Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40
- 59)
TUESDAY 20 JANUARY 1998
MR JOHN
HICKS, MR
HOWARD LOCKWOOD
AND MR
GEOFF DOBSON
40. Is that happening in fact?
(Mr Hicks) I think in all cases a probation officer's
presentence report to the court will include an assessment of
likely response. It is never black and white but, if it is crystal
clear, either that there will not be a sufficient response or
that the individual represents a greater danger than we can handle,
the probation officer is duty bound to say so to the court.
Mr Winnick
41. Do you happen to know how often that occurs
in practice, where a probation officer advises the court that
it would not be advisable to impose a non-custodial sentence?
(Mr Hicks) It is relatively rare. I did not quite
catch the phrase you used there.
42. Where a probation officer gives the advice
that a non-custodial sentence would not be advisable.
(Mr Hicks) It is pretty rare because, in the vast
majority of the cases that fall into the band we are talking about,
there is a disposal available that the courts can consider. Our
job is to make sure that the court knows what is available and
is able to consider a community based option if, in the mind of
the court, that is suitable.
Mr Hogg
43. One of the slightly bizarre consequences
that may follow inevitably is that either the courts will be driven
to impose a fine which, for a variety of reasons, may not be enforceable
or very effective or to increase the number of people in custody,
if your officers are following what you think they should do.
(Mr Hicks) The figures work the other way around actually,
Mr Hogg. The evidence is that the courts are more likely to receive
a report from a probation officer that says there is an option
available, community service or a form of community supervision
of one kind of another than one that will say no; that is not
serious enough. This person needs to be locked up. It is their
duty in law. On occasion, we will say that we do not need to go
that far, but that is relatively rare.
44. Mr Roberts' report I think was basically
commissioned by you?
(Mr Hicks) Yes.
45. In that report, he makes an important observation
on page two, that 55 per cent of men had only one conviction or
court appearance. In other words, the simple majority do not come
back before the courts. This implies to me in a sense that it
is not the way that they are disposed of that is fundamental in
respect of this class of offender; it is the fact of the appearance
and the consequences, social and otherwise, associated with that.
Has there been research that you are aware of which is addressed
to those people who have been before a court once and have not
been before a court again? Why is it that they do not come before
a court on subsequent occasions? Do you know if there is a body
of research on this?
(Mr Hicks) Let me be sure I have understood the question.
A body of research that says why it is that—?
Mr Hogg: Which addresses the question directed
to those people who have been before the court once, the 55 per
cent, why they have not come back.
Mr Allan: They did not get caught the second
time!
Mr Hogg
46. That of course is one explanation but I
think it is not the only explanation.
(Mr Hicks) The South Yorkshire Chief Constable produced
his crime figures yesterday and said that, for the third year
in succession, crime has gone down. He said, "It is no coincidence
that, at the same time, our detection rates have gone up."
This may be only a tangential response to the question you are
asking but the key deterrent is the risk of being caught. The
simple answer to your question is I do not think we know of research
that actually says why it is. The fact is though that a significant
majority who come before the courts do not come back again. Whatever
happens to them, they stop. Our job comes much further down the
line.
47. I am wondering whether there is a body of
academic knowledge which addresses the question of why people
come before the court only once.
(Mr Hicks) I do not think it has been a focus of serious
attention, as far as I am aware. We will look into it.[1]
If I can just add to that, the fact of being caught and cautioned
is seen to have the same proportionate effect. Whatever is done
to you by the criminal justice process, half of the people get
siphoned off by whatever happens at that first stage. I think
our major concern is what happens to the other half and how we
get to grips with those who continue and get worse.
Chairman
48. Can I just take up the point you made about
the collapse of the fine? Are you saying that the result is that
a lot of people who ought to be dealt with by way of a fine are
finding themselves on your books for several months or years?
(Mr Hicks) There is a bit of a tendency you can see
in the statistics over the last two years, for expensive community
penalties to be used for some lower level offenders—first
offenders, offenders whose offending is not of the most serious.
In terms of the targeting question, I think we would want to ensure
that our resources are focused on those who are more entrenched,
who need the change processes that we can offer.
Mr Cranston
49. One of the points with the fine is that,
as a sentencer, one is presented with information about the background
of the person and they just do not have the money, to put it very
crudely. I am sure Mr Malins, who also sits in the Crown Court,
will confirm that. One is presented with the antecedents and one
sees that these people just cannot repay the money so it is no
use imposing a fine.
(Mr Hicks) It is a reality. One of the difficulties
that I came across many times as a practitioner probation officer
was the cumulative effect of some of the stage army who go through
the courts, being fined time and again, cumulatively adding up
to a huge debt of fine that is way beyond their capacity to pay.
I think what has happened with the demise of the fine does go
back to what happened with the unit fine in 1991/92, which was
a serious attempt to try and pitch fine levels at a consistent
level related to income or available assets. It was discredited.
It was abolished. Since then, the courts have found that they
do have a real difficulty.
Chairman
50. You are dealing with a clientele which,
by and large, are very impoverished, are you not?
(Mr Hicks) Yes, by and large.
51. What happens is they end up paying fines,
if they are fined, at two or three pounds a week for eternity.
(Mr Hicks) In terms of how that looks to the public,
the equation does not look to match up. I think there is a problem
about the fine. What I am saying is though that, if you look back
to the period before 1991, the fine was a more significant element,
although there were some of these problems associated with it.
It was related to the way, in our view, both community disposals
and, further up the tariff, custodial disposals were used. One
would be looking for some rebalancing, I think, for the future.
