Behind the Crime

by Colin Ferguson

  As a child, he had been dressed as a girl by his very obsessive mother who had wanted him to be female. His young adult life was apparently very confusing and he behaved as a young man, married in his twenties and had two children. At this time, he was still a cross dresser. His marriage broke down and he spent several short spells in prison, often as a result of violence. He became aware that his different sexuality was not homosexual because he wanted to be a woman. He went through all the tests that were available in those days and it was agreed that he was indeed a suitable case for transgender and not just to live as a cross dresser.

  He was not, however, able to take the final steps until he had completed his parole. He actually became a cause celebre as it was still in the very early days of this being recognised as a possibility. He normally reported to me as a man but towards the end of his parole he had taken the step of living as a woman and dressing as a woman so reporting dressed as a woman. I heard later that he had successfully made the transition.

  Bungled!

  John was sitting on the floor outside my office when I returned from lunch. He wasn’t expected so I knew something quite drastic must have happened as I normally had trouble getting him to report at all.

  He slumped down in the chair and he had evidently been drinking, “My mates are looking for me. I think they want to kill me but it weren’t my fault we got stuck.”

  Feeling as if I had come in half way through a story, I said, “Let’s start at the beginning. Why are your mates looking for you?”

  He went on to tell me that he had been driving the car in a smash and grab raid. He had as instructed backed the car into a jeweller’s shop window. His friends grabbed what they wanted and jumped back into the car. The alarm was blaring away. As he put his foot down, nothing happened. Somehow the car had become lodged on a ridge with the back wheels off the ground.

  By now, they could hear the police car coming. The mates jumped out, lifted the car off, back in and they were off but with the police in pursuit. They drove into a wood where they had a switch car.

  They were nearly home when they realised that the main bag of jewels was still in the previous car. John handed himself in to the police and received two years in prison. His friends got three years. Apparently, even the judge laughed.

  In the Wardrobe

  I was rather surprised to be given a parole supervision on a seventy-six your old man especially when I saw it was for blackmail and assault. His story was remarkable and unusual.

  George was having a relationship with a younger married woman. To all accounts, he had been very generous to her. In time, she had tired of him and started a new relationship with a retired police officer. George was understandably rather upset by this and threatened to tell her husband if she did not return some of his gifts to her.

  Her new boyfriend set a meeting up with George, apparently to sort it all out, but had one of his still working colleagues there, hiding in a wardrobe. It really did sound rather like a Whitehall farce but the result was that George became angry and threatening, at which point the policeman emerged from the wardrobe and arrested him. A recording had been taken of the conversation so the blackmail charge was proved.

  By itself, that might not have been enough for a longish prison sentence but they discovered that George had been abusing young teenage girls. Unbelievably, he had advertised his skills in enlarging their breasts. Even more unbelievable was that two young women had come along with their parent’s consent.

  The court was not amused and had sent him to prison for three years. He assured me that he had learnt his lesson.

  Grass

  In this case, ‘grass’ is a slang term for a police informant and Reg would not normally have had anything to do with it, in fact like most offenders he would have despised the person who did it. Unwittingly, I was his means of communication as one of our secretaries was married to a police officer in the CID and Reg would visit and slip his information to her so he was never seen to be in contact with the police himself.

  It all began when he was released after serving three years imprisonment for burglary. As he got home, there was a note on the door saying, “Reg, I have gone and I’m not telling you where. I have looked after the children on my own for long enough and it’s your turn now. They are next door and they know what is happening. Shelley.”

  As he was out on parole, he came to see me almost immediately as he lived just around the corner from the office. I put him in touch with Social Services and they came to see him the next day. The children were quite glad to see their father but didn’t really know why their mother had gone and the Social Worker felt that with the support of the next-door neighbour and with my supervision he could be all right. To his credit, Reg did not try to duck out of his unexpected responsibility but he certainly made full use of my supervision and the next-door neighbour.

  The fear of having to go back into prison and thereby losing the children gave him a strong incentive.

  A minor brush with the law brought him in contact with local CID and an offer that he could not refuse.

  The girls were eleven and nine at this time and were old enough to look after their own hygiene and knew how to use the washing machine, much to Reg’s relief.

  They looked after him as much as he looked after them.

  Then Reg made a mistake and burgled a house in Surrey. There was no protection for him there and he was fortunate to get a probation order because of his children.

  He was still learning how to deal with the official bodies such as the Social Security and the school but they all knew how he was trying to be responsible for the first time in his life and coped with his exasperation at the slowness of responding to his needs.

  I had one example of it when I was slow in dealing with him and he stormed into the office and began shouting at me from about a foot away. I must have been having a bad day as well because I bellowed back at him and told him in simple English not to shout at me and to go away and come back the next day when he could talk properly. He turned and left the office.

