“Proactive Outreach in The Criminal Justice System”

We have come a long way since the then Justice Secretary, Kenneth Clarke on 30 June 2010 at the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies in London said:

“….My priorities are to punish offenders, protect the public and provide access to justice. They seem to me the obvious and basic aims of my office, my department, and my team of Ministers. The proposals I’m going to outline today in relation to the courts, legal aid and sentencing will have proper regard to each of these priorities. Reoffending has been rising again in recent years. It appears to be up by about 8% for adults between 2006 and 2008. It is astonishing that nearly half of offenders sent to prison are reconvicted of another offence within a year of their release. More than half of the crime in this country is committed by people who have been through the prison system. The rate of reoffending is even higher – 60% – for the 60,000 prisoners who serve short sentences each year”.

He went on to state that Prison doesn’t work and if anything a spell of incarceration is likely to have a cataclysmic negative impact on many aspects of the prisoner’s life, during and after the sentence has been served.

He stated that “…. It is virtually impossible to do anything productive with offenders on short sentences. And in the short time they are in prison many end up losing their jobs, their homes and their families. The voluntary and private sectors will be crucial to our success. We want to make far better use of their enthusiasm and expertise to get offenders away from the revolving door of crime and prison.”

The Covid-19 Pandemic resulted in a chronic backlog in the Criminal Justice System with more than 53,000 cases waiting to go before the Crown Courts. It now June 2022 and I have no idea where the waiting list is in comparison to other years. Someone, somewhere came up with the idea to create dozens of additional “Nightingale Courts” to help with demand during the pandemic. The Guardian reported that this constituted the greatest threat to the proper operation of the criminal justice system in history.

The wheel has gone full circle, with a shift from the Advise, Assist & Befriend approach to Enforcement and Punishment and back again. Personally I believe that the Probation Service must return to ‘social work’ values in order to survive and as a consequence positively influence clients and keep them from offending in the community.

 This will involve practicing ‘effective’ case management on a daily basis in the communities in which the clients live. The short sighted thinking that led to the ‘enforcement and punishment’ model being rigorously adopted and implemented, albeit under threat of financial cuts. resulted in the prison population being at an all time high.

  If the Government wants to save money and in doing so become effective in reducing offending behaviour then it must  change the way the Criminal Justice System currently works and adopt a  Professionally managed, ‘proactive outreach’ service to address the multiple and complex needs of the ‘revolving door’ clients that reoffend within two years after release.

 Many people involved with the Criminal Justice System are very often disenfranchised individuals with complex needs. They frequently have unmet needs and  issues relating to  problematic drug and alcohol misuse, poor mental health and a significant number are the product of abusive relationships (past and present), dysfunctional parenting, and a significant number  have unresolved issues relating to adverse childhood experiences, bereavement and  debt. 

 ‘Many prisoners have experienced a lifetime of social exclusion. Compared with the general population, prisoners are thirteen times as likely to have been in care, thirteen times as likely to be unemployed, ten times as likely to have been a regular truant, two and a half times as likely to have had a family member committed of a criminal offence…fifteen times as likely to be HIV positive.’  Social Exclusion Unit

  If an individual is homeless or sleeping rough then this will necessitate an approach that allows professionals and support workers alike to prioritize the individual and leave the comfortable surroundings in which they work, ‘hit the street’ and practice proactive outreach and engage with ‘the person’ until they have built up a relationship that then enables them to positively influence change.

 ‘Client pinball’ is a term I use to describe one of the major downfalls of current practice, where workers arrange a series of appointments over a set period of time. They then instruct the client to attend each and every appointment in the belief that their part of the contract is fulfilled. Yet the reality is that the individual bounces from service to service until all the problematic areas of their lives are supposedly addressed. In reality they may not even make the first meeting and if they do, it is unlikely they will find the impetus to make the other appointments as arranged. Signposting, is in my view,the last ‘great irresponsible act’ it meets the needs of the organization and its responsibility under contractual obligations to evidencing requirements in relation to data collection but it does nothing to ensure contact is made with specialist services. When it is later discovered appointments have not been kept then the client is labelled unmotivated and breached.

  If the Criminal Justice System is sincere about working towards a seamless sentence where sentences are ‘managed effectively within a framework that supports compliance, then there will need to be a shift in the way Probation Officers work with the client throughout the lifetime of the order. This will necessitate the introduction of a ‘refer and chaperone’ approach that will increase engagement and reduce the risk of reoffending whist at the same time developing a rapport between the client and his/her Probation Officer/Support worker.