Mr Malins
52. Unit fines were quite rightly wholly discredited.
Is not part of the problem that in the magistrates' court certainly,
particularly the lay benches as opposed to the stipes, they are
inclined to hand down terribly heavy fines for motoring offences,
no insurance, driving whilst disqualified etc., to a category
of people who are probably on benefit and to whom a fine of £600
is a complete impossibility? You get means enquiries etc., and
the whole approach there must be wrong, must it not?
(Mr Hicks) I think there are better things that can
be done with some categories of motoring offenders. The problem
is that motoring is common to all of us. There is the public view
about what is done to people who are convicted and it is usually,
as you will probably know, a range of different offences, vehicle
unfit, alcohol perhaps, driving with no insurance, the whole lot,
and, as you say, it adds up cumulatively. To the ordinary person
in the street, £600 seems to fit.
53. It is probably four times the value of the
car.
(Mr Hicks) That is right. We would say that it is
one of the areas where probation programmes actually do have something
quite significant to offer, certainly for the more serious people,
programmes that are about learning about road responsibility.
The police work with us in learning about driving skills. The
health service work with us in looking at the effects of alcohol
and drugs, so it is quite a significant factor for some of the
people we are dealing with and the programmes are very effective.
Again, if you get the chance to look at one of the motor programmes,
I would commend you to do so.
Chairman
54. Mr Dobson and Mr Lockwood, I did not mean
to swear you to silence at the beginning of the proceedings.
(Mr Dobson) We agreed Mr Hicks would be the main spokesperson
and we would prompt him.
Chairman: Do come in if you have something relevant
to say. Now we turn to the completion rates or success rates of
the various types of orders available.
Mr Winnick
55. How many orders are actually completed successfully?
(Mr Hicks) I can give you the figures. They vary.
56. They do vary, if I could interrupt you,
because there seems to be some contradiction between what you
say on page one of your memorandum, that 71 per cent complete
successfully and yet, on page 12, it seems they have all gone
up to a range of 75 to 90 per cent.
(Mr Hicks) I can explain. The year on year figures
show an average for the probation order, around 72 per cent, plus
or minus a little bit. For the community service order, the average
is one percentage point lower, 71 per cent. I can add to that
figures for successful completion of post-custody supervision
as well. In particular, the mandatory parole system has a very
high success rate of completion. It is one of the best. It is
in the nineties. It has hovered between 90 and 95 per cent over
the past ten years, which is quite significant, given that parolees
have served, by definition, longer sentences and, by definition,
have been convicted of more serious offences.
Mr Hogg
57. They have a lot more to lose.
(Mr Hicks) They have a lot more to lose. Their supervision
is very carefully monitored and probation officers are prepared
to have them called back to prison on an instance if they consider
that there is a serious risk of things going wrong. They do so.
On a Friday afternoon, they will pick up the phone, call the parole
unit and it will happen there and then, which is quite an important
factor, the speed of process and the capacity to recall when the
situation is going wrong. That is one of the reasons for the 90
per cent figure you have. The disparity between the 71, the 72
and the 75 is that the 71 and 72 are just successful completion,
running the order through. There are a small percentage of both
probation and community service orders that are discharged for
good progress and the added small percentage accounts for the
disparity between the 71 and the 75.
Mr Winnick
58. If we take that 71, for the sake of argument,
being a success rate, that would leave 30 per cent or near on
of those sentenced to community forms of sentence who failed to
complete their course. Do you consider that satisfactory?
(Mr Hicks) In any individual case, no. Our expectation
is that people will complete one way or the other and we would
expect to impact on their behaviour so that they would not reoffend
in the future, certainly not during the course of their supervision
with us. The facts are though that if we are targeting our attentions
correctly on those people who have entrenched patterns of offending
behaviour, and if my description of the stage army is correct,
then our expectations have to be realistic. As you see in the
language of our paper, we actually consider that that level of
success with that group of people, with that pattern of offending,
is actually pretty good. We have to acknowledge that if you are
going to work with people who present those kind of risks of reoffending
you are not going to win every time. That is why people who do
the job that I do are essentially incorrigible optimists.
59. I am one of those who appreciate the work
that you do and I well understand the kind of offender that the
probation service in general has to deal with but you have critics,
Mr Hicks. Next week, we will hear from former probation officers
who dispute your figures saying that in fact the probation service
is, to a large extent, a hoax and does not really amount to much.
When it comes, for example, to breaching probation orders, one
of those former probation officers, Mr David Fraser, gives an
example in one of his memoranda to us, when he says that the figures
about breaching do not add up to a great deal. As an illustration,
he says that when a warrant is taken out where a probation order
is not being dealt with by the offender in a proper manner and
the court takes no action because of the delay, this order would
go into the statistics as successfully terminated, "because
the probation service can argue that the court has taken no action
to bring that order to an end before its normal completion date."
What he is saying in effect is that the probation service as a
whole, if not your Association, play around with these statistics
in order to claim a high success rate, which you yourself have
mentioned, when that figure has no basis in fact.
(Mr Hicks) The figures you are referring to in that
question are Home Office figures. If there is any jiggery pokery,
it is not we who are doing it. I would say that the issue of the
enforcement of orders and the follow-up of non-compliance is one
where the service has some improving to do. We have identified
that. We have attended to it with the Home Office and with the
Inspectorate. They have drawn attention to it over the years.
If what I said earlier sounded a little complacent, please do
not take it as the whole story. It is a complex matter. Probation
officers need to make judgments about what is going to happen
if someone fails to comply. National standards are clear: if there
are three unexplained non-compliances, the person must go back
to court. It is a fact that courts do vary in their responses
when we take people back before the courts. Sometimes they will
impose a warning or a small financial penalty and then require
the order to continue, because courts do recognise that you cannot
necessarily expect total results immediately.
1 See Appendix 3 Back
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