  Several members of our staff asked me if I was all right afterwards as my response to Reg was unlike my normal quieter way of working. Still, Reg returned the next day and we were able to sort the issue out. The time came and I was due to move to Reading. This disturbance to his support caused him considerable anxiety and he had a bad row with the head-teacher which led to a case conference being held.

  For some reason, I was not involved in it but I had spoken to the social worker the day before.

  I called to see him that afternoon. I knocked and the door opened slightly. Pushing it more, I called in to Reg and took a step into the house only to find him standing behind the door with an axe in his hand, raised and ready to hit. There are several situations that all the training in the world cannot prepare you for.

  I looked straight at Reg, “That’s not for me, is it Reg?” After making sure there was nobody else, he came down and we were able to talk and to calm him down before the social worker did come. I must admit that writing about it was far less worrying than standing there with an axe above my head.

  He had thought they were coming to take the children into care. Thankfully, I was able to reassure him that the meeting had been to talk about how they could help him in his care of the children.

  I also pointed out that it was just as well it was me at the door as otherwise he would have been inside and not able to look after the children. I arranged for him to come into my office to meet the officer who was going to look after his supervision when I left. I also made him promise to behave himself with her. It may sound as if I was treating him a bit as a child, but in a way he was.

  His relationship with the police also helped to keep him at home but it was a very risky thing as he would have been at considerable risk if it had become known to the criminal gangs.

  His new officer knew Reg already from having covered for me when I was on holiday and of all my colleagues, she
had the tough qualities that are needed for supervising the more demanding client without freaking out. Even Probation officers can feel overwhelmed at times.

  That’s Not Me!

  Alice came from a good family, a professional family but a family destroyed by alcohol. Her father had been a highly regarded doctor who committed suicide when his alcoholism became too much for him. Her mother had spent long spells in hospital because of alcohol and her brother had been killed in a car accident when he was drunk.

  Alice had still done well at school but in her last year she began to take drugs. Her then boyfriend, took her to parties and clubs where drugs were freely available. Drugs helped her forget her grief and stopped her from drinking but by the time I met her she was injecting heroin and rarely able to work. She still had the security of her home but it was also the centre point of her sadness. Being arrested and put on probation was a shock to her. She didn’t want to accept she had a problem even when she became seriously ill and almost died. That did however, make her value her life and so we could begin to work on motivation for the future. The drugs however did still have a control over her until one day when she was at the hospital.

  She needed a fix so she nipped in to the toilets. As she was about to inject, she saw a sign on the door. “Drug addicts! Please do not fix in here as it may be used by children.” She thought how terrible it was for children to be exposed to drugs and then realised that she was the problem. She had cried for ten minutes trying to say ‘it’s not me! It’s not me!’ But it was.

  We began to work on a questionnaire that I used to see if that might give her a starting point. One of the questions was, ‘How far do you feel you have you achieved your ambition in life.’ The scoring was nought to twenty and she had nought. She realised that all her ambition was the next fix and she could not see beyond it. But she wanted to. I told her to go away and after a week to come back and tell me where she wanted to go however crazy it sounded.

  The following week, she returned and she knew – I want to be a nurse and to work with people like me who have drug and addiction problems. She had said it before to others but they had always said it was impossible. I asked her how she was going to get there and what did she need to do.

  For a year, she stayed at a clinic clearing herself from the physical addiction. It was hard time and it times very frightening for her. By now, her probation order had finished but I continued to work with her on a voluntary basis. Several times, she nearly gave up but the day came when she could come home. Target two was about to begin.

  At least twelve months in a job without relapse. She got a menial job in one of the big London stores and at the end of this she was accepted for a training course in nursing. She became aware that it was not just the drugs she had to conquer but her addictive personality.

  Three years later, I had a letter from her to say she was now a sister on a ward dealing with addictions.

  The last time I saw her, she was spearheading a new centre for the treatment of addictions on television.

  It was obviously a great help that her academic ability meant that achieving her dream was possible and it was a question of enabling her to recognise that it was possible and having a light support to get her through the two years of torture she had to endure that got her where she could be.

  She was still an addict but now she could recognise that and handle it. Her achievement in doing so was a real triumph of determination as the power of addiction undermines confidence and seeks only its own ends. People cannot stop because they are told to do so, they must have motivation and a lot of courage.

  I confess to a feeling of joy that I was able to help her do what she did.

  Patience

  Fred was put on probation for two years, mainly because the court thought that he was in danger of being led into more serious crime because of his poor school attendance and his involvement with the gang with whom he had got into trouble. He reported regularly and never got into any more trouble. I saw him in my office and visited the home several times. He was in his last year at school and it was clear that academic achievement was not his forte. Since leaving the fellowship of the gang, he tended just to stay in and watch television.

