Suicides by offenders in the community have been relatively under-researched in comparison with prison suicides. This study examined in-depth the events and experiences of 28 service users under probation supervision, based on continuous records from the start of their sentence to their death by suicide. The study presents novel findings through mapping suicidal behaviour onto the probation supervision process, and demonstrates the complex pathways leading to suicide in this population. Key issues identified include missed appointments, the impact of legal proceedings, changes in supervision, and the importance of recording risk.
Despite a growing recognition of the intersectional relationship between homelessness and incarceration, we have a limited knowledge about housing policy and practice for people leaving custody and (ex)offender groups in the community. Addressing these gaps, this paper provides an overview of the main local housing authority statutory duties in the provision of housing support for prison leavers and (ex)offenders in England and Wales, and situates the issues with accessing accommodation within the wider context of austerity. The paper presents a case study that explores criminal justice practitioners’ experiences of working with local authority housing agencies. Stemming from 25 interviews with housing practitioners and criminal justice practitioners, the paper outlines the main challenges facing criminal justice agencies as they try to secure accommodation for homeless (ex)offenders and resettle them in the community. Finally, the paper concludes by raising critical questions about the housing options for this population, now and in the future.
This paper aims to contribute to the debate on making probation practice ‘desistance-focused’. It does this through considering the body of knowledge on responding to trauma through ‘bearing witness’ to the person’s story – attending to their values and lived experience – and applying this to probation practice. It addresses why the literature on trauma has relevance to work with people who have offended. Then it explores the epistemological, performative, moral and political dimensions of ‘bearing witness’ and the relevance of each of these to desistance. It highlights the potentially critical role of the audience (in this case the probation practitioner) in the co-construction of the desistance narrative. Additionally, the paper argues that insufficient attention has been paid to the moral space in which such narratives are co-constructed. In a context where the voices of people who have offended are silenced and their experiences of victimisation or structural violence are written out, I suggest that ‘being present and being with another’ (Naef, 2006: 146) enacts a moral responsibility to support a transition from object to subject and to recognise and endorse the humanity of those who have committed crimes. The paper provides a practice example of ‘bearing witness’ to desistance. Finally, it addresses potential challenges in asking probation officers to ‘bear witness’ to desistance.
Using the existing empirical literature and making reference to original research with Canadian children of prisoners, this Practice Note offers a caution to practitioners against making homogenizing or pathologizing assumptions about children who have a parent involved in the criminal justice system. Specifically, the notions that children of prisoners are highly likely to follow their parent to prison, are identical in their experiences of parental incarceration, or are necessarily in need of a specific counselling intervention are challenged. While children with a parent in prison are vulnerable to a variety of risk factors such as poverty, the relationship between parental incarceration, its covariates, and negative outcomes is complex. This paper concludes with four recommendations to practitioners working with families of prisoners and others involved in the justice system.
This is a reflective piece that explores how work to support children and families of prisoners in the North East of England developed from very limited provision 10 years ago to what is now a substantial and multifaceted programme. The success of the work has been driven by the voluntary sector, with one key agency in particular taking a lead, supported by research that has provided the evidence base to identify intervention points and to demonstrate effectiveness and impact. We see that the persistence and commitment of a key voluntary sector agency working in partnership with a research organisation, backed up by strategy and a supportive prison environment, has created strong children and families provision in the North East.
All families need both formal and informal supports throughout their life course. Parents relationships with their children need to be promoted, supported and maintained. For parents living with their children and acting as their primary carer this role, although fulfilling, is filled with challenges. At particular points in time and for a variety of reasons parents need to be supported in carrying out this role, striving towards healthy family functioning. For parents where there are additional stressors associated with their relationship with their children. The impact of this can be significant and far reaching for all involved. Incarcerated mothers and their children face particular difficulties in maintaining their relationships and for mothers to ‘perform’ a mothering role. Throughout the stages of childhood, family breakdown and separation from their mother is a traumatic experience for children. This paper considers the current provision within the Irish Prison System for supporting incarcerated mothers in their efforts to maintain relationships with their children and wider family members and highlights the deficits within this. This paper argues the case for reviving the role of supportive social work practitioners to work alongside incarcerated mothers in an effort to retain and realise their parental rights and duties and to maintain relationships with their children.
