The Essence of Probation
| Author | Paul Senior, Dave Ward, Lol Burke, Charlotte Knight, Michael Teague, Tim Chapman, Jane Dominey, Jake Phillips, Anne Worrall, Anthony Goodman |
Introduction
The Kendal group decided that we should seek to identify what constituted the essence of probation as a marker towards articulating what probation at its core might look like and where its boundaries with other activities lay. We were able to use the experience of the group from many years of probation engagement but also many different reflections of the probation world going back to the 1970s. We also benefited from experience that people brought from outside the world of probation, including youth work and social work. This was no consensus forum and each contributor brought their own insights and perspectives. We were reminded of an article written in the mid-1970s by David Millard, probably in Social Work Today, aspects of which were repeated in Millard (1982). Millard talked about why he thought probation existed and he said, from a sentencer's point of view, that it existed because it occupied an area of uncertainty, that sentencers get a number of situations in which they are required to sentence and they do not quite know what to do: they could send to prison, they could put on probation, they could do other things, and probation has always flourished, as it were, in that area of uncertainty.
'Experientially, the probation officer carries the dilemma within his role and in this way the probation order institutionalizes the moral dilemma of the court.' (Millard, 1982:292)
We took that as our starting point and sought to identify whether we could shape the probation ideal that flourishes in that area of uncertainty, delineate what bounded it and where it linked to other systems and, thus, inductively work our way towards the essence of probation. This is the journey of this article.
Probation's potential targets are variously called clients, probationers, offenders and, more commonly now, service users though other less helpful descriptions abound too. The world of probation operates in and around four major systems of social organisation - the correctional system, the social welfare system, the treatment system and the community. These systems exist in various formations in all western social democratic societies and many other jurisdictions - Japan, Latin America, South-east Asia and Africa. For our purposes a brief outline only is needed.
The correctional system is composed of the key law enforcement agencies. Given the centrality of prison in modern legal systems they occupy a vital holding environment in this system. The prison is serviced by the police who arrest and process those who commit offences and the courts and legal apparatus which processes and sentences them. Prisons have not always been at the centre of penal policy but in neoliberal societies they have come to occupy a key mechanism of social control and numbers incarcerated have grown rapidly over the past two decades when, paradoxically, crime itself has been reducing. The similar growth of community sanctions has not slowed the prisonisation of society, meaning that increasing numbers are subject to varying degrees of law enforcement both in and outside prison. These key agencies use a considerable proportion of the available budgets for law enforcement and justice and, before the fiscal crisis stopped this, had always grown at the behest of eager governments driven by law and order rhetoric. This is well documented (Garland, 2002).
The social welfare system is really an amalgam of a range of welfare organisations which together and in varying degrees in different societies, support individuals as they seek to carve out a life for themselves and their families in modern communities. It would include housing provision, work opportunities, benefits support, education and training and welfare support agencies some of which are provided by the voluntary and community sector and increasingly by the private sector - especially housing. The undermining of universal welfare provision over the last four decades can be linked with the emergence of a decidedly individualistic, consumer focused culture. Welfare has been under attack in neoliberal societies and provisions have been subject to cuts and higher thresholds to access in concert with austerity policies and neoliberal thinking.
The treatment system revolves around health and counselling systems for both mental and physical health issues and services for drug and alcohol rehabilitation. Such services are often delivered by voluntary agencies too alongside or in addition to NHS services. Treatment systems and programmes for mental health, for drugs and alcohol and physical health problems are universal provisions to which all members of the community have, in theory, equal access. Fiscal challenges limit this universal accessibility and the lesser eligible, often deemed less deserving, struggle to get the treatment services they might need and mental health services are even less well-resourced than other aspects of the NHS, thus making access particularly challenging. Those in conflict with the law are often amongst the least deserving and hence least eligible. In addition the resources available are shrinking and this means those on the margins miss out because of a lack of provision of services or lack of money to access limited provision.
The community houses (though not always literally so) everyone who is not separated or excluded by virtue either of imprisonment, immigration centre or a secure treatment facility. A community allows its inhabitants free movement and in this sense probation approved premises with curfews are a limited form of freedom as are forms of house arrest via electronic monitoring. The community contains therefore at any one time a variety of individuals, some of whom may have been in trouble with the law, or victims of criminal offences, who may also be drawn from the offender population. Community organisations support individuals through their lives and some are dedicated to supporting particular groups, though their prevalence will vary according to the amount of funding available.
There is also informal support provided by individuals, be they family members, neighbours, work colleagues or altruistic people who may or may not be associated with more formally constituted organisations. Again, the availability of such support, much trumpeted by the neoliberal constituency, will vary according to macro or personal economic circumstances and, indeed, demographic changes. These changes, on the one hand, have created a pool of volunteers and informal carers among the increasing numbers of active retirees but, on the other, an increasingly resource demanding and politically influential ageing population, requiring support over a lengthening period of deteriorating fitness and self-sufficiency.
An example of the sort of community support service which has had a chequered history amongst the ebbs and flows of economic circumstances and social policy priorities are youth services. So, although communities seek to provide universal services, the ability of lesser eligible individuals to access them varies over time and at times of economic constraint they are likely to be at the bottom of any criteria for help. It has got harder for communities to offer support and informal supervision to people in trouble, including offenders and their families (Fitzgibbon, 2011).
The four systems can be represented thus:
Figure 1: The four major systems
Such a separation of services is a heuristic device which differentiates each system to illustrate the prime focus of their endeavours, be it law enforcement, welfare support, treatment or community integration. These systems are, in essence, separate 'fields' which interact and overlap - in the Bourdieusian sense (Thomson, 2012). In practice such systems overlap in their purposes and share actual space though this overlap is often difficult to manage. Consider the example of mental health services which operate in correctional services, or work opportunities for offenders, or young offenders within youth services. In practice these systems also contribute to isolating individuals who need to access multiple systems but for whom their lesser eligible status makes it problematic for them to get reasonable help.
The focus of this paper is individuals in conflict with the law who have been sentenced by the court to forms of community or, if imprisoned, post custody supervision and this is the core arena of probation. Such services used to be easy to identify as just another public service (at least from 1907 until 2014) although, of course, a number of services were provided by the voluntary sector in the mid-20th century. The capture of probation work by the public sector was not complete until the 1960s. However since 2014, through government reforms, such services are now spread over a plurality of agencies in the public, private and voluntary sectors. This plurality makes it more difficult to delineate which services support the probation ideal and which stand on or inside the thresholds of other systems.
If the diagram below was truly dynamic the overlapping elements would be seen to change over time as one of the major systems gains ascendancy. So, a law enforcement approach driven by 'law and order rhetoric' has become increasingly part of the probation offer with enforcement and risk management assuming greater prominence. In the 1970s community-based practices were more popular amongst probation practitioners. In the 1980s probation had more engagement in welfare rights issues and appointed workers within the agency to support this orientation as it did employment officers and accommodation officers. The overlaps with the treatment world have been particularly difficult as the two independent systems of health and criminal justice vie for supremacy. There have been examples of joint projects but the boundary issues shift constantly. The sometimes tense relationship of CAMHS (Child...
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