The second major development in the work of Court Welfare was the setting up of voluntary contact centres where parents who ‘needed’ to see their children in a safe place could do so. The same applied to children who needed a safe environment. With one enthusiastic volunteer who took on the setting up and arranged the training, we had five centres in Berkshire within two years.
Looking Back
I retrained as a family mediator but even after twenty years of retirement, I still say I was a probation officer. The work we did was valuable in several ways. It was described as to supervise, advice, assist and befriend. Some elements of the community saw that as being ‘soft’ on crime but it always meant that the offender had to face up to what they had done.
Prison was the escape from responsibility and it still is, as well as costing so much more in both money and human life. A person once imprisoned is a greater risk to the community than one who is kept in the community. Yes, prison is needed for those who remain a threat to the community but being a nuisance to others is never a good reason for a custodial sentence. Tariffing has, in my opinion, caused far more damage than it could ever solve.
Probation was about crime prevention. Rarely did my ‘success rate’, that is orders that completed without further offending, fall below eighty per cent. We provided a first-class service to the courts by our reports and we kept people out of prison and contributing to their community.
Sadly, we were also a political pawn and one Home Secretary who did not like us, wiped out our social work training at the stroke of his pen. Prevention, as I have already said is the prime reason for probation and facing your responsibilities is more challenging to the offender than anything the court might do. The present attitude seems designed to fill the prisons rather than pursue justice for either victim or offender.
As such I am glad to see how reparation schemes have developed. Where appropriate, they are of great value to both victim and offender.
The prison population is now more than double when I retired even though the numbers going through court are much the same. The probation service has effectively been emasculated and sentencing become tariff based instead of a system of common sense and justice. This has been caused by both recent governments
That makes the stories of some of the people that I have met on my way as, if not more relevant for today as they were in the 1970s/80s. It is from this era of my work that the stories come as it is most unlikely that anyone would now be recognised.
Anyway, I have changed the names and basic details. Only the story is unchanged. It was a great privilege to be there at a time when justice was the target and not the cost. In these few pages, you will have met some of the people called criminals. After over thirty years working with them, I still wonder who the victim is. The poor, the inadequate, the ill-educated, are there in abundance. But so are the victims of crime and the prime work of probation was always the prevention of crime for both victim and perpetrator.
I was fortunate to be there when the answers were about trying to change things for the better and I say again what a privilege it was to be where I could be part of the humane side of criminal justice.
Behind the Crime Page 8