You remind me of Valjean

As a recent book – Rethinking Community Sanctions – points out, a more democratic politics around community-based sanctions might help to address the lurch to carceral ‘solutions’.

Whilst taking on this challenging academic text, I mused on twin recollections of my time as a field probation officer in London.

I was for a period of time a probation union representative on behalf of Napo. At one meeting with the Local Probation Board I approached the head of diversity and queried whether having a user perspective on the board would offer fresh insights on front line practice.

“Its much too early for that”, they said, airily brushing off my question. Not long afterwards, however, the board appointed Mark Johnson a former and drug user, bestselling author of Wasted, and the founder of the charity User Voice, to its ranks.

When I returned to the probation office, I offered to cover the afternoon office duty slot. During the course of the afternoon one of those who called into the office was Martin (not his real name). His gnarled persona suggested someone who had experienced institutional living. It was not long before he began to share some of his anecdotes.

He was at the time under no form of statutory supervision, so his voluntary status enabled a degree of frankness, which appealed to my professional curiosity. He explained that he had a long history of heavy violence and had served time here and abroad.

After we had talked, he asked if I would help him write his biography! Flattered as I was at this request, I demurred on the basis that I had not the time available due a high caseload. He was adamant that he wanted me to assist him.

Rather than discourage him, I suggested that we meet up separately to consider what this might mean. Taking on a voluntary client at the time was antithetical to the pervasive organisational culture, predicated on the imperative of completion of electronic assessments called OASys on statutory cases. These provided measurable outcomes, rather than a proper focus on good quality professional practice.

I arranged to meet up with Martin for our next encounter in a local cafe and to my relief he had by then linked into an organisation that offered specialist trauma counselling centred on his early life experiences. I was, though, painfully aware that our voluntary contact was morphing into a form of shadow supervision, taking me away from statutory casework for which I was held accountable.

The acid test came shortly thereafter, when Martin informed me via letter that he was on remand facing serious violence offences. I sensed a dilemma coming.

Feeling that our contact was an important aspect of what at one time would be established practice, I opted to visit him in a high security prison (arranging half a days leave to do so) and subsequently attended his Crown court trial.

Was this, I thought a calculated deceit – is was unrecorded voluntary casework – or was I undertaking this casework as a defiant reminder of a time when professional discretion and willingness to take a risk with troubled people gave probation officers the decision on who to provide advice and assistance to? A discretion now attenuated by the cultural shifts in how probation viewed itself as primarily a law enforcement agency.

One memorable exchange, with a literary flourish, during this period was when Martin entered the family waiting room whilst on remand. I quipped, “You remind me of Valjean the character from...”. “You mean from Les Miserables”, Martin piped up, just I was about to complete the sentence. “I read it when I was doing time in Rikers Island”, a notorious prison in New York City.

Martin was found not guilty after trial and our voluntary contact tapered off.

But whenever I pop into a bookshop I pore over the crime biographies section in the hope that his memoirs might be there, providing a long overdue and telling reminder, from a unvarnished user perspective, of a broken criminal justice system.

Mike Guilfoyle is a retired probation officer.