  Worst of all for me was that he was almost totally monosyllabic. In two years, I cannot remember him saying anything more than yes or no but he did keep out of trouble and his order finished ‘satisfactorily’.

  Two years later, I was told that Fred was in the office waiting to see me. The change was almost unbelievable. He was bright eyed, keen and full of the fact that he had just passed his driving test. We talked for about half an hour about his great sense of success and how this had opened up new opportunities for him at work. Suddenly, Fred believed in himself and in the future.

  He had come to tell me even before he had gone home. I learnt from him that being patient and accepting him as he was made me the only person who had not told him he was stupid and no good for anything. I had always encouraged him. It was a privilege to share in his joy and success.

  Potatoes

  Ken came to me on borstal license and with one of the least promising referrals I had ever seen. He had several previous offences most of which involved violence. His offence before the sentence for borstal training was for attempted murder; he had run over his victim and then reversed the car back over him. Fortunately, the injuries were not as severe as they might have been. He had only been in the borstal for the minimum time because he was so disruptive and he was definitely not keen on supervision.

  I was, therefore, quite surprised when he reported on release. I outlined the conditions of his license and said that as far as I was concerned that was what I expected. He grunted and then said, “I don’t want to go back inside, it does my head in!”

  Why I said what I did I cannot recall because it sounds very odd now. It was however quite inspired, “I’m glad to hear that Ken. Now I’ve told you what I expect but if you really want to change we will have to work on this lovely anger you have.”

  Yes, he did look at me as if I was mad, but he asked the question, “What do you mean?”

  I explained that as far as I was aware he was riddled with anger and it was no use telling him not to be angry because he was angry and he either had to learn how to control it or it would ruin his life completely.

  He listened. I continued, “I want you to go now and come back next week at the same time and if you are willing, we will start to see how you can use it for good and not for bad.”

  He left and reported the following week as I had asked. “What can I do?” he asked.

  We began to look at ways for him to use up his energy in sport and by going to the gym. Then be began to look for work that would use his energy. He found a job in a greengrocers shop and that was quite physical. He moved out of the area but I retained his supervision as by then it only had a short time to go. Then he committed a minor offence and appeared in a court outside my area. I wrote a report explaining the work we had been doing but the clincher for him was the owner of the shop who came and gave him a glowing reference.

  Ken was given a conditional discharge. He had kept his anger in check for nine months. During that time, we had looked at what the root of his anger might be and it wasn’t hard to find when he talked of the physical abuse he had suffered at the hand of his mother. Bereft of love and taught to be violent himself, he had never found a reason to be anything else but the victim of his uncontrolled anger.

  Throughout his life experience, people had told him to stop being angry, but it was only when he came here that he was effectively given permission to be angry and then to work with it in a constructive way.

  We kept in touch after the license came to an end. He married and they had a child and he found the love he had never experienced as a child. The last time I heard from Ken was in a letter to let me know that the baby was well (she had been ill for some time).

  It ended with a PS:

  “When it’s too m
uch for me now, I take it out on the potatoes.”

  Too often, we are scared by people’s anger and as such we fail to see the hurt person inside the violence. By accepting Ken’s anger as a reality for him and not denying it or punishing him for it, Ken became the hard working, loving father and husband, even though he still did need the potatoes.

  Reading

  Though I was happy in Battersea, my career needed to move up a notch and I began to apply for senior positions and this resulted in our move to Reading in 1979. At this time, there were three area teams and the work was much as I had known it. I was given the Whitley area to manage with a team of five officers. Because of the heavy workload, I still had some face-to-face work in what was seen as one of the difficult parts of Reading. The following episodes come from this period.

  The challenge came when we moved to specialist appointments and in 1982 I was given the county responsibility for the supervision of juvenile offenders and for the Family Courts. Having only learnt how to drive when I reached fifty, my new driving licence came into use as I now had three office bases, Windsor, Newbury and Reading.

  In Reading, we began to deal with juvenile offenders through a Joint Agency Group which effectively became a sub-judicial way of dealing with juvenile crime through the police cautioning system. I worked alongside a police inspector, senior social worker and the Education Welfare Officer. As the assessments were made soon after the offence was committed instead of three or four months later, we were able to take voluntary action and to place the responsibility back into the family after a police warning. Where something more was needed or if the youngster was already on a caution then we proceeded to court.

  In the space of three years, we had reduced the number of juveniles going to court from 350 a year to just about 100. The number of custodial sentences came down from 50 to just two. Partly, this was due to the fact that we had released time and space to deal effectively with those who were in danger of further offending. The re-offending rates dropped by over a third.