 If the Probation Service takes the view that a reduction in offending behaviour is its ‘raison d’être’ then it will need to change its practices as much as the social excluded/hard to reach offender is expected to change his or her behaviour. For many this change of practice and culture will be viewed as abhorrent, impractical and far too risky. Yet the fact of the matter is the above are ‘lame’ excuses and do not stand up to scrutiny. The fact is ‘risk’ can be managed by working in pairs and having appropriate safeguarding practices built into working practices. The crux of the matter is that the supervision of offenders is not a 9-5 Monday to Friday operation.

 As the Carter report (2003) made very clear:

 ‘…believing that offenders in the community will reduce their re-offending through occasional interviews with Probation Officers is naïve.’

I would take it a step further and say that sitting in an office waiting for someone not to turn up is morally wrong and not cost effective . The adoption of proactive supervision and the introduction of a mobile community based outreach team could ameliorate the need for breach proceedings being implemented thus saving thousands of pounds by avoiding the need to return an offender to jail. (Current cost £42,000 per annum, per prisoner)

 Running parallel to the necessary change in culture and function would be the need to allow the Probation Service to adopt an eclectic mix of interventions and partnerships which will be fundamental to its future development. I do not however support the argument that promotes the contracting out of current services. The key strengths of the Probation Service are that the staff are/were highly trained, responsible accountable and that it has superb policies and procedures already in place. They just need to be adapted to allow more contacts to take place in the community.

 I believe that Probation Officers could become fantastic case managers if they operated in a proactive way, within the community and were given much more personal discretion to case manage and make ‘on the ground’ decisions as to issues such as licence recall or the instigation of breech proceedings.

 I would argue that if Probation staff spent six hours a day making home visits they could begin to build up a picture of their client’s lives and, gain a better understanding of the complex issues that act as barriers to accessing services; especially if they are related to drug and alcohol dependency, peer pressure or a lack of financial resources to keep appointments. For some people the choice to change sometimes does not exist.

 For many there is but an ‘illusion of choice’.  Pathways into support services need to be brokered and the proactive probation outreach worker could ‘champion’ and advocate access to specialist and multiple support services, especially if that individuals previous behaviour has resulted in them having sanctions imposed upon them that excluded them. However it may be that they are in fact barred from accessing a service or organisation because of draconian outdated practices.  It is regrettable that millions of pounds have been spent on updating and refurbishing buildings in for the most socially excluded but very little has been spent on training and up skilling the staff that work within them.

 A multitude of Government funded interventions have proved how effective ‘outreach’ can be in all its manifestations. More recently, the piloting of innovative interventions to address social exclusion and homelessness proved that getting individuals off the street and accessing support is possible if there is a will to do so. Post Covid, the ability to ‘fast track’ clients to specialist services, such as health visitors, housing, state benefits, dentists, psychologists, mental health nurses, heath care assistants and indeed General Practitioners hinders the workers ability to affect positive change.

I truly believe that if the professional is prepared to think beyond the label of ‘offender, rough sleeper, prostitute, problematic drug and alcohol user etc’, it will in turn assist the individual in thinking beyond the label of ‘authority figure’ or any other professional title, and by doing so allow them the opportunity to challenge their own behaviour and expectations.

 The problem I came across, time and time again was the entrenched belief that socially excluded individuals brought it all upon themselves, and that wonderful ‘all singing and all dancing’ services were on offer 24 hours a day,but the socially excluded individual chose not to engage.

Many were shocked to find out that agencies did not work together and integrated pathways existed in name only and many people still slip through the health and social care safety net. This highlighted the need for mandatory multi-partnership training for every agency involved in the client’s journey. Unfortunately institutional silos still need to be broken down to improve inter-agency partnership working and create the so called ‘virtuous circle’.

 In Summary, if the Ministry of Justice is serious about offering a more effective service for less money then it needs to be  prepared to start with a clean sheet and let go of the tenets of wisdom within the  current mechanisms of service delivery. Many of the points made may be uncomfortable for some managers and even for some practitioners. I have found that at times, the most successful interventions are disconcerting for some as they have clearly gone against the grain of agency principles. If meaningful rapport is to be established and engagement is to be genuine and fruitful, then it must involve daily and weekly contacts in the community. For this to be made possible, good line management must be in place. This means senior probation officers being prepared to defend against professional tensions and assist in the management of risk by moving away from an office based appointment system to community based interventions. The adoption of a proactive  outreach approach that allows individuals to remain in the community of their choice, whilst accessing all necessary wrap-around support services will in my opinion lead to significant reductions in re-offending, excellent compliance with community based orders, and sustained retention with the multitude of services that already exist in the community. Finally, in relation to the question about military veterans needing a separate criminal justice pathway to everyone else, the answer is no.

 Tony Wright CEO