My song today is ‘I’ll Be There’. This song was written by Barry Gordy, Hal Davis, Bob West, and Willie Hutch. It was recorded by ‘The Jackson 5’ in August 1970. “I'll Be There" is also notable as the most successful single released by Motown during its ‘Detroit era’ (1959–72).
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The most defining characteristic of any friend, workmate, lover, partner, spouse, soulmate, or family member is someone who will ‘be there for you’ in times of need.
During the late 1960s, I gave up my job as a mill manager after deciding that I wanted to change my career and become a Probation Officer. In order to acquire a place on a ‘Probation Training Course’ at university, I returned to night school over a three-year period to obtain the ‘A-Level’ and ‘O-Level’ examinations I failed to take during my earlier years. I entered the ‘Huddersfield Probation Office’ as its newest member of staff in 1971. I was a thirty-year-old married man full of zest, and who was determined to change the world for the better by helping all of my clients to change their criminal, unhealthy or inappropriate behaviour patterns which had been blighting their lives, making them unhappy, and forever getting them into trouble.
During my first year as a rooky Probation Officer in Huddersfield, it soon became apparent to me that my training as a Probation Officer had left me ill-equipped to help the people who I was supposed to help. The extent of the range of problems my Probation clients displayed often had very little to do with ‘criminality’ per se and had more to do with poverty of circumstances, unsatisfactory accommodation and living conditions, unhappy relationships, lack of self-confidence and self-belief, addiction and substance abuse, unhappy childhoods, poor communication, an absence of social skills, and either aggressive and violent response patterns, or non-assertive response patterns.
Another problem I faced was the sheer volume of work Probation Officers were expected to do within any working week. In many ways, the Probation Officers of the 1970s performed a range of roles that no Probation Officer of 2020 either could or would be expected to perform; even if they possessed the know-how and skills required. In 1970, a Probation Officer needed to be both Jack and Master of all trades as they carried out the roles of befriender, adviser, prison visitor, court server, report writer, matrimonial guidance counsellor; psychological counsellor, and most importantly, someone who could stop the offender committing crimes! Today, these roles (where they still exist) are ‘specialist roles’ which the officer works in, to the exclusion of all the other roles.
It had long been recognised by prison reformers (even before the turn of the 20th century), that many ex-prisoners face severe problems and are at particularly high risk of re-offending when they leave prison. Over the last century, the Probation Officer essentially evolved from that of being a volunteer prison visitor enacting a ‘befriending role’ to the Probation Officer of today, who is a paid professional enforcement officer for public protection. A range of interventions has been tried over the years to reduce the risk of prisoner reoffending, from 20th-century religious missions at the prison gate to one of supervision in the community under licence. One of the oldest traditions is that of ‘voluntary after-care’, whereby supervision, advice, or practical assistance with resettlement are provided at the request of prisoners.
The Probation service has been formally responsible for the provision of voluntary after-care since the mid-1960s, but in recent years the numbers of offenders assisted in this way have declined dramatically. Indeed, in some areas the practice has been explicitly discontinued. Today, much of the work done by Probation Officers takes the form of being Parole Officers protecting the public by keeping contact with statutory licensees released from prison. Probation Officers also serve the Courts by preparing reports upon individuals appearing before it for offences committed. Their reports assist the court to arrive at the most appropriate sentence in respect of the offence committed and the person who committed it. Probation Officers also operate group community programmes as a substitute for a custodial sentence. Since the early 1990s, there has been a general shift in probation priorities and resources away from activities with a ‘welfare’ focus towards the enforcement of statutory requirements and work more directly geared to crime prevention and public protection.
During my first year as a rooky Probation Officer, I realised that there was simply no way that it was possible to see every probation client on my books through weekly office appointments and home visits. I would have around fifty probation clients to supervise, and unless they were to become no more than ‘tick clients’ (someone who fulfilled their statutory commitment by simply showing their face in the office for less than five minutes weekly and answering a few cursory questions which I could statutorily make a record of), it was impossible to actually get to know anyone and establish any workable client /officer relationship, let alone significantly help them!
