One of Labour's first challenges is to tackle the prisons overcrowding crisis they have inherited from the Tories. While the new government has enacted emergency measures to release people from prison early, a longer-term solution is needed. One of the potential fixes put forward is for courts to send fewer people to prison, issuing them with community sentences instead.
UNISON has already covered how the government's early release scheme is impacting probation workers responsible for supporting people after prison. But what about probation workers in the community, supporting people on community sentences?
“Working in probation is all about being a people person,” says UNISON member Errol Wallace, a community payback supervisor who has worked in the probation service on and off for 27 years.
Community payback is a type of sentence given to people convicted of a crime. It involves carrying out between 40 and 300 hours of unpaid work. The work is generally of benefit to the local community, often including the cleaning and upkeep of community spaces.
“This role is very unique. The title ‘community payback supervisor’ doesn’t do justice to it. We have to have a good psychological understanding of how to work with people and we’re often dealing with their mental health and personal issues. We’re also counsellors and health and safety officers all rolled up into one.”
Errol gets a buzz from working with people on probation, due to the changes he feels he can make to their lives. “I’m a big advocate for rehabilitation. Anyone who comes through the door of my projects is a human being first. I’m not here to judge people. I ask them how their work is. If they’re searching for work, I ask how their job search is going.
“People’s backgrounds are often a part of why they offend,” he continues. “If someone has been brought up in a home where they’ve experienced verbal abuse as a young child and they couldn’t do anything about it then, when they grow up they may be abusive to others. It’s important for people to recognise where it all comes from, and to address it so they can move on with their lives.”
Errol says that, over the years, he’s found himself going outside of his role to take care of the people he supervises.
“One time I was supervising a project and the project beneficiary called me at 6:30am in the morning to say she’d just seen one of the men on my project sleeping on the ground. It was October and freezing cold at the time. I drove straight to the location and brought him into the office. I could see his skin changing colour as he came back inside.
“It transpired that he was homeless. I rang management and said: ‘we’ve got to have a duty of care to this fella’. He was working with me three days a week and I paid for him to stay in a hostel. I gave him an old mobile phone and we went to Primark to get him some new clothes.”
Errol tears up when he remembers receiving a telephone call from the man three months after he'd finished his order: “He wanted to thank me for my help, and told me he was just about to sign for a set of keys for a room.”
In Errol’s view, many more people could be serving their sentences in the community, as opposed to prison. “It’s so important for people to have self-worth and a job, so that they don’t reoffend. For so long, all the government’s been concerned about is locking people up. But locking people up doesn’t help anyone. It doesn’t help the individual and it doesn’t help society. And we all pay for it in the end. It’s so expensive.
“The cheaper option," he laughs, “would be to send them to Eton.”
Prison: the numbers
It costs an average of £51,724 per year to keep someone in prison, according to latest Ministry of Justice data.
A recent study has estimated the annual total economic and social cost of reoffending at £18.1bn.
Research shows that people who serve a community order are less likely to reoffend. For women, the data is stark: 73% of women released from a short prison sentence will reoffend within a year, compared to only 30% of women serving a community order.
While Errol finds his work with people on probation rewarding, he doesn’t feel that this is recognised by the government:
“There’s always a spotlight on us in case anything goes wrong. But there’s not much of a focus on what people are doing right.”
“We’re being given more and more paperwork to do on top of the direct work we’re doing with people. It means that probation workers end up having to take our work home with us, because obviously you’re busy during the day supervising the people on probation.”
“I’d love for people on probation to do an exit questionnaire after they complete their order," Errol says, "because I’d love to hear about what they’ve learned and how they’ve benefited. Honestly, supporting people on community orders can be like watching birds fly the nest. You feed them, they get feathers and then they’re gone. I do love what I do, and a big part of it is about being a listening ear.
“A better name for probation officers would be change officers.”
'It feels like a treadmill'
People end up under Errol's supervision because a court has ordered them to be there. Probation officers who work in courts play a key role in sentencing, by producing pre-sentence reports (PSRs). A PSR covers an individual’s personal circumstances and history and the probation officer uses this information to make recommendations to the magistrate on what their sentence should be.
It's UNISON member Claudia Campbell's job to produce pre-sentence reports at a magistrate's court in East London. She says: “Our proposals can change someone’s life.”
Whatever is put in a PSR could mean the difference between prison time, a community order or a conditional discharge, which means that someone does not receive any sentence on the condition that they don’t commit any further offences.
“I once had to interview someone who was charged with assault of an emergency worker,” Claudia says. “When I got the paperwork, it turned out that it was the case of a young Black male on the autism spectrum who was stopped by the police. They were looking for two white males, but had stopped him.
“The police officers had grabbed his shopping bags and touched him, which was very overstimulating for someone on the spectrum. He overreacted, they chucked him on the floor, and he was arrested and it came to court.
