The Game of Life on Licence

Yesterday the funerals were held for the two murdered victims of the London Bridge tragedy of 29th November involving people attending a Learning Together event at Fishmongers' Hall. 

As more details emerge, an article in the most recent edition of the London Review of Books serves to not only put the terrible event into some context, but also shed some very uncomfortable light regarding the current state of the probation service under the dead hand of Civil Service control. I'm increasingly coming to the view that it's no longer fit for purpose and selected the following passages which I believe graphically illustrate how the whole probation ethos is being steadily destroyed under pernicious NPS control and as a direct consequence of TR:- 

Life on Licence   

John​ is one of more than 250,000 people in Britain living under the supervision of the probation service. He got out of prison in April 2018, when his sentence still had some years to run. I met him while I was reporting on the shortcomings of the law on joint enterprise. In 2005 he had been convicted for murder after a man died as a result of injuries received during a burglary John was involved in – injuries John did not inflict. Following a 2016 Supreme Court decision finding flaws in the law, John appealed and his conviction was overturned: he was sentenced to 18 years for manslaughter instead. Since he had already served more than half that time, he was released on licence.

John’s probation officer found him a room in a shared house in Openshaw, in Manchester. The landlord claimed housing benefit on John’s behalf, and sent a man round each week to collect a portion of his Jobseekers’ Allowance in cash. The company managing the property claimed to be providing ‘supported’ accommodation, but there was no evidence of any support when I visited. Its website gives no information about the services provided and the ‘About Us’ section consists of just a few stock photos and the letter ‘x’, as a placeholder. It’s a private company registered as a non-profit with the Regulator of Social Housing, but the house John was living in belongs to the father of the two men described as company directors at Companies House.

John had almost no money, and had to walk three and a half miles to his probation appointments, and a mile and a half to sign on, unless he could get cash for the bus from one of his sons. ‘It’s fucking burning my head out,’ he told me. ‘I can’t even get a haircut.’ One of the conditions of his tenancy was that he wasn’t allowed to work because this would mess up his housing benefit. When he got a job as a building labourer the landlord gave him a week’s notice. ‘Maybe next time I speak to you I’ll be in Strangeways,’ John texted me.

His probation officer wasn’t much help, and the room he eventually found in a hostel in Cheetham Hill came from a charity for ex-prisoners. For a while he was happier: the facilities were better and he felt validated by having work. He attended the graduation ceremony for the Open University degree he had taken in prison, an experience that wasn’t wholly positive: ‘It just seemed like I shouldn’t be there,’ he told me in a WhatsApp voice note, ‘that I was like the black sheep in a swell of good, law-abiding people ... I felt I didn’t deserve to be there.’

He hoped to move to Cambridge, where researchers he had met through a prison education programme called Learning Together had promised to help him find a job. He had come across Learning Together at HMP Grendon in Buckinghamshire, where he also received therapy for the first time after a lifetime of anxiety and negative feelings about himself, exacerbated by years of addiction and grief over the death of his mother in 1988, when he was 17. The prospect of a job in Cambridge was vague – part-time gardening work at the university and perhaps a role in prison education – but he now fixed on it as representing a more hopeful future.

But his probation officer didn’t seem interested in helping him find accommodation in Cambridge, and he had no prospect of finding a room in the private sector without a substantial deposit, so he stayed in Manchester. At least once he let his frustration show by swearing at the probation officer, and she abruptly ended their conversation. When he missed an appointment because he was at work, she sent him an official warning and threatened to refuse to allow him to attend events organised by Learning Together. He felt bullied. ‘Why even mention the best things in my life? She scares the life out of me ... sometimes I think she’s trying to fuck my thing up for Cambridge.’

For reasons that are unclear, in October 2018 his probation officer told him he had to take a drug test. This had never been a condition of his licence, and his lawyers advised him to refuse. John followed the advice, and 1 November he was sent back to prison – this time to HMP Manchester, as Strangeways is officially known.

Some sense of John’s experience is captured in Probationary: The Game of Life on Licence, a board game commissioned by the Liverpool gallery FACT from the artist Hwa Young Jung. Together with academics from Liverpool John Moores University and probation officers, she held a series of workshops with men on probation in Merseyside. They played chess and the original Game of Life board game, while Hwa Young talked to them and tried to get a sense of their life on probation. Some men drifted out of the group and one of them found Hwa Young’s curiosity too painful. ‘The way I work is with a lot of questions,’ she told me. ‘Is life fair? Why is it not fair? What is the purpose of prison?’

The game, for four players, begins with their release from prison. One character is released to his own home, two to a hostel, one to homelessness. ‘We had a lot of discussion about how much to factor in luck and skills in the gameplay,’ Hwa Young said. ‘We decided it’s mostly luck.’ Players roll dice, and pick up various cards and tokens under the headings ‘Emotional’, ‘Skills’ and ‘Relationships’. An ‘Emotional’ card might tell you that you feel upset because trains passing by your hostel keep you awake – you lose Emotion tokens as a result. Squares that help a player move forward, like ‘Get Forklift Licence’ are green; grey squares, like ‘Break Curfew – Warning Letter’ or ‘Lose Job’, will send you back. The four characters have to ‘check in’ regularly with the fifth player, ‘The Eye’, representing the experience of supervision, who can recall the four players to prison.