An analysis is presented of how prisoners’ relatives experience and attribute meanings to the imprisonment of one or more family members. Drawing on 30 interviews conducted in Portugal with men and women taking an active role in supporting prisoners, the article explores the collateral consequences associated with both male and female imprisonment. Empirical findings point to the heterogeneous, ambivalent, complex and dynamic character of prisoners’ relatives experiences and meanings. In addition, the results also highlight the significant impact of gender relations and access to social and economic resources on the social implications associated with imprisonment.
This article focusses on the issues that arise when grandmothers are put in the position of caring for their grandchildren while their parents are in prison. It will present the lived experience of three grandmothers who are in this position and 16 imprisoned mothers, whose mothers were caring for their children, who participated in two focus groups at two different female prisons. It is now well established that parental imprisonment generally has a negative impact upon children. Children with imprisoned mothers often face the most disruption to their lives. Many children with mothers in prison are cared for by their grandparents, with grandmothers generally doing the majority of the care. Pressures faced by grandparent carers of children with incarcerated parents occur as a result of stigma, loss, isolation, poor health and a lack of practical, emotional and financial support. If grandparents were not willing to provide this care, many more children with parents in prison would face being placed in foster care, or in children’s homes. The complexities encountered by both grandparents and imprisoned mothers as a result of the changes in roles that arise from these circumstances will be explored.
This paper explores the experiences and support needs of British Pakistani families of prisoners through in-depth interviews with six family members of different prisoners: four males and two females, ranging between 18 and 40 years. Key findings are that British Pakistani family members of prisoners experienced the Criminal Justice System as culturally inappropriate and insensitive, raising questions of direct, indirect and institutional racism. Furthermore, family members were more likely to access support if criminal justice and support services staff were drawn from the wider British Pakistani community, but felt hindered from doing so if those staff were thought to have personal relationships to the families’ own local communities.
The aim of this article is to critically reflect upon some of the practical difficulties which surround the implementation of an outcome-focused payment initiative, colloquially referred to as Payment by Results (PbR), in a drug and alcohol service situated in the North of England. Drawing upon the findings of a longitudinal study in a residential rehabilitation service, the discussion illustrates some of the tensions and dilemmas which surround the introduction of increasingly business-orientated decisions within a person-centered environment that is designed to work alongside some of society’s most troubled and troublesome individuals. To conclude, the article suggests that financially-driven processes (such as PbR) commodify the rehabilitative ideal, making service users and practitioners alike increasingly accountable to a counterintuitive fiscal endeavour.
A continuing criticism of the Transforming Rehabilitation (TR) reforms is that they fragment the process of probation supervision and, as a consequence, are likely to damage the network of relationships (between workers from different agencies as well as between supervisor and supervisee) that encourages compliance with orders and desistance from offending (PA/PCA, 2013; Ugwudike, 2013; McNeill and Robinson G, 2013; Robinson A, 2014). This short article reports on a research study that explored probation practice in an increasingly fragmented environment. The article outlines the implications of some of the study’s findings for the developing practice of community rehabilitation companies (CRCs) and highlights points of particular concern if good practice is to be maintained and practitioner expertise sustained.
The following paper shall discuss the implementation of the Coalition Governments Transforming Rehabilitation (TR) reforms in 2014 by focusing on the impact of these reforms on the desistance narratives of high risk intensive probationers, paying particular attention to the division of probation work between the National Probation Service (NPS) and the Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRC). It is argued that the reallocation of offenders between the NPS and CRC altered high risk probationers’ perceptions of self, caused probationers to question the occupational competence of CRC offender managers and saw probationers evidence the emergence of an attitudinal dissonance between the two services.
The repeated references to ‘agile working’ within the Community Rehabilitation Company (CRC) landscape led me to independently investigate what the terminology means. In this article, I share the findings from my brief examination of some of the available literature on these ‘new ways of working’. I place this information within the context of the publicized approaches that four out of the eight CRC owners promote. It is noteworthy that between them, these four corporate bodies own 16 out of the 21 CRCs in England and Wales. I conclude by highlighting some of the boundaries that could restrict probation practitioners’ ability to conduct meaningful probation work built around relationships of trust, collaboration and engagement.
