Written evidence from Mr Will Watson (PB
03)
PERSONAL INTRODUCTION
1. I am a retired Probation Officer with a wide
experience of the Probation Service in all its forms. I worked
as a trained, main grade Probation Officer in Central London from
1972 to 1995, when I took early retirement.
2. I returned as a part-time Probation Officer
in 2001, and worked until the end of 2006 during the period of
transition from Probation Service to Offender Management.
3. I submitted a note of evidence to the all-party
House of Commons Committee on Home Affairs, chaired by Chris Mullin
MP, about these same issues of probation and imprisonment, for
a meeting of the Committee with the then Inspector of Probation
Prof Rod Morgan on Tuesday 11 February 2003.
[Please see HC 437-i of session 2002-03, my note
at Appendix 3].
4. Since retirement, I have kept in touch with
most aspects of the penal system. I remain an associate member
of Napo, and have kept myself informed of the work of Mr Harry
Fletcher, Campaigning Assistant General Secretary. His paper on
the Reform of the National Offender Management Service, [hereinafter
"NOMS"] distributed to all Parliamentarians earlier
this year, was particularly useful.
5. I am a member of the Howard League for Penal
Reform, and actively support their current campaign for safer
communities, more community penalties and less crime.
6. I am also a member of The Prison Reform Trust.
7. I keep up a befriending relationship with
a long-term prisoner, and by visiting him regularly I am aware
of present prison visiting conditions.
8. With Mr Chris Hignett, ex Senior Probation
Officer, I founded "The Campaign for the Reinvigoration of
the Probation Service" [hereinafter "CROPS"] in
November 2008. We have about 50 supporters.
9. We sent many representations to the previous
administration voicing our concern about the ever-rising prison
population, and what we consider to be the wrong use of the Probation
Service. We had no response from that administration.
10. Our submissions to the new Minister of Justice,
Mr Ken Clarke, have however been acknowledged by Genevieve Mitchell
an "official in the Ministry of Justice's Justice Policy
Group". She has informed us that her department is issuing
a "Green Paper" on sentencing in November, and she is
interested to receive our views on that.
11. I note your comment on the present coalition
government's stated wish to introduce a "Rehabilitation
Revolution".
12. I attach a copy of our "CROPS"
manifesto which we believe shows the best way to achieve such
a revolution.
13. I would like to address in the main, two
of the Questions you ask: Question 2 and Question 5. I make some
comments also on Question 8 concerning Training.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
14. "Offender Management" is a disaster
in all possible respects: it is particularly ill-suited to the
delivery of sentences in the community, which is the traditional
province of The Probation Service.
15. The concept of "Offender Management"
should be rejected in its totality. The bureaucracy surrounding
it should be abolished. The Probation and Prison Services should
be returned to their previous position of totally separate, independent
services. Prisons could then return to their previous realistic
role of punishing offenders by simple humane containment.
16. Probation Officers could return to their
role of rehabilitating offenders in the community.
17. Prison sentences should be changed back to
the way they were managed before 1991, and the present notion
of "Automatic Early Release" at the half way stage should
be abolished.
18. This latter provision would mean that "Offender
Managers" currently supervising offenders "Automatically
Released Early" from prison would be able to return to being
Probation Officers supervising Community Sentences.
19. Question 2: How effectively are probation
trusts operating in practice? What is the role of the probation
service in delivering "Offender Management" and how
does it operate in practice?
20. The concept of "Offender Management"
is a deeply flawed and destructive one, particularly in the field
of supervision of offenders in the community.
21. Offenders in the community, however closely
supervised or managed, will always be able to commit offences
against the public if they choose to: they are in a completely
different category to offenders in prison, who cannot commit such
offences.
22. This is one of several reasons why prison
sentences have become more and more common, and the prison population
has expanded: "Offender Managers" are bound to recommend
prison, as the only safe place to "manage" an offender.
23. I do not think that the Probation Service
should be operating "offender management" at all: that
is a job for Prison Officers in prisons, or Police Officers in
the community.
24. From a practical point of view, it is important
to take a different approach to the supervision of offenders in
the community, and to the gathering of information which may lead
to a "Community Order".
25. The Present system of "delivering Offender
Management" depends entirely on the "Offender Assessment
SYStem", known as "OASYS".
26. It is important to understand how this Questionnaire
operates, in contrast to the previous Probation Officer [hereinafter
"PO"] method of acquiring information about the offender.
27. The OASYS falls into three parts. The Offender
Manager [hereinafter "OM"] at present has to first obtain
the official Criminal record of the Offender, and tabulate this
into the OASYS Computer Program.
28. From the offender's previous convictions
the OASYS will arrive at a figure as to the likelihood of the
offender re-offending, and the level of harm likely to be caused.