The probation system has suffered badly from the ‘Transforming Rehabilitation’ reforms of 2014. Supervision of low and medium-risk offenders was taken out of the direct control of the public sector and contracted out to ‘community rehabilitation companies’, private bodies run by businesses such as Sodexo and Interserve. Post-sentence supervision was extended to all prisoners serving sentences of less than a year, adding around forty thousand people to the rolls but with no increase in funding.

Nobody involved in probation is happy with the situation as it stands. Staff are overworked and often asked to do tasks for which they aren’t properly trained. In the north-west, for instance, the latest report by the Inspectorate of Probation found a 20 per cent shortfall in the number of probation officers. Morale is at an ‘all-time low’, the House of Commons Justice Committee found last year. Some of the 2014 reforms will be reversed from 2021 under the terms of a new plan released over the summer: community rehabilitation companies will be scrapped and responsibility returned to the National Probation Service, which will supervise all offenders, regardless of the severity of their crime or whether they have served a custodial sentence. This has been hailed in the Guardian and elsewhere as the ‘re-nationalisation’ of probation, but the reforms do not represent a return to the status quo ante. Each NPS region will have an ‘Innovation Partner’ from the private or voluntary sector, to which they will be obliged to contract a wide range of services. These include Community Payback (under which offenders do things like clean graffiti and pick up litter), but also accredited programmes like Building Better Relationships, aimed at male perpetrators of domestic violence. ‘The marketised model that was a driving rationale for Transforming Rehabilitation is not to be dispensed with,’ an editorial in September’s Probation Journal argues, ‘but rather reformulated.’

Meanwhile the profession is being hollowed out. In the year to 31 March 2018 an 8.4 per cent increase in the number of frontline staff disguised a 5.3 per cent fall in the number of probation officers, while probation services officers, a lower paid and less highly trained job, increased by 37.9 per cent. Last year the House of Commons Justice Committee recommended that the government develop a ‘probation workforce strategy’ to protect staff retention and morale, and set down expectations for training and maximum workloads. The proposal was rejected.

Learning Together held its first workshops at Grendon in 2014, under the direction of Ruth Armstrong and Amy Ludlow, from Cambridge’s Institute of Criminology. John had been sceptical at first. ‘The lads were always talking about it, “Oh they’re just studying us like lab rats,” but as the weeks went by ... Ruth and Amy, you just have to meet them and see them in action.’ Each week there was a lecture on a topic like sentencing guidelines, or long-term imprisonment. Working in small groups with a facilitator, students and prisoners presented ideas related to the subject. One week, John’s group had to come up with ideas for improving the criminal justice system. John proposed pairing up officers on the beat with ex-offenders. ‘A lot of people don’t like talking to the police, the kids and that. If I’m there, from the estate, they’d maybe trust me a bit more. That way the police can get their information, and I can keep my eye on the police that they’re not bullying the kids. That makes it a bit more legitimate.’ The response from the academics – encouraging, thoughtful, respectful – was gratifying. He had already spent a fair bit of time studying, in fact he was the prison’s Open University orderly, helping other prisoners navigate their way through their studies, but Learning Together meant more to him because it gave him the opportunity to work with others and to be validated with and by them. ‘I’ve always struggled with self-esteem. I tried arguing with it, but I couldn’t hide from the support and the care that was there.’ At the end of the course students from Learning Together gave him a legal dictionary, and after he left Grendon one of the staff members visited him in HMP Preston during his appeal.

All this led John to join other former prisoners at a celebration of the programme’s fifth anniversary at Fishmongers’ Hall on 29 November. Ruth and Amy were there. So were Saskia Jones, a volunteer John knew, and the course co-ordinator Jack Merritt, who had come to his Open University graduation ceremony: the two people killed when Usman Khan launched his senseless knife attack.

Harry Stopes

More details regarding the board game 'Probationary' can be found here.

What Makes a Murderer

Somewhat strangely given his notoriety, I wasn't aware of the John Massey case until I gave in to a compelling urge to watch the first in the series of the luridly-named Ch4 programme 'What Makes a Murderer' last night. Despite the somewhat over-dramatised format of this type of endeavour where a 30 minute story is spun out to an hour, I suppose it was always likely that it would attract my attention having got to know quite a few men who have been convicted of murder over the years.

I don't know about other officers, but right from the start John's measured, calm and ice-cold delivery certainly got my undivided attention and particularly upon learning he'd served 43 years and had not been subject of a whole life tariff. Anyone in our line of work would know immediately that you have to work particularly hard at things in order to serve that length of time, and so it later transpired, but already several bells were ringing labelled 'psycopath' and 'danger'. 

Over my career as a Probation Officer my working hypothesis has been that, in the absence of compelling contradictory and expert evidence, we are all the product of behaviour that results from an equal combination of genetic makeup and environment, the age-old conundrum of nature or nurture? This tv series seeks to apply all that modern science can muster in order to search for physical, neural evidence of a predisposition towards a particular behaviour, namely that of murder and from evidence gained via extensive brain scans and genetic analysis. 

