The Irish on probation in the North-West of England
| Author | David Lobley,David Smith,Sam Lewis,Peter Raynor |
| Published date | 01 September 2005 |
| Date | 01 September 2005 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0264550505055146 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
The Irish on probation in the North-West of England
The Irish in Britain have been described as an invisible ethnic minority (Murphy,
1994) and there has been concern for some time in and around the Probation
Service that they may be disadvantaged by anti-Irish prejudice in their contacts
with the criminal justice system (Fletcher et al., 1997). This concern was shared by
managers and practitioners in two probation areas in the North-West of England,
and research was commissioned in 2003 to study the needs and experiences of
offenders of Irish origin under supervision by probation officers in Britain. Three
of the researchers were also involved in the large study of Black and Asian pro-
bationers funded by the Home Office (Calverley et al., 2004), and a number of the
same data collection methods were used in the study of Irish offenders in order to
enable comparisons both with Black and Asian offenders and with broadly com-
parable samples of white British offenders (Frude et al., 1994; Mair and May,
1997).
The category ‘Irish’ is problematic: for example, people may not choose to
identify themselves as Irish; many people in Britain who have one Irish parent
might or might not be seen by themselves or others as Irish; Northern Irish
Protestants might define themselves as British to emphasize their difference from
Catholic Irish, but still be seen as Irish by mainland British people. Not surpris-
ingly, we found that it was not always easy to identify through Probation Service
databases those people under supervision who would define themselves as Irish
and be prepared to talk to us about it. We were eventually able to interview 48
people (38 on probation, 10 on post-custody licence) and were also able to
administer CRIME-PICS II (Frude et al., 1994) as a measure of crime-prone
attitudes and beliefs and self-reported problems. In addition, pre-sentence reports
on 30 of the interviewees were compared with 30 randomly selected reports on
non-Irish defendants, using an established PSR assessment guide (Raynor et al.,
1995). Readers interested in a fuller account of the research and its findings will
find them in a paper in the Irish Probation Journal (Lewis et al., forthcoming), and
a full report has been prepared for the two probation areas (Lewis et al., 2004).
This short report is intended to draw attention to key findings only, and to some
of their practical implications. Key findings and their implications:
●The Irish in England are a diverse group, and not all will define themselves
as Irish. It is important not to over-generalize about them, as this can itself
293
Probation Journal
The Journal of Community and Criminal Justice
Copyright © 2005 NAPO Vol 52(3): 293–302
DOI: 10.1177/0264550505055146
www.napo.org.uk
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