early days of missionary work with offenders and yet its most recent incarnations – the Offender Group Reconviction Scale (OGRS) and the Offender Assessment System (OASys) – were initially met with considerable unease by probation staff (Mair 2001).

This is not the place for a detailed analysis of the theology of the Evangelical movement and how it provided a powerful basis for dealing with what we might now call social problems (see Ignatieff 1978; McWilliams 1983; Vanstone 2004a; and Wiener 1990 for more detail), but the significance of Evangelicalism for penal reform generally in the nineteenth century, and for the development of the probation service specifically, cannot be underestimated. As McWilliams (1983) has shown, the religious impulse behind probation was superseded within 30–40 years of the introduction of probation in 1907, although its shadow lingered on until the introduction of the National Probation Service in 2001.

Philanthropy

The charitable impulse in Victorian life was just as significant as – and, indeed, intimately related to – the importance of religion. Christianity enjoined its adherents to practise charity towards those who were in need; this would not only save the soul of the giver, but also help the needy, and this injunction was deeply engrained amongst Victorians even of limited means. Victorian philanthropy indeed may have been

... little less than a golden age of Christian social service that yielded benefits far beyond the provision of welfare services. It provided the foundation of civil society. It humanized urban industrial life and relations between rich and poor. It introduced a higher moral tone to working-class life. It contributed to social cohesion. It gave skills and status to disadvantaged groups and, as such, has been described as a nursery school for democracy.

(Bowpitt 2007: 106)

Charitable ventures aimed at young delinquents, such as the Marine Society and the Philanthropic Society, had been established by the beginning of the nineteenth century, and soon after the Society for the Improvement of Prison Discipline and for the Reformation of Juvenile Offenders was formed, which advocated segregating young offenders from adult criminals (Pinchbeck and Hewitt 1969; 1973). That there was a considerable need for philanthropic endeavours was made clear by the work of Henry Mayhew with his London Labour and the London Poor first published in 1851 (and interestingly followed up in 1862 by The Criminal Prisons of London), which showed graphically the extent of poverty in the metropolis. Mayhew's work was followed up in the 1860s by Joseph Rowntree's studies of poverty (the first of which examined the links between crime and poverty), and towards the end of the century by Charles Booth's massive survey Life and Labour of the People in London. These studies not only demonstrated empirically the existence of poverty, they also classified different kinds of poverty and – by implication – suggested that as there was so much poverty difficult choices would have to be made about who should be helped given the limited resources available.

With no state apparatus to support or direct it, charity had, for more than half of the nineteenth century, been ad hoc, localised, loosely organised – and thus increasingly seen as inefficient. In 1869 the Charity Organisation Society (COS) was formed with the aim of improving charitable work by organising it, regulating it, and scientifically classifying those who might be its objects into the deserving and the undeserving. Only the former would receive assistance; helping the latter would be wasteful. But how was it possible to differentiate between those who genuinely deserved help and those who did not? The answer was by careful inquiry into those who applied for help – one of the principles of the COS:

Careful investigation of applications for charitable aid, by competent officers, each case being duly considered after inquiry, by a Committee of experienced volunteers, including representatives of the principal local charities and religious denominations.

(Mowat, quoted in Garland 1985: 116)

Charitable activity, however, in addition to its philanthropic aims, can also be seen as having a political objective. Peter Young has argued that

... charitable activity, including probation, operated as a mechanism which politically incorporated a possibly oppositional working-class culture into an institutional and cultural structure based on middle-class values and ideologies. Thus social work should not be seen as a gradual liberalisation and democratisation of society, but as a directed attempt to circumscribe the scope of legitimate action and life styles available to working-class people.

(Young 1976: 55)

While the close relationship between religion and charity slowly began to unravel towards the end of the century, for much of the second half of the nineteenth century the links between the two were inescapable. Charity was one of the distinguishing features of the religious individual. Charity was meant to save sinners. Charity was putting Christian beliefs into practice and thus was especially suited to Evangelicals. Not all could be saved or helped and thus the need to differentiate between sheep and goats was the same for religion and philanthropy. It would be difficult to over-emphasise how many of the great philanthropists were driven by their religious beliefs: Wilberforce, Shaftesbury, Fry, Carpenter, Rowntree, Barnardo, to name but a few.

But this is not to suggest that charity and religion always proceeded smoothly hand-in-hand. Garland (1985) has demonstrated that there were real tensions between groups in the charity movement. And given the levels of need found by the likes of Rowntree, Booth and Mayhew it slowly became evident that charity alone – no matter how well organised or efficient – was not enough. The state began to move into the sphere of social work as the century ended.

Crime

While crude data on the numbers committed for trial for indictable offences began to be collected in 1805, it took a further 50 years before anything that might be termed a useful data set began to appear in 1857. It is, therefore, difficult to be precise about trends in crime during the nineteenth century. Radzinowicz and Hood (1986: 113–15) argue for three discernible periods: for the first 40 years of the century they see ‘unrelieved pessimism’ with crime steadily increasing, followed by 30 years of ‘qualified optimism’ and then a final 30 years of ‘unfaltering optimism [when] [t]he war against crime seemed to be won’. Wiener (1990: 15) argues that there was considerable anxiety about crime in the early Victorian period with ‘contemporaries almost unanimous in perceiving an ever-rising amount of criminality of all kinds, and particularly offences committed by juveniles’. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, the flogging of adults was abolished in 1861, only to be reintroduced almost immediately in 1863 with the Security against Violence Act (the Garotter's Act) of that year, which was a result of the panic engendered by the garotting outrages of 1862.