I don't think I found much that was hugely surprising in this first episode, apart that is of the alarming notion that particular genes that control certain behaviour can be triggered by life experiences such as John's enforced separation from his mother at the age of three. But this coupled with evidence from the extensive brain scans that highlighted the reduction in size of critical areas of the brain responsible for feelings associated with reward and risk-taking begin to open up the whole pandora's box of the degree to which individuals can be held responsible for their actions.

It is of course a moot point as to whether the scientific avenues being explored in this tv series would have had any significant effect regarding John's conviction, sentencing, and passage through the criminal justice system, had they been available at an earlier stage, or would it just prove a further lucrative work stream for the legal and medical profession and endless argument? 

It's surely an alarming avenue for society to be heading down if this kind of medical research gains traction because it must surely open up the prospect of preventative treatment or incarceration even? One thing it did confirm to me though was the vital importance of cases like this being supervised by skillful and well-trained Probation Officers and the provision of extensive and thorough reports post sentence, for sentence planning and Parole application.        
    

The Parole Board At 50

A couple of weeks ago Russell Webster published a guest blog by Martin Jones, Chief Executive of the Parole Board for England and Wales and it covered a lot of important ground:- 

The parole board faces up to new challenges

Striving to improve

2017-18 represents the fiftieth anniversary of the creation of the Parole Board. Those fifty years has seen fundamental changes and many improvements in the way our system works, it has also brought enormous new challenges.

Deciding whether it is necessary to keep someone in prison to protect the public is a vital, often difficult, and sometimes unpopular, decision. We need our independent members to show good judgement, to assess, based on all the evidence, whether somebody serving a prison sentence can be safely managed in the community.

The Board has published a strategy: Parole Board Strategy 2016-2020 setting out our plans for ensuring the Board meets our important duties. Our number one priority at present has been to tackle the unacceptable delays to hearings. Delays have a corrosive impact and can cause a loss of hope.

The rise of oral hearings

Whilst fifty years ago, the Parole Board rarely, if ever, saw the person whose liberty they were deciding, in 2016-17 the Parole Board held a historic high of 7,377 hearings. This high, is partly a consequence of increased numbers of people being eligible for a parole review (including the continuing legacy of the discontinued IPP sentence) but most recently the result of the Supreme Court judgment in the case of Osborn, which obliged the Board to hold more hearings to ensure fairness. We now hold nearly five times the number of hearings we held a decade ago. Our hard work has now brought down the backlog by 40% over the last two years, bringing down delays; but there remains more to do.



IPPs

The Board’s strategy also commits us to making progress on IPPs. Whilst our role is to look at risk to the public, and I believe there are a small number IPPs who remain a genuine danger to the public; I share the concern of many commentators about the fact that there are still 3,528 IPPs in prison. I fear that for some imprisonment itself and their despair; is not helping. Whilst historically there was justifiable concern about the failure of IPPs to make progress, in recent years the numbers of IPPs progressed has risen significantly as a result of progress in custody and greater confidence. In 2016-17 the Board ordered the release of over 900 IPP prisoners (including the re-release of recalled IPPs); this is 20% more than in the preceding year and I expect us to make further significant progress this year. Despite the progress made, I can understand why IPPs are perceived as creating potential injustice, and believe there is a compelling case to changing the licence arrangements, which have the potential to compound the difficulties seen over the last twelve years.

Recalls a growing challenge

Whilst the Board strives to keep up with growing demand, it is striking to note the range of cases now coming to the Board. When created our primary purpose was to provide to ministers on the release of those serving a life sentence following the abolition of the death penalty. Today we spend significant time dealing with recall prisoners; whose numbers have increased astonishingly over the last twenty years. On average, we receive around one thousand recall cases a month and many of those cases are going to an oral hearing. Whilst it is quite right that prisoners have the right to challenge the lawfulness of their recall, I believe that more could be done to encourage probation officers to exercise their professional judgement to keep people in the community, and fully support efforts being made by Sonia Crozier as head of the National Probation Service to find alternatives to recall and increase confidence.

We are also working with our members to ensure we have a robust, evidence based approach to risk. The recent decision to stop SOTP programmes is salutary. Parole decisions cannot be takes through tick box approaches. Treatment and programmes are not panaceas. Risk can reduce through age; maturity; insight into offending; and a reduction in opportunities to offend. Whatever has happened in the past; the Board is encouraging its members to look at all of the evidence available and to be open and reflective about our decision making. Risk can never be entirely eliminated, but good decisions will identify the risks and how they might be managed in the community. But this needs imagination from all involved. Looking to the future; I am certain that the Parole Board has the opportunity to utilise technology such as alcohol monitoring to better manage offenders in the community; and we are already making use of GPS tracking devices on a small scale.

Balances the rights of prisoners and victims

Finally – our system is not just about processes; it is about people.

Whilst we strive to do the very best we can, there are no crystal balls. If we measured our success only by the number of serious offences committed by those released by the Parole Board the overwhelming majority of our release decisions are sound. However, whilst deeply regrettable, there have always been a tiny number of cases where those released by the Parole Board commit serious offences. We take each such tragic case extremely seriously, as the public would expect. A serious offence can be a hammer blow to the member who makes the decision. We always seek to learn lessons; but we cannot allow these rare cases detract from the fact that most of those in our prisons should have a second chance.