29. The second part of OASYS is tabulated after
the OM has asked the offender a series of as many as 160 questions
about the offender's perception and memory of their behaviour,
feelings and attitudes.
30. These questions relate to the fields of literacy,
employment, abuse of drugs and/or alcohol, aggressiveness and
loss of temper, homelessness, mental health and happiness, reaction
to childhood upbringing, physical health, attitudes to themselves
and the world and other points.
31. Having got all this information, or as near
as he/she can get it, the OM then "scores" the various
sections according to the computer programme's own "weighting"
system. The idea at the end of both these parts is that the Computer
Programme will come up with an exact measure [out of a maximum
of 168 points] of the likelihood of re-offending, and the amount
of harm likely to be done.
32. Coming a poor third in this process is the
assessment of the areas of life of the offender which need to
be worked on to prevent that re-offending.
33. I suggest, and others will argue I believe
more cogently, that the ability of any such system to predict
accurately future behaviour of the individual has been shown to
be poor.
34. Obviously, PO's like myself had to gather
information about offenders for the court reports, but the secret
of success here lies in the approach used.
35. OASYS is flawed for several reasons: Firstly,
It is very long and complicated: a then highly regarded Senior
Probation Officer, who shall be nameless but who has since moved
to a high position in the NOMS bureaucracy, advised me in 2003
that two good sessions of about 45 minutes each were necessary
to do a "good" "OASYS" assessment. It is probably
unusual in practice to have more than 45 minutes allowed for the
interview.
36. Secondly, The feeling that an offender often
gets from an OASYS interview is that they are regarded from the
beginning as some sort of malfunctioning "unit" which
is being assessed for its dangerousness, like some piece of machinery
that has gone wrong, not like a human being at all. As I remarked
in my Note of Evidence of 2003, this approach may work with motor
car engines, but is ill-suited to human beings.
37. I suggest that the PO's way of asking questions
of the offender about to be sentenced by the court was much more
oriented to the needs and fears of the offender. It was sympathetic,
and sought to begin the all-important "Casework Relationship"
referred to below.
38. The intention of the PO was to show, from
the outset, that he or she was concerned, above all, to help the
offender. We believed that most offender's "offending behaviour"
could be understood by us through our training in psychology,
psychiatry, sociology, criminology and human growth and development.
39. We further believed that by working with
the offender in this shared enterprise known as the "Probation
Order" we could help them "address" this behaviour
and so change it, and so achieve that much sought after goal of
"reducing re-offending".
40. Many offenders and their anxious families
today complain that having been diagnosed as of "medium risk"
of re-offending, and therefore not sent to prison, they are quite
unable to get any "help" to prevent re-offending. The
whole "Offender Management" scheme seems quite uninterested
in the notion of help.
41. Thirdly, nearly all offenders are very anxious
at this interview, where information is gathered in order to write
a report for a court as to the most suitable sentence to be passed.
They are aware of the influence that the PO or OM can have on
the court, and are anxious to get the help they need, and not
go to prison if possible.
42. Offenders in this position usually have mental
problems of some degree: they are often emotionally insecure and
very frightened in general, and in particular of being sent to
prison: they may have handicaps in the area of intelligence and
literacy. Such people need to be handled sensitively, and sympathetically,
not mechanistically, and unfeelingly, if a worker is to have any
chance of "working" with them after the sentence of
the court.
43. To put it another way, the possible "treatment
plan" for the offender under a community sentence needs to
be worked on from the moment the offender walks in for the pre-sentence
report interview.
44. These "treatment plans" can be
very complicated and painful for the offender. They can involve
one or more other agencies, and possibly long-term residential
treatment for alcoholism or drug addiction. If no feeling of trust
between offender and worker exists, these plans will never even
get out of the starting blocks.
45. Fourthly, the "OM" need not feel
under any pressure to make a "non-custodial" recommendation
to the court, as that is not a priority under the NOMS: the priority
under the NOMS is to get the OASYS Questionnaire completed, and
tabulated onto computer, and checked and "signed off"
by another staff member [and regularly revised and updated].
46. The managers of NOMS will only want to know
"Have you done your OASYS?", and will not concern themselves
with the question of whether a non-custodial recommendation has
been made or not.
47. PO's on the other hand would be expected
to make a non-custodial recommendation wherever possible, and
to work out a comprehensive treatment plan , or at least the outline
of one.
48. Fifthly, the NOMS pressure, and that for
the courts, is to get all cases "processed" as quickly
as possible. This is highly undesirable in cases where further
reports on offenders are required, as they often are.
