Through-care with Prisoners and their Families in England

Abstract

FACED with increasing responsibility over the past decade, and clearly with more to come, plus also certain radicalising influences in the social field, some interesting trends are becoming evident in the English probation service. Only a few of these can be indicated in this article.The casework pioneers accepted more readily their role in furthering social control than would today's workers. The traditional casework approach that dominated probation work in the 50's and 60's with a sometimes too precious notion of the one-to-one &dquo;worker/client&dquo; relationship was based on the &dquo;helper/helped&dquo; concept. A reaction is developing, but we should not go to the other extreme. The principles and techniques of casework based on the knowledge of psychology and child development remain valuable, provided these notions are re-defined and transposed into today's settings and the wider continuum of worker-clientcommunity relationships.&dquo;Through-care&dquo; has been a significant development. The recommendations made in the report on the Organisation of After-Care (1963)1 that compulsory and voluntary after-care be amalgamated into a common service were implemented and the Probation Service became the Probation and After-Care Service. Some of its officers were seconded to do casework in penal institutions as prison welfare officers.This new situation created some anxiety. It was feared that we had inadequate resources for this extra work; it was also queried whether a service traditionally established in the community was the right agency for the new task, whether a service hitherto used to working with easier probationers in more hopeful situations would cope with &dquo;a more damaged and hardened group of clients&dquo;.2 Happily, by now the service has begun to see the positives of the situation. It had been said often enough that after-care should start at the moment when the offender is sentenced, or even earlier. At long last this notion has been put into practice. Many departments have already developed a system of &dquo;through-care&dquo;. While the &dquo;outside&dquo; probation officer handles the family, the worker on the &dquo;inside&dquo; (the prison welfare officer) sees the husband who is in detention, with both workers collaborating. Such effective coat UNIVERSITE DE MONTREAL on June 16, 2015 ijo.sagepub.com Downloaded from