The Board remains committed to making fair and independent decisions, as swiftly as possible, with care, humanity and courage. I know from speaking to victims, prisoners and their respective families how important our decisions are. Losing a member of your family through violent crime, or through imprisonment, is always devastating and the consequences of that loss has an impact down the generations. That is why we must do our very best to make the best decisions we can.

Martin Jones, Chief Executive of the Parole Board for England and Wales.

Is It Ethical?

Was I the only one concerned at the sentence passed down the other day on Muhiddin Mire? This from the Guardian:- 

Leytonstone knife attacker sentenced to life

A mentally ill taxi driver who cut the throat of a stranger at a London tube station has been given a life sentence with a minimum term of eight and a half years after a judge concluded the attacker was motivated by Islamic extremism. Muhiddin Mire, 30, who has paranoid schizophrenia, told police the rampage in December 2015 was an act of revenge for coalition airstrikes in Syria, which the UK government had voted to support three days previously.

Judge Nicholas Hilliard, the recorder of London, told Mire he would be immediately transferred to Broadmoor, the high-security psychiatric hospital in Berkshire. The type of sentence handed down to Mire means that if he is found to be free of symptoms and subject to review he could be transferred to prison to serve the remainder of the term. Hilliard said: “This was an attempt to kill an innocent member of the public for ideological reasons by cutting his throat in plain sight for maximum impact.”

Mire, who had downloaded Islamic State propaganda before the attack, was convicted in June of attempted murder for stabbing 56-year-old Lyle Zimmerman and threatening four other travellers at Leytonstone station, east London.

But doctors giving evidence to the hearing conflicted over whether Mire’s mental illness was the sole reason for the attack. Dr Shaun Bhattacharjee, a Broadmoor forensic psychiatrist, told the court Mire’s interest in extremism was a symptom of his mental disorder. But Dr Philip Joseph told the judge it was possible for Mire’s obsession with Islamic terrorism to be separate from the illness.

Ultimately, Hilliard sided with Joseph’s argument. “What the defendant was intent upon was designed to intimidate a section of the public that were there to witness what he was doing. This was not carried out in secret but very brazenly indeed. It was carried out to advance a religious or ideological cause, namely Islamic extremism.” Hilliard said Mire’s interaction with commuters in the tube station during the attack was evidence of his awareness of what was going on around him.

It was revealed during an earlier hearing that Mire was sectioned in 2006 and released with a prescription for antipsychotic medication after two weeks in hospital. He was put in touch with a community mental health team upon his release but soon lost contact with them and stopped taking the medication. In the years before the attack, Mire became increasingly unwell and was probably already exhibiting symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia.

Among “strange” ideas Mire had was a belief that the former prime minister Tony Blair was his guardian angel and that he had been possessed by evil spirits, the court heard. His paranoid delusions later manifested in a belief that he was under surveillance by the security services and was being followed.

Bhattacharjee told the court the prevailing culture – in this case a heightened state of tension over Islamic terrorism – could often inform schizophrenics’ delusions. As an example, Bhattacharjee said in the 1970s some paranoid schizophrenics experienced delusions related to the IRA and Irish terrorism.

During the attack, Mire shouted, “This is for my Syrian brothers. I’m going to spill your blood.” But Joseph told the same hearing that this interest in extremism was separate from his mental illness, not fuelled by it.

Mire told police in the hours after his arrest that the attack was an act of vengeance for coalition airstrikes in Syria. On 2 December, the government voted in favour of extending bombings against Isis targets in the Middle East to include Syria. He had images of the soldier Lee Rigby and a British Isis killer on his phone, along with material linked to the terror group. The court heard Mire started viewing Isis videos online three years before the attack.

--oo00oo--

There are a number of things I simply don't understand about this case, not least how someone mentally ill can be held criminally responsible for their actions? In addition, I've always been concerned about conflicting expert medical evidence when commissioned by either the prosecution or defence. Why can't the experts be commissioned by the court instead and avoid the suspicion that an experts opinion is being cherry-picked? Finally, I didn't understand the mechanism for sending him to Broadmoor Special Hospital straight after sentence, until I read this from the Mental Health Cop blog:-

Muhiddin MIRE was today sentenced by a criminal court following the attack at Leytonstone Underground station last December that made prominent national headlines. I admit, I had a bit of a job initially piecing together what exactly the court had done, following vague media reports that appeared somewhat to contradict themselves! One simply claimed the man had been sentenced to ‘life in jail’ whilst another that he would ‘begin his sentence at Broadmoor’. This made me wonder whether, in fact, the court had sentenced him to what’s known as a hybrid order – this turns out to be exactly what they’d done; so I thought I’d quickly explain it, in case of any doubt as to what this means!

Before I do, I’d observe that somewhere between being charged with attempted murder by the police and his sentencing today, he has been transferred between the criminal justice and mental health systems. When he first appeared at court, there would be no power for Magistrates to remand the defendant to hospital under the Mental Health Act. At or after his first appearance at the Crown Court, he could be transferred and that has obviously occured and facilitated a period of assessment by the psychiatrists who have given professional opinion to the sentencing judge. The defendant has pleaded guilty to the offence, notwithstanding that his mental illness is serious enough to mean he reaches the threshold for admission to hospital under the MHA.

