Doing Probation Work

Identity in a Criminal Justice Occupation

Rob Mawby, Anne Worrall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136261763
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

A great deal has been written about the political, policy and practice changes that have shaped probation work but little has been written on the changes to occupational cultures and the ways in which probation workers themselves view their role. This book fills that gap by exploring the meaning of 'doing probation work' from the perspective of probation workers themselves.

Based on 60 extensive interviews with probation workers who joined the probation service from the 1960s to the present day, this book reaches beyond criminological and policy analysis to an application of sociological and organizational theory to rich qualitative data. It explores the backgrounds and motivations of probation workers, their changing relationships with other criminal justice agencies, and the complex public perceptions and media representations of probation work. The book considers the relative influences of religion, the union, diversity and feminization and, while it acknowledges that probation work is stressful, it draws innovatively on sociological and organizational concepts to categorize how workers respond to turbulent times.

This book challenges the dominant narrative of probation's decline in recent literature and constructs three 'ideal types' of probation worker - 'lifers', 'second careerists' and 'offender managers.' Each makes an essential contribution to probation cultures, which collectively contribute to, rather than undermine, the effectiveness of offender management and the future of probation work. This book will be important reading for researchers in the disciplines of criminology, criminal justice, sociology and management as well as probation workers of all grades and those in training.

1

Probation – A Tainted but Resilient Concept

Despite governmental attempts to eradicate it from criminal justice vocabulary (Worrall 2008a), the concept of ‘probation’ has proved remarkably resilient and has, in recent years, come to signify resistance to and subversion of the dominant penal discourse of ‘offender management’. It has become an ‘imaginary penality’ (Carlen 2008) – an area of work where it is necessary for practitioners to act as if they believe in the rules about the effectiveness of ‘risk-crazed governance’ while knowingly using those rules in ways that will also achieve meaning.

This is not a book about the history of probation, though we set the historic scene briefly below. Those who wish to read more about the history of probation are directed to Mair and Burke’s (2012) excellent and challenging work, Redemption, Rehabilitation and Risk Management. Nor is it a book that describes or evaluates the work of the probation service with offenders in the community. Others (Raynor and Robinson 2009; Canton 2011; Robinson 2011) have recently completed that task. This is a book about probation workers and their occupational cultures. We intend it to fit as much into the literature on the sociology of organizations as it does into criminal justice literature. It is about what motivates people to become probation workers, how they make sense of their work, how they respond to turbulent political times and media criticism, and what stories they tell about the value of their contribution to society.

While a great deal has been written about the historical, political, policy and practice changes that have shaped the role of the probation officer, very little has been written on the changes to occupational cultures and the ways in which probation workers themselves view the impact of changes to their role and very little about the relationships between probation workers and other criminal justice agencies engaged in offender management. This book aims to fill that gap by exploring the meaning of ‘doing probation work’ from the perspective of probation workers themselves. Based on 60 extensive interviews with a range of probation workers, the book will reach beyond criminological and policy analysis to an application of sociological and organizational theory to rich qualitative data.

The probation service reached its centenary in 2007 but the response of workers to this was muted and more akin to a wake than a celebration, despite the imaginative efforts of both NAPO, the National Association of Probation Officers (NAPO 2007) and Senior (2008) to compile books of recollections. Mair and Burke suggest that ‘a more considered response would have been to ask how it had come to this’ and they liken the service to a Cinderella who ‘never actually arrived at the ball’ (2012: 1). They also come to the pessimistic conclusion that while community sentences probably have some sort of future in criminal justice policy, this may well not be the case for the probation service. That it still exists after 100 years is something for which we should be grateful, they say, but ‘it has lost its roots, its traditions, its culture, its professionalism’ (2012: 192). It is the aim of this book to challenge this view and its narrative of decline. Our research suggests that, while working in a much changed world, probation workers retain a strong sense of all these things – possibly too strong for their own good. What Mair and Burke fail to give sufficient credit for is that modern probation workers can handle the ‘imaginary’. They can do what is required of them – they can be competent offender managers – while constructing identities that allow them to believe that they are still part of an ‘honourable profession’ (Probation Worker 3¹).

Setting the Scene

The probation service has its roots in the work of the nineteenth-century police court missionaries, first employed by the Church of England Temperance Society in 1876 to ‘reclaim’ offenders charged with drunkenness or drink-related offences. The Probation of Offenders Act 1907 gave magistrates’ courts the right to appoint probation officers, whose job it was to ‘advise, assist and befriend’ offenders placed under their supervision. The Criminal Justice Act 1925 made it obligatory for every court to appoint a probation officer, and during the first half of the twentieth century the work of the service expanded to include work with juveniles and families, as well as adult offenders. Part of that work included dealing with matrimonial problems and it was through this aspect of the work that the role of Divorce Court Welfare Officer developed. By the mid-1960s, where our research starts, the service had also taken responsibility for the welfare of prisoners, both inside prison and on release. In addition to the strong interpersonal skills required for supervising offenders in the community, the distinctive professional skill that probation officers developed was that of Social Inquiry (or Enquiry) – a social work assessment of an offender in their social environment, with the specific purpose of assisting courts to make sentencing decisions (Worrall and Hoy 2005: 78).

