Ben Entwistle was awarded Commended in the 2025 Mike Guilfoyle Essay Prize
A friend told me of a Probation client who wanted to hand himself in to the Police over an unresolved criminal matter. The Probation Officer contacted the Prosecution and arranged to accompany his client to the Police Station. On the day, the PO was dressed for work, the client in a suit and tie. On arrival the Police tried to arrest the Probation Officer.
This incident, though amusing in one sense, makes a serious point about notions of professionalism. Fulfilling a commonly-held stereotype about what a professional looks like and actually being one are (or certainly should be!) quite different things. However smart, expensive and executive-looking one’s attire, the essence of professionalism cannot simply reside in clothing. The most professional looking person may be the least competent or, worse, may be cynically passing themselves off as someone they are not for dishonest ends.
At its simplest, a professional is someone paid for the work they do. There is overlap with the idea that, to merit this pay, one must work to agreed standards of competence, knowledge, expertise and conduct. Wikipedia says: “Professionalism is a set of standards that an individual is expected to adhere to in a workplace in order to appear serious, uniform or respectful. What constitutes professionalism is hotly debated and varies from workplace to workplace and between cultures.” The use of the word ‘appear’ here is interesting; again we have the risk of presentation being deceptive. The dictionary definition of ‘profess’ makes this concrete, noting the commonest use of the word is to refer to someone claiming something untrue about themselves. Another idea linked to the concept of professional conduct is that this must be ethical and of a high standard.
With this we are coming close to what professionalism might best mean in Probation. Because of the nature of Probation work, it seems indisputable that the base-line for a professional identity must be truthfulness, honesty, compassion and a passion for justice and right over wrong. Nothing seems more likely to undermine work done to help those guilty of offences to change their behaviour and lives, than the “do what I say not what I do” institutional hypocrisy which has lately been exposed with such devastating impact in bodies like the Police and the Church. I do not mean that Probation Staff must be morally perfect and without error; that would be equally unhelpful. But integrity in this endeavour must encompass the courage to be honest about one’s flaws and failings. When we talk about the professional’s ‘use of self’ in the task of building a constructive, open and mutually respectful relationship, this is surely one of the aspects we mean. Over-aweing someone with personal, moral purity is unlikely to help them grow.
So we have a combination of factors: a level of knowledge, expertise and experience with regard to practice; the job itself; and a value-base, an ethics of engagement rooted in truthfulness, justice and a hopefulness about the human capacity for growth and change. This should not negate the capacity to challenge harmful and dishonest behaviour but it should equally not surrender to crude, judgemental stereotypes or an “us and them” prescriptiveness.
My own view (and this is a personal opinion, though one shared by many people and expressed in a significant body of Probation literature) is that when Probation was removed from a ‘social work’ ethos and forced into a ‘criminal justice, punishment in the community’ ideology, this essential value-base was diluted and ultimately lost. This went hand in hand with, and was accelerated by, the imposition of computer technology which automated the work into matrices of risk-assessment, data-collection, actuarial orthodoxies and prescriptive formulae for intervention. The illusion was established and assiduously reinforced that what was (and should be) an essentially human and interactive profession, could in fact be an ‘exact science’ with answers, solutions and evidence-based outcomes. By the time I retired it seemed to me the notion of professionalism in Probation had become something I could not recognise, utterly at odds with the ethics and values I was trained in and first knew. The measure of the new professional appeared to reside in: speed of typing; mastery of IT systems; effortless assimilation of lists of arcane acronyms; a facility with statistics; the capacity to navigate with ease and alacrity between different algorithms and matrices; and a narrow view of ‘offenders’ that was able to slot them swiftly into one category of delinquent risk or another.
The orthodoxy of risk-assessment seems posited on the conviction that past-behaviour is self-fulfilling and it is unlikely the subject will do anything different, despite our original mission having been wedded to the belief in change. I finished in a ‘report-writing team’ and was constantly being told my reports were too long, that I was taking too much time over them and this is why I was feeling so stressed, that my interviews with clients were too protracted and that Judges really couldn’t be bothered to read all the unnecessary details I was including.
In conclusion, I don’t believe true professionalism can be fully restored to Probation until the ethical and human are returned to its heart; until the 24/7 feeding of the machine is downgraded in favour of personal contact; until OASYS is scrapped; and until, in Ruth Wilkes’ formulation, an ‘instrumental morality’ is replaced with an ‘expressive’ one. This hotly debated issue of professionalism will not go away through being ignored. In The Guardian piece “Plan for less-qualified probation staff to oversee sex-offenders.” And in the current edition of “Professional Social Work” (March/April 2025), in a piece about AI: “This raises the question of whether existing human rights’ frameworks are fit for purpose in the age of AI. Is there a need for new human rights, such as the right to a human, rather than a machine decision?”
I was drawn to Probation by the depth and seriousness of its core task, its humane compassion, its grappling with tensions between justice and punishment, right and wrong, and with concepts of the better life. I feel this ontological seriousness has been sacrificed to the speed and ease of a tick-box mentality. As Mervyn Peake wrote: “The vastest things are those we may not learn/we are not taught to die nor to be born/nor how to burn with love/How pitiful is our enforced return/to those small things we are the masters of.”
The Mike Guilfoyle Essay Prize is annual competition, co-hosted by the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies and Napo, that honours the legacy of Mike Guilfoyle. Mike was a dedicated probation officer and active Napo member, and this competition aims to encourage reflections on all that is valuable and important in probation.
This year’s essay question was What does professionalism mean in probation?