So this is yet another example to prove the point that serious mental illness does not always equate to a lack of criminal responsibility for serious crimes. Indeed, as previously pointed out, attempted murder is the most difficult kind of assault to prove – because a charge of murder succeeds if it can be proved that the defendant intended to kill or seriously injure the victim; attempted murder requires proof of intent to kill. A notably higher threshold to satisfy.

HYBRID ORDERS

A hybrid order means that the court can issue a ‘normal’ criminal sentence of imprisonment to any defendant over the age of twenty-one, but they will first be admitted to hospital under the Mental Health Act for treatment. It then depends how long the patient’s treatment lasts as to whether they are discharged from hospital or transferred to prison to complete that original sentence. All of this is done under s45A of the Mental Health Act 1983.

So in Muhiddin MIRE’s case, he was sentenced to ‘life imprisonment with a recommendation that he serve a minimum of 8.5yrs in jail’, commencing with the treatment aspect of the hybrid order. Let’s imagine he remains in hospital for 6yrs receiving treatment, he will then be transferred to prison for a minimum period of 2.5yrs before the Parole Board would be able to take any decision about his release from prison. Were his hospital treatment to last 9yrs, then release would beconsidered – but not necessarily granted! – as soon as the clinician in charge of his care recommended discharge from hospital. If the Parole Board did not grant immediate discharge, he would be transferred to prison to serve further time in jail until his case for release is reconsidered.

Finally, anyone made subject to a hybrid order after conviction for any offence specified in Schedule 1 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003, will be subject to the provisions of Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements, or MAPPA. These are arrangements which aim to ensure, amongst other things, post-release mechanisms through which public authorities cooperate to share information, to ensure risks are properly managed in the community, if or when a patient is discharged or prisoner released.

So this is the only form of sentence which combines two periods of detention: first in hospital and then in prison. These orders seem to becoming more popular amongst judges, the point being that they prevent people with serious mental illnesses who are convicted by the courts of being subject to a far shorter period of detention under a (restricted) hospital order than they would have done if they had been sentenced only to a period in prison.

And we could debate the ethics that sit behind that approach, all day long … on another day!

--oo00oo--

Somewhat strangely, I notice that the regular legal bloggers have yet to comment on this case.

Trial by TV

I didn't intend watching last night's Channel 4 documentary 'Interview with a Murderer', mainly because I find 'respected' criminologist Professor David Wilson extremely irritating and egotistical, but of course I did, not least because like most probation officers, I've interviewed quite a few murderers in my time, supervising many through very long periods in custody, dealing along the way with much obfuscation, minimisation and denial. As a consequence, it was absolutely riveting. 

The professor clearly enjoys the media limelight and some readers will recall he was the star of the televised but much-criticised real-life experiment to recreate conditions that would have prevailed in HM Borstals a while back. Not only did I feel compelled to watch, I also followed the twitter feed as commentators passed judgement in real time and I have to say the whole thing was very scary and deeply disturbing.

The case of Carl Bridgewater, the 13 year-old newspaper boy killed at point-blank range with a shotgun to the head is notorious not least due to the wrongful-imprisonment of the so-called 'Bridgewater Four' and a corresponding failure to convict the real culprit. Having said that, the subject of this tv documentary, former neighbour Bert Spencer, has been consistently named as a likely suspect and decided at age 74 to publish a book that seeks to clear his name.

Now the keen-eyed will possibly have noted from the programmes title a hint of pre-judgement, but astonishingly Bert Spencer is subject to a Life Licence having been convicted of murdering his friend Hubert Wilkes with a sawn-off shotgun only weeks after the killing of Carl Bridgewater. He was released having served 14 years of a Life Sentence.  

Possibly as a way of gaining publicity for his forthcoming book, Bert Spencer agreed to take part in this fascinating televised forensic examination by David Wilson, I presume on the basis that he felt confident of the strength of his argument and ability to demonstrate to a sceptical audience the fact of his innocence. It did no such thing of course and instead proved to be a superb training aid for student psychologists interested in the diagnosis of psychopathic personality traits.

Right from Bert opening his mouth the alarm bells were ringing and I was constantly reminded of the vital importance of psychiatric reports especially in homicide cases. Unfortunately in my experience many trial judges do not see the point due to the sentence upon conviction being mandatory, but this misses the point entirely of being able to answer the key question always in the mind of probation officers during sentence supervision - 'why?'  

Of course it's only by being confident of arriving at a robust answer to the question that assessments of risk can be arrived at, which in turn inform sentence planning and progression, and ultimately decisions regarding release by the Parole Board. What struck me was the completely unconvincing explanation given by Bert for the murder of his long-term friend and neighbour. One can only hope that the probation officers involved in the case managed to elucidate rather more because I'm left with the very strong feeling that concentrating on this aspect of things holds the key to unravelling everything else. 

The thing about tv programmes is that we never know what was edited out and landed up on the cutting room floor. Consequently we are left with the impression that David Wilson did not spend much time on what Bert actually did, but rather on what he might have done. This was a mistake in my view because experience has taught me to be a firm believer in the former, as being able to inform judgements in relation to the latter, and especially where high degrees of denial are present. 

