aaProbation Officers - Social Workers
Or Agents Of Control?
aaToday, like no other time in the history
of the probation service, probation officers are increasingly being seen
as taking on the role of agents of control with their remit as public
protection officers as their function moves closer to that of a prosecutorial
authority.
aaGone are the days when the probation officer
ethos was to befriend and assist offenders to lead a non-offending lifestyle
and to encourage and intervene where necessary in promoting a sense of
social justice.
aaThe one time social work ethos of probation
work has now been replaced by tough talk and policies that further increasingly
marginalizes and isolates offenders with all the features of 'Big Brother'
as extreme forms of monitoring - surveillance - supervision and control
takes over from concerns about social equality and inclusion.
aaThose most concerned about social problems
are not quite at one with themselves in their desire to change them. For
solving problems would necessitate a change in the organisational mores
from which they arise.
aaThe liberal for all his or her allegiances
to humanitarian mores remain members of our society and as such under
its organisational mores.
aaThey wish to improve the conditions of
victims but not interfere with the structures which create them.
Until they abandon their attachment to those organisational mores and
structures they must continue to be seen as the perpetrators of the social
ills, injustices and inequalities and thus the causes they seek to remedy.
No one loses by giving verbal expression to humanitarianism and probation
staff are perfectly adept at this but many would lose out by putting humanitarianism
into practice and certainly someone would lose by any conceivable reform.
aaThey must therefore continue to treat the
symptoms without removing the causes.
Nowadays, released prisoners who are subject to parole licence and this
accounts for a substantial number of prisoners re-entering the world outside
of prison and more likely than not liable to be labelled as if they were
still offenders. Thus seems to justify a total scrutiny of their lives
in the community after the completion of their sentence.
aaI do not suggest that there are offenders
who will not always pose a risk but to propose that all ex -offenders
fall into that bracket which justifies blanket concerns and controls is
misleading and alienist and closer to a Tory party conference agenda than
social work practice.
aaCurrent probation practice is now characterised
by the almost paranoid high level of attention it gives to the issue of
risk. An interest more in keeping with Conservative 'moral panic' and
exaggerations but unlike the conservative whose language is one of less
government and less interference in the lives of people. The National
Probation Service seeks an increase in the attention it gives to individuals
thus aligning itself with the 'nanny state' of control from the cradle
to the grave and always searching out those areas where people require
the interference of 'experts' on how to live, love, work and play.
aaWe now live in a world in which it appears
that no place or situation is safe or risk free - the 'risk society' is
now upon us with children being deprived of play activity because of some
perceived danger, to the hysterical obsessions with diet, playing, loving,
working even dying.
aaIt seems that everything is a risk which
probation officers have not been slow to adopt in dealing with ex-offenders
and forever the world around us must be cocooned against those who are
perceived as being a threat to it with the full might of the 'nanny state'
being brought into play as a method of control.
aaThis necessarily requires 'tough talk'
by probation officers whose concerns are less to do with rehabilitation,
reform, social justice and inclusion and more to do with policing and
moral control. The service now largely directs its energies at the level
of the individual offender, rather than the world around him or her. The
idea that offenders should be helped has now but almost disappeared.
aaGone also are the days of being 'tough
on the causes of crime'.
aaBy a disregard for the causes of crime
and the encouragement it provides to probation officers to treat these
as irrelevant. Social workers ill-equipped to argue on the basis of values,
rather than of technical management, against the possibility of their
being expected to take on a more overtly repressive, controlling role
are being progressively excluded from meaningful participation in criminal
justice.
aaAn extreme example of the transformation
comes from California where in the early 1990s probation officers had
to choose sides - between being social workers attempting to stop offending
and without jobs or crime-controllers with both jobs and guns.
aaThey chose the Smith and Wesson Model 64
.38 calibre and ammunition that had the maximum stopping power.
aaThe probation officer's vision statement
then suddenly became rather desperately. 'Arming Probation Officers Doesn't
Change the Agency's Mission'.
aaThe point is not that British probation
officers and social workers are imminently likely to be asked to choose
their weapons, but that social workers who see their work in purely technical,
systems management terms may not be able to argue coherently against changes
which are plausibly presented as an aid to more efficient system management.
aaWhat is also emerging is the attack on
both civil and human rights, by probation staff on those under their supervision,
through the attachment of conditions to orders and licences. Which restrains
offenders and in many instances prohibits the normal forms of rights and
expectations which all other members of the community come to expect in
a free and democratic society. Often based on no more than a perceived
risk. a notion often arrived at on dubious criteria and suspect evidence
that has no place in the order of natural justice or sentencing exercises,
but sufficient to justify a revocation of a parole licence and further
imprisonment.
aaWith violent crime on the increase, the
subculture of violence might continue to be seen by some offenders as
being a more powerful response to societal injustices and inequalities
than the controls like public protection which seeks to curb it thus promoting
and producing more harm that it sets out to remedy.
