Friday 29 October 2010

Time to 'Get Real'

The Ministry of Justice has just published details of serious further offences committed by offenders subject to MAPPA supervision. Of a total of 48,388 persons, 196 fell into this category with 14 committing offences such as rape or murder. Any serious offence is regrettable, but what is really significant is that 160 of this total were in the lowest risk category. Now it could be said that either the risk assessment process was therefore at fault, or that absolutely no risk assessment process is ever going to accurately predict future behaviour. In the end it has to be a judgement call and that is precisely the essence of why we need the best trained and experienced probation officers to try and keep the risk of serious reoffending as low as possible. In 43,192 cases it worked.   

The real nightmare every probation officer faces on a daily basis is the phone call that tells you one of the people on your caseload has just been arrested for a rape or murder. It didn't used to be like this of course, but the fact is nowadays the supervising officer will be blamed either directly or indirectly. The implicit view of the press and public will be that the officer's supervision should have prevented it - they were being supervised after all. Unfortunately management won't leap into action to offer support, instead they'll pore over the OASys assessment and inevitably find some fault with it. 


Now seeing as we deal with some of the most dangerous people in society on a daily basis, the chances are that some will commit further offences. I think this is a piece of commonsense that we as a society have just simply lost sight of. Officers do not have the benefit of hindsight, cannot read minds and do not follow their clients 24/7. So how has this deeply unreal, dysfunctional expectation come about? The answer is that politicians have encouraged the public to think that supervision has some magical quality and that OASys has a scientific ability to predict and prevent dangerous criminal behaviour. Sadly, probation management and to a degree NAPO have also colluded in this wildly misguided belief, to the extent that it has now become a very large stick with which to beat us. 

As I have said before, risk assessment is not a science, never can be and OASys has just created a massive forest from which we are trying to spot the odd tree. At most the process has never been much more than a highly educated, informed and reasoned guess. Bear in mind that most of this group will have been released from prison from determinate sentences. In other words release was non negotiable, so their risk had to be monitored in the community under licence no matter how high the risk category. Some will have been granted early release on Parole Licence when a careful decision has to be made about trading off concerns about risk, with the opportunity of imposing longer supervision and more restrictive conditions such as hostel residence or tagging, as more intrusive means of monitoring behaviour.

But our prison system is absolutely jammed with people on indeterminate sentences, precisely because the system has become so risk averse due to this unrealistic public and press expectation. We simply have to 'get real' - despite our best endeavours, some offenders are going to remain dangerous and commit more serious crimes. It has been, and for evermore will be, thus.     

5 comments:

  1. "Of a total of 48,388 persons, 196 fell into this category with 14 committing offences such as rape or murder."

    A quick "back of fag packet" calculation says that picking a random group of 50,000 adult males in the UK would lead to a 'background rate' of 7 convictions for rape or murder in one year. So, double the background rate for a group marked out as dangerous enough to include in MAPPA isn't too bad a failure rate.

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  2. It is and will always remain a matter of judgement, which over-systematized processes suchas OASYS will always undermine.

    Ian Mason has an excellent point.

    That said, if you have two such cases in your career, you are probably not very good at judging such things and should probably quit - we can't all be good at everything, and knowing your limits is all.

    Three and you should resign or be fired.

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  3. Were those 160 in the lowest risk catagory for MAPPA? Or just the lower risk non-MAPPA cases?

    What the statistics you provided don't show, is what the SFO reviews findings were. How many of those cases were managed to a high enough quality? How many were proven to have massive failings?

    I also wonder how many SFO's there were from non-MAPPA cases? Especially since the critera for what constitutes an SFO has changed so drastically - essentially, unless that person was assessed as high risk AND commits murder, rape or a sexual offence against an <13yr old, there is no SFO. That excludes a lot of very serious violence.

    I've been through an SFO review, following a murder. It was one of the most useful learning experiences I have ever had, in terms of better understanding risk assessment and management. But that's from a PSO grade when I'd only been in post 9 months. I didn't learn anything that the PO supervising the case should've already known.


    All of that said. The end result is the same. We cannot manage everyone 24/7, we cannot predict every outcome and OASys will not be able to cover everything.

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  4. A177 - nice to see you back.

    As far as I understand it, the 160 were all MAPPA cases, but in the lowest risk category - so in other words, despite our best endeavours, we're never going to know everyone who is going to re-offend seriously. Apparently 1,205 in high and very high risk categories were recalled and there were 14 SFO's from the total of MAPPA's.

    Glad to see the NAPO forum's getting more lively and thanks for putting a mention on for this blog.

    Cheers, Jim

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  5. Found your post on the forum - I'll try and get through that report at some point, lots of interesting information.

    You've got another reader out there in NAPO land, that comment is not from me!

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