I'm presuming that lawyers will have passed this programme as fit for transmission, but to be honest I'm astonished that the producers don't seem to have informed the police concerning the seemingly damning comments made by Bert's former wife. I'm no lawyer, but I can't help feeling that this tv programme has ensured that this dreadful murder of a young boy doing his paper round will ever be solved and that Bert Spencer could ever get a fair trial should he find himself charged.               
  

HMI's - A Word in your Ear

We've been moaning for weeks that the media never mentions probation, but yesterday we were all over TV, radio, press and the internet. Sadly not about privatisation, despite Ian Lawrence valiantly trying to steer John Humphrys on the BBC Today programme around to the topic, but a negative report by Liz Calderbank and Nick Hardwick, respective HMI's for Probation and Prisons. 

Now if I were cynical I'd say the timing was suspect to say the least, providing as it does lots of negative publicity about the emotive topic of 'lifers' being released either on a temporary basis (ROTL) or Parole Licence, but with inadequate risk assessments having been carried out. 

This is a big topic, but I want to try and keep it simple. First a bit of history.

1) Lifers used to be a relatively small part of the total prison population, but Tony Blair's government ensured that the number rocketed by introducing the dreaded IPP sentence. The Indeterminate Public Protection sentence is very similar to a Life Sentence, but usually with a much shorter tariff, ie the minimum period that must be served for punishment purposes and before the parole process can start.

2) Lifers used to be treated 'specially' - prison Governors chaired sentence planning meetings and typically home probation officers were 'paired' and kept their lifers for many years, even if moving office or role.

3) Any application for release would involve a visit and report by the so-called 'Independent' - a member of the Parole Board, but not part of the decision-making panel.

4) Resources were always available to ensure that each lifer was visited in prison at least once a year, no matter how far-flung the prison was.

5) Every prison had sufficient seconded Probation Officers to enable every lifer to be seen and assessed in prison, and hence by a suitably-qualified person

6) OASys had not been invented and assessments were written as real documents that could be read and understood. 

Nowadays some prison officers are designated 'offender supervisers', they complete OASys assessments and chair sentence planning meetings. There's no money for probation officers to visit regularly and you are expected to interview by video link. OASys is so crap, naturally ways are found to avoid the bloody thing at all cost. 'Ownership' of the OASys changes regularly between prison and community and when extra text is added by other authors the result is akin to a dogs breakfast. This report is a complete indictment of the uselessness of OASys, and yet both authors, the MoJ, Noms, PA, PCA et al all pretend it's a vital and useful offender assessment tool. No it isn't!    

If it wasn't so serious it would be quite funny how much space is taken up in the report discussing OASys and how there is confusion as to who's job it is to fill it in, how poorly it's filled in, whether it's filled in and how often it's filled in. I want to let both HMI's into a secret about OASys that might just help them understand why there's a problem OASys is a complete and utter pile of shite and whoever was responsible for commissioning it and designing it should be compelled to complete one every day until they beg for mercy!

One of the most startling findings from this inspection concerned arrangements for the completion of OASys assessments on individual prisoners while in custody. We were surprised to find that so many different models had evolved and that staff had varying degrees of understanding about what was required, of whom, and when. Phase III of the offender management model, launched in January 2008, sought to clarify arrangements for the offender management of indeterminate sentence prisoners. Under this phase of the offender management model, the community based offender manager was clearly at the heart of the assessment, sentence planning, supervision and release arrangements for those given an IPP sentence. For life sentence prisoners, by contrast, the model dictated that prison service designated staff, known as offender supervisors, would complete prison based offender management tasks, with probation staff providing the community element, including supervision post-release. This distinction between the arrangements for managing life sentence prisoners and IPP prisoners seemed illogical to us and may have contributed to the confusion we found.

Yes remember that? 'Seamless end-to-end offender management'? The same daft people who dreamt up OASys felt that the home probation officer was the ideal person to be in charge of the prisoner's progression through their sentence and chair sentence planning meetings. Oh, and preferably chair it by video link. It was a totally fanciful idea and hence has been ignored by both prison and probation. The same people are of course the architects currently trying to make the Transforming Rehabilitation omnishambles work. 

Without hesitation I can categorically say that I have never come across anything invented by man that wastes more time, for absolutely no purpose. Believe me, filling in a complete OASys induces an irresistible desire to beat ones head upon the desk, cry uncontrollably and either reach for valium or huge quantities of alcohol. Will someone, somewhere please rid us of this nightmare and let us get on with the bloody job?!

Now at this point no doubt some people will be thinking it can't be that bad, and to them I'd say this. No contractor thinking of getting involved in the Transforming Rehabilitation omnishambes will have anything to do with it - they've got a business to run and it will be lean and mean with no room for timewasting useless stuff like OASys. No one ever reads a complete OASys from beginning to end, unless they are an HMI or investigating officer on an SFO enquiry. Not even the Parole Board feel its any use. When I was at an Oral Hearing recently, the Chair pushed the file to one side and simply said 'now, what do you really think?'     