Although there had always been a degree of tension in the role of the probation officer between caring for offenders and controlling their criminal behaviour, these two aspects of the work were viewed as part and parcel of both the psychoanalytic casework and the paternalistic common-sense advice that combined to characterize the typical probation officer of the early and mid-twentieth century. By the end of the 1960s the probation service had grown from the status of a localized mission to that of a nationwide, secular, social work service to the courts. From the 1970s onwards a number of developments had paradoxical consequences for the service and resulted in a loss of identity or, to use Harris’s (1980) term, ‘dissonance’. Harris argued that probation officers were experiencing three kinds of dissonance. Moral dissonance resulted from conflicting ideologies about the purpose of probation; technical dissonance resulted from discouraging empirical evidence about the effectiveness of probation in reducing criminal behaviour; and operational dissonance resulted from the tension inherent in managing the ‘care and control’ aspects of the daily probation task (Worrall and Hoy 2005: 79).

By the mid-1980s the service was experiencing the rise of managerialism along with many other public sector organizations (Clarke et al. 1994; May 1994; Mayo et al. 2007). The most visible effect on probation officers was their perceived loss of professional autonomy and a greater emphasis on accountability through the devising of local and area objectives and, by the end of the decade, National Standards that directed practice in all aspects of report-writing and supervision. Few disputed the need to standardize some very variable and inconsistent practice across the country and between individual officers. Professional autonomy had undoubtedly been used in the past as an excuse for poor practice, but the overriding point about National Standards was that they limited the discretion of the individual probation officer and focused on the management of supervision rather than its content. In addition to making the individual officer more accountable to management, it also made the service more accountable to government (Worrall and Hoy 2005: 84).

Despite its acceptance that probation ‘is a long-established concept, well understood internationally’ (Home Office 1998: para. 2.13) the new Labour government elected in 1997 expressed its determination to abolish any terminology that might be ‘misunderstood’ or ‘associated with tolerance of crime’ (para. 2.12) by seeking to rename the service and to explore the possibility of merging it with the prison service (both attempts failing but only temporarily). The compromise reached was the creation of the National Probation Service in 2001² and the removal of the word ‘probation’ from court orders.

This compromise was short-lived, however, and there were further radical changes in the governance of probation. In 2003, the Carter Review (Carter 2003) and subsequent government response (Home Office 2004a) proposed a new National Offender Management Service (NOMS) which would finally bring together the prison and probation services (from June 2004) to provide ‘end-to-end management of all offenders, whether they are serving sentences in prison, the community or both’ (Home Office 2004b). Carter had envisaged that the services of probation might be provided by others – independent, voluntary organizations and even by the private and commercial sector. It was argued that competition between providers would raise standards generally. The Offender Management Act 2007 therefore empowered the Secretary of State (the Minister for Justice) to commission services directly, with the clear implication that they may be commissioned from providers other than the probation service. In 2010, the Probation Areas of England and Wales were reconstituted as 35 Probation Trusts, that would both provide probation services and also themselves commission services from others. In 2011 a ‘procurement competition’ to run community payback included potential providers from the commercial sector as well as from Probation Trusts (Worrall and Canton 2013). The first of these contracts was awarded jointly to Serco and the London Probation Trust in July 2012 (BBC News 2012).

These changes both reflected and confirmed a major change of ethos for the probation service, which now affirmed its objectives as ‘enforcement, rehabilitation and public protection’ (National Probation Service 2001). This has had considerable implications for work with offenders. Enforcement meant ensuring that offenders met the requirements of their orders. Returning an offender to court for non-compliance with an order (known as ‘breaching’), which had been seen in the past as an admission of failure by the probation officer, was now viewed as essential to the credibility of orders and an act of strength (Hedderman 2003; Hedderman and Hough 2004). Rehabilitation was to focus no longer on the welfare of the offender (with some ill-defined hope that this will lead in some way to reform), but on the clear objective of measurably reduced reconviction. Public protection was to be achieved through the sound assessment and management of risk. The level of risk became the single most important criterion in determining the amount and type of subsequent intervention. Every offender who goes to prison or is placed on a community order is subject to an assessment of their risk of reoffending and of causing serious harm. There are various methods of calculating risk but the most widely used is a computerized system called the Offender Assessment System, or OASys (Burnett, Baker and Roberts 2007; Kemshall and Wood 2007). Under the National Offender Management Model, work with offenders is now divided into four ‘tiers’, depending on levels of risk and dangerousness. Tier 1 offenders are to be punished; tier 2 offenders are to be punished and helped; tier 3 offenders punished, helped and changed; tier 4 offenders punished, helped, changed and controlled (NOMS 2006; Worrall and Canton 2013).

