If you repeatedly ask someone to do something that is inherently, and obviously, impossible, and then blame him for not having done it, you might be suspected of ulterior motives, such as a desire to hide something such as your own incompetence.
And so it is with the criticism constantly levelled at the Probation Service, which is accused of not keeping the public safe. It does not do so because it cannot do so. Blaming it diverts attention from the defects of policing and criminal justice policy now going back over decades.
The probation service is a scapegoat for the failure of the police and the judiciary
Much publicity has been given to the case of Zara Aleena, who was murdered by a man called Jordan McSweeney nine days after he was released from prison, having been assessed by the probation service as at ‘medium risk’ of further violent offence. This was despite the fact that he had been imprisoned nine times before, had been convicted 28 times for 69 offences, including for violence. Among his last offences was possession of a knife while in prison, which hardly suggests a deeply repentant or reformed man. The assessment, then, was self-evidently absurd, but that does not go to the heart of the matter. Indeed it is fundamentally irrelevant.
Unfortunately, the public has fallen for the idea that probation can keep it safe. Even the murdered woman’s grieving aunt said, ‘She would have been alive today if probation had done their work better.’ But the probation service is a scapegoat for the failure of the police and the judiciary.
In 2019-2020, about 34 per cent of people on probation were reconvicted in a year, on average for about four offences: that is to say, there were about 1.2 convictions for each person on probation per year.
But in private, most convicted criminals will happily, and sometimes even proudly, admit in private to five to 20 times as many offences as they have ever been charged with: in other words, the reoffending rate per person on probation is probably several hundred per cent per year rather than a mere 120 per cent. And as there are roughly 200,000 people on probation, this suggests that at least a million crimes, and probably far more, are committed each year by people on probation.
As if this were not enough, 90 per cent of people on probation are not just parkers on double yellow lines, they have committed, and been convicted of, serious offences. It goes almost without saying that practically all those in prison have already been through the not very hard-grinding mill of probation. And it is apparently easier to find a prisoner with 40 convictions in an English prison than one with a single conviction.
Pity the poor probation officer! What can he do? How is a short meeting with a probation officer supposed to deter or reform someone who has offended many times and has little incentive, or intention, not to repeat? It doesn’t take long to kill someone with a knife, and most people supposedly under supervision are not supervised for the immense majority of the time. The whole idea of probation as it has developed is therefore nonsensical, and in a way even demeaning to criminals, who are deemed to be as influenceable as butter. No doubt there are some persons of exceptional charisma who can beneficially influence the wickedly-disposed, but there are probably very few among the 18,000 probation officers, whose actual powers are so limited. It is small wonder that the Chief Inspector of Probation, Justin Russell, said it is ‘impossible to say that the public is being properly protected from the risks that people on probation pose to them,’ as if this had nothing to do with him.
However, it is possible to say that the public is unsafe because of the existence of the probation service.
The powers the service has are arbitrary and against the rule of law. Assessments of dangerousness are notoriously inexact, and if people are in effect penalised (or not) on their basis, arbitrariness is inscribed into law. Assessments are inaccurate in both directions, but dramatically so when someone is deemed safe when he turns out to be dangerous.
The case of Damien Bendall is illustrative. The probation service said that this man, with convictions for robbery, attempted robbery and grievous bodily harm (one step below attempted murder) was, like McSweeney, at ‘medium risk’ of reoffending. And the judge said, suspending a 17-month sentence for arson, that he did not believe ‘for a second’ that Bendall would ever return to court, and that his decision to move away from where he was living was not only brave, but the wisest thing he had ever done. Three months later, Bendall killed his girlfriend, her two daughters, one of whom he raped, and a third child. All this is not an aberration or exception, at least not in the statistical sense: it is the perfect normal working of the system.
Everything in that system has become a charade, a Potemkin village – a failing state with no Catherine the Great in sight. All is appearance, nothing is substance. Judges sentence criminals to three years’ imprisonment, knowing full well that they will be released in 18 months or sooner, as a matter of course, and do not protest against having to lie in this fashion. The probation service busies itself with procedure, and indeed is overwhelmed by it, though – as the chief inspector himself intimated – it knows perfectly that it is doing nothing except pulling the wool over the public’s eyes, making work for itself, and slouching towards a pension.
In all this, it is the purest form of British public service.
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