Risk assessment is not a science, but a skill that can be honed by well-trained and experienced staff. It can never guarantee 100% accuracy because a lot of our clients are accomplished liars and manipulators well-versed in the art of obstruction or obfuscation. We try to do our best and are successful in the vast majority of cases, but SFO's will occur. Lets not blame the PO, but the perpetrator instead and recognise that good assessments require adequate resources.               

Some Observations 18

I thought I'd better try and pen something in case people thought I'd been gagged. In truth I'm waiting, like many in probation I suspect, to hear exactly what Napo and the other unions have stitched-up with the Ministry of Justice. I gather the NNC meeting on Monday was unsatisfactory for a number of reasons, mostly to do with absences, that of delegates, the Napo General Secretary and crucially appendices B and C that deal with transfer of staff and pensions respectively.

With the clock ticking inexorably towards a decisive NEC vote scheduled for 17th September, it doesn't take a genius to see that the membership are not going to have long in which to absorb the details and voice an opinion. Apart from questioning the wisdom of going down this negotiating route in the first place and whilst supposedly fighting the TR proposals at the same time, I just don't understand why somebody doesn't tell Grayling to fuck off with his daft bullying timetable.

Anyway, one result of the meeting on Monday is that the cat is out of the bag regarding the indicative ballot turnout - it was 34%. 

Moving on to other matters that have caught my attention, I suspect I might not have been alone in having professional reasons for tuning in to watch the first episode of the Channel 4 series 'Burgled' set in Leeds, West Yorkshire. The city apparently remains a burglary hot spot and the series follows a dedicated police team tasked with catching those responsible. I found nothing particularly surprising from the first programme, apart that is from absolutely no mention of probation involvement in what is clearly an Integrated Offender Management initiative.

It would seem from twitter conversations that such is the determination of Chris Grayling and the MoJ to win the TR omnishambles war that orders have been issued prohibiting footage of probation staff involvement being aired. It would seem that our involvement is to be airbrushed out of the picture, bringing to mind similar propaganda tricks in Communist Russia. Utterly disgraceful if true, as we all know probation is a key element of IOM.

The Parole Board authorised the release of Jon Venables recently under yet another identity. I've been reading the very thorough report on the case as part of the Serious Further Offence investigations and it's particularly encouraging to read of the praise given to probation, and especially for a case that had no probation involvement from the beginning due to Jon's age.

I've always felt this was most unhelpful in a case which we all knew would eventually end up on our plate and result in a very unsettling transfer at an arbitrary age-related point. I find this revelation so shocking that I think I would have refused to take the case on:-

The assessments and work done during Jon Venables’ time at
Redbank were not shared with his subsequent supervisors to 
inform their understanding of the subject.  The reports seen by the 
Parole Board, including the several psychiatric evaluations, do not, 
however, contain any indication, even indirectly, that there was a 
sexual motive on the part of Jon Venables in committing the 
original offence or other warning that might have alerted his 
supervisors to potential abnormal sexual interests. (para 102, 104)

There is much in the report of interest, but I particularly noticed this other bit:-

No suitable individual was identified after 2004 to establish a long 
term mentoring arrangement that might have helped him cope 
better with the strains of living under his changed identity, his 
problem in balancing study and employment, and his issues with 
establishing a ‘normal’ lifestyle for a young single man of his age 
and social background.  Such support could also have eased the 
load of his offender manager in maintaining the appropriate 
boundary between offender manager and mentor. (para 97, 199)   

Without doubt there has always been a role for skilled volunteer input in probation work and it was most unwise for many Service's to take the decision some years ago to dispense with them. Of course their benefit has been rediscovered once more in recent time, raising the suspicion that it's resource-driven and politically-motivated as part of the 'Big Society'. Yes whatever happened to that big idea?

A great shame because volunteers carefully chosen can add so much to help achieve positive outcomes for clients, whilst giving a sense of purpose to many people with lots of spare unproductive time on their hands. As the report says, it also helps the PO enormously. 

Of course an excellent example of the volunteering ethos is provided by the increasing profile of Circles of Support and Accountability, a specialist charity closely linked to probation that works with sex offenders and their re-integration within society. The work was highlighted at the weekend in an article in the Independent:- 

Circles UK has been running these groups quietly in Britain for more than 10 years, but is so concerned about the hysteria around the subject that it usually shies away from publicity.

While befriending paedophiles may be a hard sell to the tabloid press, the statistics show that it works.

A review of a Circles project in the South-east found that none of its 71 past clients had made another contact offence over a four-and-a-half-year period." A control group of 71 criminals with a similar offending history committed 10 new offences in the same period.

The latest man Paul has agreed to help is Barry, a 69-year-old who is on the sex offenders' register for life after sexually assaulting young children, including his own son and stepson, for more than three decades.

but for me this quote from a volunteer serves as a warning that selection and training are extremely important and must have made the organiser cringe just a little:- 

Despite his disgust at Barry's actions, Paul is one of five volunteers who meet up with him every week to talk about his life. "I hate do-gooders and I don't usually volunteer for things, but I felt so strongly about this," Paul says. "He's a bastard and what he's done is awful and I'd love to wring his neck. But we can't kill him and we can't lock him up for life, so what are we going to do? The only answer is you try to help him not to do it again. To me there's no alternative."      