Running in parallel to the changes in practice and management were debates about the need to change training to better equip new officers to meet the requirements of the modernized service. In 1995, the government repealed the legal requirement (that had existed for approximately 25 years) for all new probation officers to hold a social work qualification. The aim was to end the control by higher education over probation training but a compromise was reached that lasted until 2010, whereby trainee probation officers were required to study for a university degree at the same time as an NVQ Level 4 award. The programme was employment-led and run by consortia of probation services and higher education. While there was little doubt that this Diploma in Probation Studies was extremely demanding there was widespread disquiet that the specificity of the roles and tasks for which trainees were equipped did not produce the flexible, reflexive and creative employees that are needed to work imaginatively with offenders (Knight 2002). Some suggested the new training contributed to the de-professionalization of the service (Aldridge 1999a). In 2011 the introduction of the new Qualifications Framework moved even further towards a model of internal workplace training, resulting in a qualification that is intended to be available to any employer (including voluntary and private sector organizations) (Ministry of Justice 2012).

Occupational Cultures

Our interest in occupational cultures was sparked during our evaluation of a number of projects involving the multi-agency supervision of prolific and priority offenders. Observation of the joint working and personal interactions between probation workers and police officers, and latterly prison officers, revealed some of the tensions and dynamics of culture clashes and crossovers between criminal justice practitioners which we have written about elsewhere (Worrall et al. 2003; Mawby and Worrall 2004; Mawby et al. 2007). During our discussions and subsequent writing about aspects of these cultural dynamics, we became convinced that the occupational cultures of probation workers was a topic worthy of further research in its own right.

At its broadest, the culture of an occupation or an organization can be described as the values shared by individuals that manifest themselves in the practices of members of that occupation or organization. Mullins (2010: 739) describes occupational culture as ‘how things are done around here’ and Liebling et al. (2011: 153) refer to common ways of thinking that affect approaches to work.

In the management and organizational behaviour literature, distinctions are made and contested between organizational, occupational and professional cultures. Schein (2010: 1–2), refers to organizational culture as applying to all kinds of government, public, private and voluntary organizations. Within these, occupational groups form subcultures, and cutting across the occupational groups there may be smaller teams that develop micro-cultures. Johnson et al. (2009: 320) describe occupational culture as a broader construct than professional culture, developing through ‘social interaction, shared experience, common training and affiliation, mutual support, associated values and norms, and similar personal characteristics of members of a particular occupational group’. The development of cultures provides a resource which allows groups and organizations to function internally, to react and adapt to the external environment and to integrate new members into ways of working. According to Morgan (2006: 126–38) organizational culture includes: operating norms, symbols and rituals of daily routine; language used within the group; stories, legends and myths about individuals, the group, and the organization which sustain cultural values; the work atmosphere/context, including the physical environment; and shared systems of meaning that are accepted, internalized and acted upon.

Utilizing similar themes, Schein argues (2010: 23) that culture can be analysed at three different levels. The first is that of artefacts, and this is the level of the tangible, the visible and the obvious. The second is that of espoused values and beliefs, and the third level is that of underlying assumptions, the taken-for-granted beliefs that influence behaviours and characterize an organization.

Drawing on these concepts, our intention is to identify and explore the characteristics of the occupational cultures of probation workers where the culture of a group can be defined as:

a pattern of shared basic assumptions learned by a group as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, which has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems.

(Schein 2010: 18)

No comprehensive body of research and literature exists on the occupational cultures of criminal justice practitioners. Perhaps one of the most enduring attempts to find the common ground is Rutherford’s (1993) conceptualization of the ‘working credos’ that underpin the daily work of criminal justice personnel. Based on interviews with senior practitioners, he developed a typology of three ‘credos’ – Credo One (associated with punishment and degradation), Credo Two (associated with efficiency and the smooth running of the system) and Credo Three (associated with caring and rehabilitation). He concluded that the system in the early 1990s favoured the Credo Two practitioner over the Credo Three practitioner, whose position was ambiguous and precarious. He speculated about the increasing influence of Credo One practitioners but considered that they remained more a feature of the US than the UK criminal justice system.

Despite recent re-emergent interest in the cultures of prison officers (Crewe et al. 2010; Tait 2011), probation officers (Burke and Davies 2011), police auxiliaries (Dolman 2008) and private security workers (Button 2007; Hucklesby 2011), only police culture has been subjected to in-depth study (for recent examples, see Skolnick 2008 and Loftus 2009, 2010). Some of the early classic studies of policing examined police culture, even if they did not explicitly seek to do so. For example, Banton (1964) and Cain (1...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1. Probation – a tainted but resilient concept
• 2. Lifers, second careerists and offender managers
• 3. There’s a time and place
• 4. Probation’s changing relationships with courts, police and prisons
• 5. Perceptions, misconceptions and representations
• 6. Job crafting, coping and responding to adverse working conditions
• 7. Diversity and different voices in probation work
• 8. Doing probation work: cultures, identities and the future
• Appendix A: Our participants
• Appendix B: Project information sheet and schedule of interview questions
• Notes
• References
• Index