Unbidden memories

It distils a wonderful amalgam of insightful academic and practitioner insights into current probation practice, set against a political background of penal excess.

One phrase from the text set in train an unexpectedly troubling personal memory, and a recollection of one of the most challenging of professional encounters that probation officers face in aiming to foster effective and empathic client supervision. The term used was ‘carceral citizen’, which covers the multitude of civic restrictions (often with penal consequences) that encompass the lives of those convicted of sexual offences during and after formal supervision has ended.

When I was around the age of twelve I was sexually assaulted by a stranger when out with friends in an area of parkland in the town I then lived in. The police were alerted , but the perpetrator was, to my knowledge never apprehended, and over the years the painful memory of this event dimmed.

Such unbidden memories came back to me when I first encountered Patterson (not his real name) during my time as a probation officer. At the time, many of those convicted of sexual offences on probation caseloads would be allocated to field probation officers, prior to the setting up of more specialist public protection teams and bespoke sexual offending behaviour programmes.

There was an informal organisational understanding that survivors of sexual abuse, including probation officers, could opt out of such supervisory roles. But I had interviewed Patterson on office duty and been fully appraised of his worryingly unpleasant index offences committed against minors, which merited a custodial sentence and indefinite notification requirements as a sexual offender (now subject to legal review after a minimum period of fifteen years has elapsed).

He had lost his property following these offences; a level of hostile community reaction being part of this outcome.

In one of our first meetings, it was clear that the impact of his custodial sentence (which included a period on recall) had been a salutary experience, with the usual segregation arrangements being in place throughout. His post-release supervision included spending time at probation Approved Premises (AP), which offered enhanced supervisory oversight.

It was apparent that such protective measures were proportionate, but still instilled a level of emotional resistance to actively considering the harmful consequences of his earlier offending.

One aspect of my supervisory role, which began to inform our contact, was a better appreciation of the importance of enlisting outside agencies to enable greater support, to forestall further isolation and potential risk of harm escalation. To Patterson’s credit, he had formed a strong bond with an organisation that offered practical and, at times, therapeutic support, which bolstered supervision.

Patterson asked on one occasion, after I had agreed to meet him outside the office in a less “oppressive space”, for me to accompany him to a police station to seek the return of some of his confiscated property (from the time of his arrest) that fell outside the items that were deemed of investigative interest (this being something of an opaque notion).

At the station, I contented myself with encouraging him to have the confidence to itemise his list and request property that would enable him a possible return to employment. The designated police officer was unavailable and my abiding sense was of a rather unhelpfully obstructive approach.

I then pointed him in the direction of enlisting legal advice to mount a judicial challenge to his indefinite registration. Police home visits (by this time he had moved out of the AP) were regularised and variably experienced as minimally helpful but necessarily intrusive.

One another occasion, again when I opted to meet with him in a public space, I felt a visceral moment of near uncontainable anger of a flashback to my own victimisation, which I managed to hold onto, and which subsided.

I realised that if Patterson was to become a full member of society again, he needed to be offered the opportunity to do so, whilst at the same time recognising the enduring harm such offending gives rise to.

That my own role needed to be one of resilient understanding, informed by a belief in the possibility of change, anchored in a respectful and trusting professional relationship. He once noted, “Mike, you never seemed too flustered and I really appreciate your flexibility and concern”.

When Patterson's period on licence expired, he moved out of London to “start afresh”. Notification requirements remained in place, he stated in a letter he sent me.

I wondered, when I finished reading this highly recommended book, whether my supervision of Patterson had, to borrow a resonant phrase from the text, “pointed towards a future in which we figure out how to live together or we live apart”, by enabling him to reimagine a life beyond offending.

And had it also helped ,in some small and restorative way, towards a better self-understanding of my own past experience of sexual abuse?

Mike Guilfoyle is a retired probation officer.