For offenders to have any confidence in probation officers, there ought
to be a closer relationship than currently exists, rather than the employment
of coerced offending behaviour programmes, which are considerably closer
to control and removes the necessity for any relationship between probation
officers and those under their supervision.
aaThose most at risk of current probation
practises are released life sentence prisoners whose sentence never expire
and renders them liable to recall to prison at any time, based on a perception
of risk arrived at, on no more more than a value judgement, but for the
lifer it can amount to many years of further confinement from which he
or she may never again emerge.
aaThis in spite of the fact that lifers as
a group have always had the lowest reoffending rate of all offender groups
and is at presently at 2%.
aaConcerns of probation staff which might
render a lifer to recall may involve prohibitions and restrictions which
are now seriously open to challenges in the courts under the Human Rights
Act and may yet render them as being incompatible with the Act.
aaThe 1953 Royal Commission on Capital Punishment
reported that lifers on release ought not to have blanket requirements
attached to their licences and that such conditions were a retrograde
step and that save for notifying a change of address to the Central Aftercare
Association, released lifers should be able to make a fresh start without
interference and this was allowed uncontroversially.
aaToday, lifers can be recalled at the whim
of probation officers for behaviour construed as being 'a risk' of offending
even if the likelihood of such offences can in no way be linked to or
of the nature of the index offence or considered a risk to life or limb.
aaThe Stafford judgement (ECHR 2002) went
some way in challenging recall criteria when the applicant who had been
on a mandatory life sentence licence had been reconvicted of offences
of fraud and sentenced to a term of imprisonment which also revoked the
life licence.
aaAt the expiration of the fixed term. Stafford
remained in prison under the terms of the life licence recall.
aaThe ECHR took the view that as Stafford
had originally exhausted the punishment part (tariff) of his life sentence.
That it would be difficult to understand why he had been released in the
first place from the life sentence, if he had still posed a risk and that
further detention for the fraud could not be justified beyond the fixed
term. Simply because the Home Secretary considered Stafford at risk of
committing further non-violent crimes or the type of criminal conduct
unrelated to the original offence of murder.
aaAs the liberal elite fascists dig in deep
with their visions of a society under continual surveillance, monitoring,
assessments of individuals. The indeterminate incarceration of the mentally
ill and psychologically disturbed there are now moves to bring the children
of prisoners within the sphere of risk assessment.
aaOn the 16 August 2004, it was announced
that Home Office Minister Hazel Blears was proposing the introduction
of legislation to monitor the activities and behaviour of children of
prisoners and that such monitoring and supervision involving social services
and public protection officers (probation staff) would continue until
the child's 16th birthday.
aaIt was estimated that at the present levels
some 125,000 children are likely to become subject to fascist nannies.
There has already been some disquiet in 2004 with the Probation Service's
role in the proposed administering of polygraph (lie detector) tests on
convicted sex offenders.
aaWhilst the public would reasonably argue
that children have a right to be protected from paedophiles and that we
should endorse any measures to curb such offences taking place The reality
is that there has already been condemnation of this proposed measure and
none more so than from experts in the USA where the use of polygraph results
have yet to be admissible in the American courts.
aaYet, in the UK such a measure would give
probation officers the clout they would require to order the recall to
prison of a sex offender who appeared to render positive results without
the protection of the courts. Put simply. an unacceptable form of surveillance
would imprison a suspected offender.
aaThe implications of the acceptance of polygraph
testing is not that it might come to be seen as an acceptable form of
monitoring for suspected sex offenders but begs the question. who next,
the unemployed. the homeless. the socially excluded, the mentally ill
or benefit claimants?
aaAlso in 2004, we saw the introduction of
two unelected bodies - The Multi Agency Public Protection Panel (MAPPs)
and the Multi Agency Risk Assessment Panel (MARAPs).
aaThese will comprise of police officers.
probation officers, social workers and representatives from other bodies
whose remit will be to monitor the activity initially of sex offenders
but has now come to include all lifers.
aaMany offenders who now have less faith
in probation staff than perhaps they once had might also believe that
as long as they conform to the conditions of their parole licence that
they should not engage probation staff in social problems or concerns
for fear of them being misinterpreted as a 'risk' and of them being taken
into custody, that probation staff no longer being social workers cannot
be trusted to assist them in addressing their needs and might by being
too open and honest unwittingly become victims, victims of arbitrary probation
practice.
aa Charles Hanson ~
aaaaaaaaa aa aaa HMP Cornhill ~
aaaaaaaaaa aaaaa aa
aaaaa aa August 18th 2004
Charles Hanson
VV 1638
HMP Cornhill
Shepton Mallet
BA4 5LU |