The Service Develops
| DOI | 10.1177/026455056601200202 |
| Date | 01 June 1966 |
| Published date | 01 June 1966 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
once, but allowing for this and for some increase in receptions, the number of
persons eligible for voluntary after-care in 1965 was probably around 45,000.
The service actually made contact with 9,345 of these, or about one-fifth. How-
ever, over 4,000 were only interviewed once, and a further 2,000 maintained
contact for less than one month.
There are perhaps two immediate morals to be drawn from these figures. First,
prisoners will only see the point of after-care if they have been prepared for it
and if the service has been doing its job whilst the prisoner has been inside. We
must therefore have an increase in the number of welfare officers in prisons, and
we must allow officers to include cases in their case-loads before release. Secondly,
we must consider whether an extension of statutory after-care is justified, perhaps
by using the provisions of the 1961 Criminal Justice Act. There would be the
basis of a most interesting research project if statutory after-care were extended
to a limited group and the reconviction rates for this group before and after the
change were compared. If statutory after-care is really more successful in reducing
reconvictions, we cannot justify the continuation of the present system; but if it
makes no difference, we should perhaps think again about existing statutory
functions.
TH E SERVICE DEVELOPS
T. A. F. Noble, M.B.E.
Chairman of the Advisory Council for Probation and After-Care
Extracts from the address given to the Annual Conference of the National
Association of Probation Officers at Hastings, on 1st May 1966.
&dquo;PERHAPS THE MAIN preoccupation of the old Probation Advisory and Training
Board under my Chairmanship between 1962 and 1965 had been the growth of
the service and the expansion of training facilities. The relatively small service
had been growing quite rapidly since 1957, and when the Morison Committee
signed its report at the end of December 1961 (when the establishment was
about 1,750) it recommended an expansion in the short run to the number of
2,000, in the long run to 2,750. The Probation Advisory and Training Board
very soon advised the Home Office that the target of 2,750 should be reached
as early as 1966, and that plans should be made to train a sufficient intake to
bring the service to a strength of at least 3,000 as soon as possible after that.
The new Council’s Training Committee a year ago envisaged a further expansion
of training facilities aiming at a service of 3,500 by 1970, with an annual output
from training of 350 from 1966 onwards. These proposals take careful account
of the need to maintain and indeed improve standards of selection and training,
to reduce and ultimately get rid of direct entry of untrained officers; and they
take account of estimates of the additional burden of work falling on the service
in the field of after-care.
The training effort involved has been very considerable. In the early 1960s,
the annual output from training was about 100 officer. In 1963 this grew to
129, in 1964 to 182, and in 1965 to 283. These are figures of which the service
itself can justly feel proud, because one of the main bottlenecks in the expansion
of training capacity in a social casework profession is the availability of
placements with tutor officers who can supervise practical training in the field.&dquo;
36
After paying tribute to the part played in training by many officers, Mr. Noble
said, &dquo;Just over two years ago, careful analysis...
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