49. This could happen where a specific requirement
for treatment for drug or alcohol addiction is needed or a requirement
to see a psychiatrist, or to reside in a rehabilitative hostel.
These agencies need time to make their own assessment of the offender's
suitability for their particular treatment, and to report to court
on them. Sometimes, indeed, a case needs to be adjourned more
than once, for example until a place in a rehabilitative hostel
becomes available. Any kind of adjournment of this sort will be
resisted by the NOMS authorities.
50. The sixth reason why OASYS-run "Offender
Management" works badly is that it is operated as though
the Community Order was a punishment. Thus, an offender is instructed
to report to the OM office in a very strict, inflexible, disciplinarian
kind of way. Any deviation from the instructions to report, even
being a few minutes late, is punished by a warning of the imminence
of Breach proceedings and a return to court and a likely prison
sentence in place of the community order. Often, the offender
is so frightened by the OM's attitude that he or she hears the
"warning of Breach" as though it were an actual breach
already, and return to court being inevitable. The offender promptly
gives up hope and surrenders themselves to the worst.
51. The Probation Officer, per contra, would
want to talk to the offender as to why he or she was late, and
enquire what was the matter. A PO might well go in search of a
client who failed to attend, rather than issue dire warnings.
It was not a matter of our leaving the matter be, but of getting
back into relationship with the offender and reminding them in
a friendly way that they had committed themselves to this Probation
Order, and must talk to us about any concerns they had. It was
a "Two-way Street". Part of our job was to maintain
hope : without hope you have nothing.
52. On the subject of talking to the PO, there
are countless instances of the offender's saying how important
it was to them "to have someone to talk to", "to
receive advice and guidance", and to "discuss their
needs and problems". (See particularly the chapter by T.
McCulloch and F.McNeill in "Addressing Offender Behaviour"
[Willan Publishing 2008], pp 154 to 171).
53. I suggest therefore a return to the Probation
Officer's way of working, and a return to the Probation Order.
54. Question 5: Does the Probation Service
have the capacity to cope with a move away from short custodial
sentences?
55. In brief, at present the short answer to
this question is "No". We [that is "CROPS"]
estimate, however, from sources within or recently within, the
probation service that between 20 and 33% of an "Offender
Manager's" time is presently spent on the supervision of
offenders who have been Automatically Released Early from prison.
56. We suggest this practice is a false economy
and based on the dangerous confusion of prison and non-prison,
and should be abolished.
57. Instead, we suggest a return to the system
that existed before 1991. Under this a prisoner simply serves
two-thirds of the prison sentence they are given at court, all
within the prison walls. Breaches of discipline in prison may
lengthen the sentence a little, but generally all parties—the
offender, the public, the court, the prison know from the outset
what the likely date of release will be.
58. This would return the sentence of imprisonment
to being a simple punishment for a serious crime. It would mean
a return to the notion that when a sentence has been served the
offender is returned to society, a free person, with as many rights
and entitlements as any other person.
59. A return to this system would be much safer
than the present half-way release system, and would return the
prison sentence to its former integrity and comprehensibility.
60. OM's now supervising these "Half-Way
Released" prisoners in the community would be liberated to
be PO's supervising Probation Orders.
61. Question 8 asks whether "the provision
of training" is "adequate"
Again the short answer is, often, "No".
In its desperation to obtain more staff, the NOMS has recruited
large numbers of barely trained staff called "Probation Service
Officers". This title is remarkably similar to the real,
properly trained over two years "Probation Officers",
but PSO's are often given merely a few weeks training.
62. The Committee might like to ask the NOMS
how many of each category it employs.
63. "PSO's" will need anything up to
two years further training, and indeed may not want to be Probation
Officers at all, having been recruited to be NOMS employed "Offender
Managers" . Some are employed in roles not compatible with
the Probation Officer role, such as Court Breach Legal Prosecution
Officers.
64. The break-up of NOMS will mean that staff
presently employed will have to be closely interviewed as to whether
they wish to work in the rehabilitational Probation Service, or
the custodial services, or leave altogether. Those who remain
will have to be trained according to their needs.
65. CONCLUSION
The need for drastic reform is borne out, I believe,
by the statistics concerning the prison population of this country.
In 1981 it was 43,000, in the next 10 years, when the Probation
Service was operating in the way I recommend to happen again [with
Parole], it rose by just 2,000 to 45,000.
After the Criminal Justice Act of 1991 it rose by
a staggering 23,000 in six years to 68,000. Since the Labour government's
arrival in 1997 it has continued to rise to its present figure
of around 85,000: the last administration forecast a continued
rise to about 96,000 by 2014. This country spends a larger percentage
of its GDP on the Criminal Justice System than any country in
the world, including America.
August 2010
| 
