Was that because you cared for me?

Peacock used was “assembly line in the head” to encapsulate the incessant demands of repetitive working to formulaic instruction, something that reminded of a particular day during my time working as a probation officer, and an aspect of organisational practice that I experienced as alienating and isolating.

At the time, the electronic offender assessment tool known by the acronym, OASys, had been rolled out to all probation practitioners, ostensibly to provide a well-grounded and research informed IT adjunct to assist professional decision-making and sentence planning.

The centrality of accountable practice was of course integral to probation officers working ethos, but the time and energy expended on this expansive IT project began to assume a more baneful manifestation. For many front-line practitioners, it morphed into a reified instrument pivoted on numbers of records of client contacts and supervision plans completed, viewed on-line by management, under the guise of supervisory oversight, in every more oppressively time pressured ways.

On the day in question, I was returning to the probation office having attended a case conference. I noticed, from the top deck of the bus I was travelling on, Ezra ( not his real name) who was on probation with a mental health treatment requirement. He was leaning precariously against a cemetery wall.

I alighted at the next stop and spoke to Ezra, who was evidently in a confused and disoriented state, offering to accompany him to his nearby address.

On arrival, I was greeted by his mother and sister, who expressed dismay at Ezra’s unsettled demeanour, while appreciative of my intervention.

Would I like to stay for a cup of tea?, his mother averred. Over the next hour or so, we were able to discuss how Ezra (who had in fact been at the community mental health team office) was responding to his order and how he was complying with his treatment.

In the course of this impromptu meeting, Ezra smoked anxiously, the room enveloped in a fug of smoke. He seemed much more composed on my departure, as I reminded him of our next appointment at the probation office.

On my return to the office I had a pre-planned supervision session which was timetabled for the afternoon. But what of this impromptu meeting with Ezra? Under what OASys rubric was I to record it?

The supervision session was by far one of the most deadening and morale-sapping practice experiences of my probation career up to that point. The meeting with Ezra hardly merited a footnote in the discussion that followed, as I was assailed with an almost impenetrable matrix of electronic records that had fallen outwith the time-frame for completion or were deemed insufficiently offence-focussed to merit any informed practice discussion.

I left the supervisory meeting deflated and consumed with professional doubts about what I viewed as the skewed priorities which now appeared to be firmly embedded within the panoptic purview of a probation service I was struggling to recognise.

It was a service in which caring, compassionate and liberatory front-line practice was slowly being subsumed under the controlling aegis of a target-driven performance management regime that appeared antithetical to the values which had inspired me to become a probation officer.

Some time later, when Ezra reported to the probation office, he politely asked if he could smoke. I declined the request (due to a no smoking policy), but suggested that we step outside the probation office for our meeting.

As he smoked contentedly, he looked across at me. “When you came to my home, was that because you cared for me?”

“Of course”, I said, musing, with a heavy heart, on whether care was now part of any measurable performance outcome, or fast becoming a curious relic of a lost probation identity!