“In my report, I noted all of his learning disabilities and why touching was overstimulating for him, and why he was vulnerable. The magistrates told me they were thinking about a community order for him, but I knew he didn’t need probation supervision. I said: ‘I’m going to step outside of sentencing guidelines and recommend a conditional discharge.’ And he got it.”
“I think people like this could have been dealt with in another way. I’ve seen these people come in, and I just don’t think they should be in the system. In these cases, I explain the full situation to the magistrate and encourage them to grant a conditional discharge.”
“People come to us and we’re not here to make judgments about what they’ve done – the courts will do that – probation is here to enable you to work out why you did it and to stop it from happening again. We’re their cheerleaders. We’re here to say to people: ‘I’ve seen someone just like you before, and I’ve seen them change their life.”
Like Errol, Claudia says that the most important thing about probation work is people skills. “Before probation, I worked in a job centre, and in my years doing that I built a lot of people skills. Growing up in east London, some of my friends and people I went to school with were in the criminal justice system for one reason or another. I’ve seen the discrimination that people suffer just from walking down the street. Probation, for me, is a way I could say: Let me hear your side. What’s your situation? I want to be the person who offers assistance.”
However, she notes that the culture of probation has changed significantly in the 20 years she’s worked in the service. While the service was founded on the values of ‘advise, assist and befriend’, these have since changed to ‘enforce, rehabilitate and protect’. On top of this, cuts and restructures to the service have put astronomical pressure on probation workers.
“It feels like a treadmill. I’ve got seven pre-sentence reports on the go at the moment, and it’s a lot of pressure and stress. What adds to the stress is that so many of the buildings we work in aren’t functioning as they should. We haven’t had a working toilet since last January, and we’ve only just got a printer after four years without one. On top of this, there have been so many changes in our ways of working. It feels like probation is constantly in an experimental stage.”
Grayling's failings
The probation service has been repeatedly restructured by successive Conservative governments, most notably by former justice secretary Chris Grayling, whose disastrous 2014 probation reforms dissolved 35 local probation trusts across England and Wales and privatised half of the service.
Grayling’s changes were reversed seven years later, with probation brought back into public ownership in 2021, under the same umbrella as the prison system, to form His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS).
UNISON national officer for policing and probation, Ben Priestley, agrees with Claudia’s comment that probation is in a constant ‘experimental’ stage: “The civil service is in a state of almost constant top-down reorganisation, which has never allowed probation to just get on with its core mission. The One HMPPS strategy has created a totally new layer of senior managers at great cost to the public purse, when what is really needed is a focus on supporting frontline staff with better pay and conditions.
“UNISON wants to see the probation service reinstate the localism it had before Grayling destroyed it. Until probation is devolved and run locally, the Ministry of Justice will run it and that is clearly not working. We want to see the government commit to re-localising probation.”
'I can see the injustice within the justice system'
UNISON branch secretary and probation officer Ian Spence works alongside Claudia at Barkingside Magistrates Court. He agrees with UNISON’s proposals to re-localise the probation service and remove it from the same umbrella as the prison service. “It’s madness that we’re put under the same umbrella as prisons. We have two completely different cultures and ours is not to punish. The probation service’s role is to identify the reasons why people commit crime, refer them to relevant agencies and deliver rehabilitative services.”
Ian has worked in probation for 20 years, and in courts since 2016. Like Claudia, he feels that the culture of the probation service has shifted in this time. “We used to be treated as skilled professionals, relied upon to use our judgement. But now it feels like we work in a PSR factory.”
Over the years, probation officers in courts have been required to include increasing amounts of information within their PSRs, but have not been given the additional time or resources to do this.
“A pre-sentence report involves interviewing an individual and doing an analysis of their offending, previous convictions and personal circumstances, followed by a risk assessment to determine their risk of reoffending and risk of serious harm. The risk of reoffending is generated by the system and the risk of harm is based on your professional judgement.”
Ian is allocated four hours and fifteen minutes to write each report, regardless of the severity of offence. This means that he gets the same amount of time to write up a pre-sentence report for someone who is charged with a first-time offence for cannabis possession, sentenced by a magistrate, as he does for someone who has committed their 20th offence for stalking, who will be sentenced in the Crown Court. To add to this, probation officers are increasingly having to factor in additional mandatory reporting measures on their database.
“Four hours and fifteen minutes is not enough time,” Ian notes. “The interview takes as long as necessary, and sometimes you have to go through around 30 pages of background material. That’s before you then have to log all of the different information through the different systems. If they have committed a sexual offence, you have to have a telephone conference with the sex offenders’ unit. If there’s gang involvement, you do a similar thing with the gangs unit. And as soon as you’ve finished it, you’re straight onto the next one.”