Sentence Planning

I thought I'd have a rest from trying to point out how misguided government plans are for the Probation Service and instead give a plug to a new business. There can't be many twitter followers of Ben Gunn who aren't aware, but others might be interested to know that in true entrepreneurial-style Ben has decided to market his services through his own business 'Mokurai Consulting'.

For someone so keen on self-publicity, I'm not entirely sure how appropriate the translated zen name is - Silent Thunder - but you've got to hand it to him, since release he's clearly decided not to let the grass grow under his feet. I admire him for both making use of his knowledge and experience and for making up lost time. 

Unashamedly making use of the appropriate Gunn Clan motto Aut Pax Aut Bellam 'Either Peace or War', and badge, Ben certainly looks ready to take on all-comers willing to either request or pay for his particular services. In addition to the offer of training and talks, I see that he's moving into a new area, that of giving advice on Parole and Sentence Strategy. He explains:- 

Having found and made every mistake available to a prisoner in Sentence Planning process, Ben offers the cutting-edge insights that equip prisoners to navigate through the demands of the prison system, minimising the length of sentence to be served and with the least inconvenience to the prisoner and his family.

Parole Boards are often treated by legal advisors as discrete events, to be dealt with as a tick-box exercise to please the Board. Ben adopts a broader view, encompassing all aspects of the prisoner’s sentence and life experience and planning a parole strategy that provides the best chance to neutralise the negative views of prison reports and parole board expectations.

Don't you just love that bit about "minimising the length of sentence to be served and with the least inconvenience to the prisoner and his family"  and "planning a parole strategy that provides the best chance to neutralise the negative views of prison reports and parole expectations." Bring it on Ben!

Sign the No10 petition here.  

Good Luck Ben

It's good to see that long-term prisoner Ben Gunn has finally been released on Life Licence. As I've said before, to go so long over tariff indicates a high degree of effort on the part of the prisoner in frustrating progression. However, I'm equally sure that the Parole Board pondered the case long and hard, and in the end felt able to acknowledge the progress that had been made. 

For Ben the really hard bit is about to begin and he's already had a taste of tribulations that might lie ahead by the reaction to his piece in the Guardian recently. I was not entirely surprised, and suspect that the online readership might not be the same liberal types that shell out daily for a hard copy of the paper. 

Having read Ben's blog avidly for some time I know it's unfair to say that he doesn't express remorse, because he does. The trouble is that he doesn't do humility a great deal and often casts himself in the role of victim. It was definitely a mistake to invoke the image of Nelson Mandela and hopefully Ben will learn from the reaction he got. Unfortunately, apart from a few trolls, I suspect he has been developing a somewhat distorted view of the world as expressed by his blog fan base.

Adjusting to life outside prison after so long is not going to be easy and a task made that much more difficult by any temptation to continue a self-stylisation of victim hood. In my view in order to make a success of release on licence, Ben will have to work on an entirely different mindset that focuses on the positive, rather than the negative. It's not going to be easy and he will need help from all those around him, including his supervising probation officer. I wish him well though and will watch with interest.      

Who Do We Blame?

It was with complete dismay that I read in the Sunday Times and Daily Mail that Jon Venables, one of the two children convicted of abducting, torturing and murdering James Bulger, apparently had sexual intercourse with a female member of staff at his Secure Unit when aged 17 and the year before he was granted release on Life Licence. I must say I am very suspicious about this story surfacing at this particular moment given that, having been recalled to prison last year by his probation officer and subsequently convicted of downloading pornographic material from the internet, his case will no doubt be coming back before the Parole Board shortly.

I am dismayed at yet another convoluted twist in this very sorry saga of demonisation that was effectively institutionalised the moment that the trial judge allowed publication of the two 11 year-olds identities in the first place following conviction. Rather than certain parts of the press highlighting the appalling breach of trust and responsibility by the member of staff in question, I note that instead they have begun to call into question the basis on which the original Parole decision was made. Somehow it's being portrayed as if it was his fault that sex took place with a member of staff who should have been looking after him.

But then right from the beginning I have never been able to understand why the public couldn't grasp that the appalling and tragic murder of the toddler James Bulger was not so much about these two 'demonic' kids as it was about their background, upbringing and the wider environment in which they developed. Even at their tender age there was reported evidence of a sexual element to the offence which would be indicative of some inappropriate sexualisation. Even if one or other were suspected of showing signs of a personality disorder, I'm fairly sure that at their age a diagnosis would not have been possible or likely to have been reliable.

Naming both boys after conviction effectively condemned them and their families to lifelong assumed identities with the constant risk of discovery and consequent vilification and torment. Not surprisingly the stress is reported to have had a very negative effect on Jon Venables' emotional state and produced a deterioration in his mental health as a result. I note that in the past his solicitor has said that he 'doesn't think he can ever be free and cannot handle the outside world'.

The sad thing is that even as I write this I realise that it will in all probability attract some very negative comment, but it seems particularly dishonest not to make clear what my 'take' is on what remains a very high profile and emotive case. In trying to understand why people do certain things, it is often the past that provides much of the understanding. These two boys were just 10 year-old children when, for whatever reason, they did what they did.