Perceptions of crime changed, however, as the second half of the century developed.

Although non-indictable offences increased during the last 30 years of the century the more serious indictable offences fell, so much so that Wiener (1990: 258) can talk of the ‘success of Victorian criminal policy’. It is possible to discern two very general responses to crime that would seem to be related respectively to the first half of the century when crime was seen to be increasing and therefore a problem, and the second when crime was increasingly seen as being under control and less of a problem. Because of the perception of crime as a problem, there were various responses to try to deal with it – one of these being the establishment of police forces first in London, then in the counties and boroughs (and this, of course, had an impact upon levels of crime). There were also a variety of charitable endeavours focusing particularly on juveniles as they were seen as being heavily involved in crime. As early as 1815 the Society for Investigating the Causes of the Alarming Increase of Juvenile Delinquency in the Metropolis had been established. In a report the following year the Society argued against the imprisonment of young offenders because of the effects of contamination by adult prisoners (Pinchbeck and Hewitt 1973). In 1817 the Society for the Improvement of Prison Discipline and the Reformation of Juvenile Offenders was formed, and it too argued for the separation of juvenile from adult criminals. The Children's Friend Society appeared in 1830 (Radzinowicz and Hood 1986). The reformatory movement ultimately succeeded with the Reformatory Schools Act of 1854 and the Industrial Schools Act of 1857 (see below).

As a result of the perception that crime was becoming much less of a problem, during the second half of the century there were more concerted moves to punish less harshly and more constructively, the beginnings of what we would now refer to as the rehabilitation of the criminal. Perhaps the most significant moment in this trend was the Report of the Departmental Committee on Prisons in 1895 (the Gladstone Report) which advocated introducing a more reform-minded approach to dealing with prisoners who were to be seen as reclaimable and no longer as hopeless cases.

It is ironic that we think that it is only since around 1980 that crime has been a serious problem in England and Wales. Even a brief examination of a handful of the various nineteenth-century studies would suggest that for much of the century crime was a topic of considerable significance for government (e.g. Garland 1985; Radzinowicz and Hood 1986; Rawlings 1999; Wiener 1990). And this in an era when there were no mass media, few developed rapid transport links in the country, no mass communications and little feel for what we now call public opinion.

Exceptional cases

As the discussion of both religion and philanthropy has noted, classification was a vital aspect of the workings of both. Theologically speaking, not all could be saved; and for practical purposes not all of the poor could be helped. Singling out the exceptional types, therefore, who were redeemable or reclaimable became a key task and various groups were defined as requiring special treatment because of their circumstances. The most significant of these was children.

During the preceding centuries, children had been simply treated as small adults but as the nineteenth century began there were increasingly significant developments in dealing with juveniles who were either criminals or who seemed to be on the verge of becoming so. Some of the most important charitable ventures in this direction have already been mentioned, but even before these had been established the Marine Society had been founded in 1756 and the Philanthropic Society in 1788. The former aimed to divert boys of 12–16 from the criminal justice system by sending them to sea, while the latter seems to have focused (at least initially) more upon children at risk (see Radzinowicz and Hood 1986: 133–8). In 1825 the principle of segregating young offenders from adults was put into practice when one of the prison hulks¹ was specifically set aside for young convicts; it was closed down within 20 years as ‘an unredeemed failure’ (Radzinowicz and Hood 1986: 144). But the principle remained and in 1838 a penitentiary for boys was opened at Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight (it too closed as a failure, in 1864). The next steps were the introduction of reformatory schools (inspired by Mary Carpenter and supported by Shaftesbury – both Evangelicals) in 1854, which were to be used for offenders under the age of 16 following a prison sentence of at least two weeks. These were quickly followed by industrial schools in 1857 for those aged between 7 and 14 who had not been convicted but were considered to be in moral danger. In 1873 Benjamin Waugh's book The Gaol Cradle: Who Rocks It? angrily attacked the way in which juveniles were dealt with by the criminal justice system, demanding at one point ‘May not the time have come to abandon altogether the practice of juvenile imprisonment?’ (Waugh 1873: 89).

But it was not simply humanitarian concerns for the welfare of children and young offenders that drove such developments. Crime was perceived to be – to a considerable degree – a problem associated with juveniles, so focusing upon them would confront the problem effectively. Even more so, by targeting juve-niles, crime in general would be tackled:

Notions about juvenile crime and habitual criminals dovetailed in the theory that the criminal class was constantly regenerated by the transmission through upbringing of criminal dispositions. If juveniles could be reached before they became firm in the mould the vicious process might be stayed and the criminal class would diminish.

(McConville 1981: 329)

While crime was a juvenile problem, it was also seen as being closely associated with drunkenness. By the middle of the century ‘drink became perhap...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Redemption, Rehabilitation and Risk Management
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgement
• Introduction
• 1 Origins
• 2 The first decade
• 3 Consolidation
• 4 ‘A major part of our penal system?’
• 5 1950–62: A golden age?
• 6 From Morison to Martinson, 1962–74
• 7 Alternatives to custody
• 8 The end of the road?
• 9 Concluding reflections
• Notes
• References
• Index