An increasing challenge of working within Approved Premises is the complex nature of offenders presenting with personality disordered traits. This practice note outlines how our team of probation and mental health staff utilised training from the Knowledge and Understanding Framework (KUF) to adapt current practice in understanding and managing such complex cases. Some case examples are provided to add context and recommendations have been made for future practice, based on reflection.
This article aims to articulate how criminal justice staff may inadvertently make errors of logic when working with offenders with personality disorder. The aim of this article is also to consider ways of working that might help criminal justice staff to meaningfully engage and motivate clients with personality disorder, properly identify strengths and avoid making these fundamental errors of logic. A way of working is, therefore, outlined which attempts to facilitate consideration of the offender’s inner world, their logic and their experience. As such, this article promotes a psychologically informed approach to criminal justice practice.
Emotional literacy as a skill in probation practice requires an ability to understand and regulate one’s own emotions, in order to be responsive to the emotions of others. The concepts and methods used in this article arise from research by Charlotte Knight for a PhD on emotional literacy in work with high-risk offenders and the practice of Panna Modi, who works as a probation officer in a sex offender treatment unit with low, medium and high risk offenders. Reference is made to the case studies of two men who were participants in a Community Sex Offender Groupwork Programme (C-SOGP) and examines some of the emotional processes and skills involved in work with them.
Whilst a positive working relationship has been recognized as a ‘powerful vehicle’ for offender change (NOMS, 2010), little is known in respect to how powerful a positive working relationship can be for probationers and the impact it may have upon their lives. From considering the ‘experience’ of a working relationship, this study evaluated ‘what worked’ for probationers by drawing from the successes and failures within a relational context. The study also explored the impact of these relationships upon the probationers, both at the time of the relationship and once it had ceased. Seven probationers were involved in this collaborative study, assisting in the design and analysis of the study, as ‘experts’ in probation relationships. The results tentatively suggested that certain characteristics (acceptance, respect, support, empathy and belief) enable a positive relational climate to exist that has a powerful impact upon the probationer, their beliefs and their behaviour. Conversely, if the probation supervisor (PS) fails to demonstrate these characteristics, a ‘toxic’ environment for change is more probable and could lead to greater risk of offending.
This article illustrates how the physicality of a probation office can be considered to reflect several important changes in the probation service’s recent history through analysis of research conducted in a probation office. Moreover, I argue that the design of probation offices has an important impact on practice. I suggest that the relationship between the ‘protected’ zone of the office and the ‘unprotected’ zone of the waiting area and interview rooms is similar to Goffman’s ‘front stage’ and ‘back stage’ (introduced in his book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life) and expand on his theory of social action by describing how the architecture of probation represents and potentially perpetuates the creation of an ‘us and them’ attitude in probation. The article then moves onto the exterior and location of the office to look at how these represent probation’s move away from the communities it serves. This has significant consequences if the policy of probation moves towards modes of practice which no longer prioritize standardization and punishment over professional judgment and the importance of the offender–officer relationship. The article concludes by looking at some examples of more inclusive forms of office design and architecture.
Maintaining mother–child contact when a parent is imprisoned is accepted as important; the benefits of visiting are seen to extend beyond that relationship, to other members of the family and to the prison itself. This article discusses research findings about the extent and nature of visiting engaged in by adolescent children while their mothers were in prison, in Victoria, Australia, from the perspectives of the children and their mothers. In the current study, while findings confirm much of what is already known about barriers to prison visiting, the study extends this knowledge. Findings support the need to engage children’s views on this topic; to examine the current methodologies used to measure prison visitation; and to more fully understand the impact of arrest and imprisonment circumstances on arranging children’s care, including plans for visitation.
This article reports our experience of developing a skills-based practice framework for effective engagement with offenders. The project began with extensive engagement with probation staff at every level. This was followed by collaborative pilots in 22 probation trusts on effective engagement by practitioners and reflective supervision by managers, using the best available international research and insights from research on desistance. The learning and feedback from these pilots was used to bring together the two complementary elements into a single evidence-based model. Feedback from managers and practitioners gathered in external evaluation of the pilots was very positive, with the vast majority seeing the approaches as having a positive impact on their practice and seeing it as important that the model continued to be used. Observation of practice and constructive feedback was particularly valued as was positive leadership and support by senior managers. The external evaluation of the pilots continues, and we are conducting an internal evaluation of the integrated model, which will look at practitioners’ and offenders’ experiences in three probation trusts over this year and next.