Supervision
| Published date | 01 September 1976 |
| DOI | 10.1177/026455057602300306 |
| Author | Yvonne Craig |
| Date | 01 September 1976 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
to bear on the poor and the powerless. The probation officer continu-
ously supports this system of class law, sometimes by active involvement
and sometimes by passive collusion.
This view of the role of the probation officer and the probation ser-
vice uncovers a parallel with the historic origins of social work. The
emergence, in Victorian England, of social work occurred at the time
of the French revolutions and stemmed from alarm amongst the bour-
geoisie that the condition of the pauperised industrial working class might
give rise to similar developments here. The role of charity and the social
worker was to deflect potential revolutionary undercurrents towards the
possibility of individual self-improvement and the early literature of
social work contains overt, and even blatant, statements of this purpose.
The rhetoric of social work may since have become much more subtle
but the function remains unchanged.
The view presented here is not the one commonly presented of the
role of the Probation Service. Most probation officers have preferred to
believe in a picture of a team of independent, apolitical and altruistic
professionals working for the common good. Thus blinded, they have
been able to operate unquestioningly in the service of the state, con-
sciously or unconsciously propagating its prevailing ideology. The pic-
ture which I have presented may not be so attractive or hopeful, but it
may prove easier for us to move fonvard if we have our eyes open.
Supervision:
Casework, Counselling, Companionship,
Control
YVONNE CRAIG
Justice of the Peace
REACTIONARY magistrates and radical social workers were equally critical
of the Younger proposals for more intensive forms of probation.
Suspicion of supervision may come as much from student sociological
acquaintance with Schur’s Radical Non-Intervention theory,’ as from
long magisterial observation of offenders regressing from fines, through
probation, to borstal and prison. Criminological shift from optimistic
views of custodial rehabilitation to current humane containment policy
could be followed, suggests Sean McConville in The Use of Imprison-
ment,2 by similar pessimism with regard to treatment in the community.
An example of this occurred whilst I was sitting in Crown Court
recently: a prison psychiatric report stated that as the teenage first
offender would not respond to any form of treatment, no sentencing
recommendation could be usefully made. Mercifully, the judge refused
to accept such reductionist opinions, calling for a second review to
’
consider probation.
For probation is one of society’s few hope-carrying institutions, offer-
ing, as Jacques Ellul, the French lawyer and Maquis member, believes,
Hope in time of abandonment’ to those we reject and who reject us.
76
Although probation services are diversifying through CSOs, new
careerism, victim support projects, etc., supervision is regarded as the
main form of caregiving in which staff, as well as the vigilant public,
have high emotional investment. Yet we all have differing expectations
of supervision, and those outside the service have little...
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