“When you’re dealing with totally different people, and totally different offences, and have to switch rapidly from one to the other, it can be problematic. We’re human beings and this is serious work that has lifelong consequences for people. It’s not a production line.”
“We’re told that if we are allocated a complicated report, we can ask our manager for more time. But you’ll still have a backlog of other reports waiting, so where will the extra time come from? It’s more work that you can't fit into the hours given.”
Untenable workloads are a systemic issue across the probation service, which is why UNISON launched its Operation Protect campaign to demand the government take action on the back-breaking volumes of work that officers like Ian are having to deliver.
For the majority of cases he sees, Ian recommends that people are kept in the community, where they can properly address the reasons for their offending. Ian recalls a man he recently met, who he recommended a community order for: “This guy had five previous offences and he had been in prison before. He had a drug problem, and I said to him: ‘You need to get your drug problem sorted’. He agreed with me. For a case like that, what’s prison going to do?”
WHEN NEEDS ARE GREATER THAN DEEDS
Ministry of Justice figures show that around half of all people in prison are addicted to drugs, with people addicted to crack and heroin accounting for two-thirds of shoplifting offences and half of all burglaries.
Community orders can include a drug rehabilitation requirement (DRR), which provides treatment to someone who comes before the court and is dependent on or misuses drugs. They are often issued alongside mental health treatment requirements (MHTRs).
In the last 14 years of Conservative austerity cuts, drastic cuts to local authority funding have had a knock-on effect on addiction and mental health services. Council mental health budgets have been cut by 26% since 2016, and with no set limit on cash for addiction treatment, many of these vital services have been cut down.
Since 2013, there has been an 81% increase in class A drug use among 16-25 year olds.
Ian says that he also sees a lot of people with mental health problems coming before the courts. “I’ve seen a lot of people come through court who really shouldn’t be in the criminal justice system. They should be with a doctor or psychiatrist, but because of the lack of support and resources, they end up in court. I remember interviewing someone with an appropriate adult who couldn’t even remember anything about their offence. They shouldn’t have been in court.”
Where individuals are unable to access the support that they need from mental health and addiction support agencies, many of which no longer exist, they are ending up in the criminal justice system.
And while the social safety net is shrinking, our criminal justice system is expanding, and it’s probation officers like Claudia and Ian who are left to pick up the pieces.
“I can see the injustice within the justice system,” says Ian.
'You have no life when you're in the probation service'
The chop and change in probation over the last 14 years continues under newly introduced ‘probation reset’ measures, which have come into force as part of the new government’s emergency measures to tackle prison overcrowding.
Probation reset shortens the length of people’s probation supervision periods by a third. This means that people on probation are serving shorter community orders and suspended sentence orders, which is where a judge or magistrate issues someone with a suspended prison sentence that is only activated if they commit a further offence.
Jacqui* works in the HR team of a probation delivery unit (PDU), overseeing the admin for around 100 probation workers who supervise both people on release from prison and those serving sentences in the community. In her position, she gets a bird’s eye view of the workplace issues:
“The churn is constant. It’s high stress across the board. Nobody has it easy,” she says.
Every day, Jacqui is responsible for producing scores of new ‘reset’ licences for people on probation and delegating them to the probation workers working within the unit.
“One probation worker can have up to 70 cases, and that’s just for resetting,” she says. “The workloads are too high, everyone’s operating over 130% and some people are working at 175%.”
STAFFING SHORTAGES
The constant restructures in the service have seen an exodus of some of the most experienced workers with no replacements, resulting in a severe staffing shortfall.
The government target number of probation officers for 2024 is 6,794. With a shortfall of 2,031 officers against the required staffing level, there is a staggering vacancy rate of 43%.
“If we could retain more staff, it would take the pressure off, but when people see how much work they have to do, and how much the salary is, they shy away from it.”
Even when people are in the role, burnout is common. Jacqui says she’s seen staff ‘break down’ when their work becomes too much, “I’ve seen quite a few people go off on long-term sick leave because of the stress.
“It’s the lack of work-life balance and lack of compensation for it. You have no life when you’re in the probation service.”
For Neil Richardson, chair of UNISON's probation sector committee, the blame lays with Grayling's 2014 restructures: “The once world-renowned and award-winning Probation Service was destroyed, on a whim, by Chris Grayling," he says.
“Starved of investment, stagnated wages, splintered leadership, loss of professional identity and being placed into the faceless bureaucracy of the Civil Service have all played their part in bringing the Probation Service to its knees.”
Neil is clear about the exact changes needed from the new government: “We must see a break from the centralised top-heavy civil service to a localised, community-based rehabilitation service. We need a rescue package that allows the Probation Service to do what they do best and to divert people from custody and deliver effective rehabilitative community services.”
*Name has been anonymised
Words by Janey Starling. Images by Marcus Rose.