Sentenced to Social Work?

Abstract

THE PRESENT time is one of declining use of the probation order in favour of other penalties. It is a time of pressure to find alternatives to imprisonment for the petty recidivist offender who finds himself ultimately being sentenced to successive terms of imprisonment. It is a time of acclamation for the community service order and of proliferation of social inquiry reports and growing domestic work. But it is also a time of doubt about the competence of the Probation and After-Care Service and the efficacy of probation methods.The belief that social work with offenders would itself make an impact on reconviction rates (the &dquo;treatment model&dquo;) has been shown by a whole series of research studies' to be only very marginally valid, if at all. This has enormous implications both for the future development of the Service and the way in which current resources are managed. The traditional social work dimension of the agency is likely to be increasingly identified as just one part (albeit an important part) of what should be available to community, courts and offenders. This process is already under way and is evidenced by the use of ancillaries and the development of community service. Thus the concept of differential treatment, once used to describe a range of social work skills, is now taking on a much broader meaning since it is gradually encompassing provision based on concepts such as justice, reparation and punishment, where social work in the traditional sense may have a limited place.The purpose of this article is to examine the nature and function of a redefined probation order which, we believe, might have an important part to play in a broadly based Probation and After-Care Service devoted to the provision of publicly credible non-custodial alternatives to imprisonment. The present positionThe current political and economic climate should not be ignored when considering the trends referred to earlier and some might think our ideas are linked too much to a state of affairs which will prove temporary and of little significance. Nevertheless we consider that the declining use of the probation order by the courts reflects a declining credibility about the philosophy of the Service and the way it operates. Probation officers, trained as social workers, often appear confused about such fundamental questions as &dquo;who is the client?&dquo;. Is it the court, the offender, the agency, or a subjectively defined mixture of the three? . Furthermore they experience considerable frustration over the amount of their time spent in routine administration related to the oversight of offenders as distinct from pure social work activity. The nature of their relationship with offenders and courts, coupled with the one-to-one methods of work which still predominate, can so easily lead to the offender's responsibility for his own behaviour being transferred to the probation officer to the point where the officer feels culpable when further offences are committed. Thus once again the implication would seem to be of a ...

Privatising Probation: The Death Knell of a Much‐Cherished Public Service?

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Why Help Offenders? Arguments for Rehabilitation as a Penal Strategy

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Talking Tough: Empty Threats in Probation Practice

“…17) to be grasped in the development of social work practice. Nearly ten years ago, Bottoms and McWilliams (1979) argued for a more modest, yet more broadly based approach to rehabilitative practice, but the greater noise of debate was generated by the narrower issue ofcontrol and its relationship to social work with offenders (Bryant et al 1978;Harris 1980), fuelled by the specific emergence of the Kent Probation Control Unit and wider concern about the decline in the use of probation by courts. This debate was underpinned by an assumption, never objectively investigated, that the decline was due to loss of faith among sentencers in a service which was failing to exercise the discipline of probation supervision with proper rigour.…”