So, very early on in my career, I decided to break the conventional mold of client reporting, and instead of having my clients report to me weekly, I would see them briefly each week ‘for the first month only’, and after that, they would be asked to report to me monthly when we could spend at least half an hour together in meaningful discussion and engagement. I also started to build an army of Probation Volunteers around my caseload to assist me in my work. These were unpaid private citizens who each had something personally to offer. One Probation Volunteer might have numerous job contacts and be more able to get some unemployed Probation client of mine a suitable job quicker than any job centre could (especially when the unemployed person had a criminal record). Another volunteer could have many landlord friends who rented out private flats and who might be persuaded to rent one out to a single man being released from prison. Another might have a sports or activity-based interest like hiking, boxing, chess, dancing, painting, camping, cycling, mountain walking, rock climbing, etc. Some would be ideal listeners. I would match my volunteers up with suitable clients on my caseload; not only to provide them with an added interest to occupy their leisure time ‘legally’, but to increase their confidence levels, and to give them a taste of accomplishing something. Failure to accomplish was too regular a pattern in many of their lives.
Within one year, I had found a way of helping clients in a way they considered to be personally beneficial. I was the first probation officer in West Yorkshire to employ these methods to free up much of my time (which had previously been spent chasing my tail like a dog and never catching it). Freeing up time enabled me to have longer and more meaningful face-to-face interviews with my clients, whereby I could now give them the amount of time they needed in the interview instead of ‘watching the clock’. In short, through using many Probation Volunteers, I was able to delegate tasks and manage my workload more efficiently and satisfactory.
It was during these days in 1972/73 when I stopped wearing a wristwatch. I have never worn one since. Early on, I involved the Probation volunteers I used in regular case discussions as well as reviewing their own designated roles. This made them feel more involved with the client, which all appreciated. Like many a teaching assistant in the classroom (who often hopes to become a teacher themselves in the future), many a probation volunteer helper used their experience working alongside me with my clients to advance their chances of being accepted onto a future training course at university to become a Probation Officer. I was the first ‘Probation Volunteer Co-ordinator’ in the whole of Yorkshire, and I eventually would run regular training courses for the thirty-plus probation volunteers who worked with at least one of my statutory or voluntary clients. By being prepared to organise, manage and train a stable of voluntary helpers, I was eventually able to free myself up to do other work which helped the client change their inappropriate behaviour patterns and to increase my likelihood of ‘being there for them’ when they needed me most.
I also decided early on in my professional career to have my working methods independently evaluated and I was also the first Probation Officer in the country to research client outcomes and have my research independently evaluated by non-Probation professional sources. By this time, I was seeing half of my client group within one combined two-hour weekly group session where I would instruct them in Relaxation Training and stress reduction methods. My group courses were also geared toward them acquiring assertive behaviour and improving their social skill range, besides increasing their control in areas of anger management and fear reduction. This work proved enormously successful, and it was extensively reported on in European Social Work journals during the 1980s.
Because my working methods treated statutory Probation clients the same non-criminal group clients and defined their problems as being related to stress, fear, anger, self-confidence, non-assertion, depression, medication addiction, history of being abused, etc, instead of viewing them as being a ‘criminal in need of reform’, it worked with over 85 percent of group members for two decades. This fact was confirmed by a ‘10-year follow-up study’ on hundreds of Probation Clients I had put through a six-month group programme between 1973 and 1993. Over 40 group clients in the study group which was independently evaluated had over thirty previous convictions each, and half a dozen group member clients each had over one hundred prior convictions. The offences ranged between theft, assault, shoplifting, criminal damage, affray, arson, indecent exposure, and indecent assault. My 85 percent non-reconviction rate compared highly favourably with National Probation Service statistics that showed non-conviction rates to be less than 30 percent. Also, my survey was after a 10-year follow-up period from my initial contact with the offender and not the usual 2-year follow-up research period used by National Statistics. My group programmes involved negligible costs to operate apart from Probation Officer time, whereas other non-custodial community programme options at the time cost hundreds of pounds, per client, per week.
I would always complete a group programme, or a period of statutory contact with every client I ever worked with by giving them a questionnaire to complete. I would require them to provide consumer feedback to the quality and type of service they had ‘expected’ and the quality of service they considered they had ‘received’. There was also a section in my questionnaire which requested ‘suggested improvements’. This latter section requesting suggestions for service improvement revealed one very enlightening aspect that regularly appeared in most of the feedback questionnaires; and which fortunately I had started operating ten years before I received the combined feedback.
One question asked , ‘How often do you feel that you really needed to see your probation Officer during the length of your Probation Supervision or Prison Licence?” and they were offered the following categories of response: Once a week: Every two weeks: Once a month: Bi-monthly: Quarterly: Other:
Now, when a Probationer is placed on Probation, they often found themselves in the world of ‘Hobson’s Choice’. The sentencing court might have offered them the opportunity of being made the subject of a Probation Order or having a prison sentence imposed. Thus, the overwhelming number of Probation Order client’s reporting to a Probation Officer did not want to be sitting in their office but felt they had no real choice in the matter. My questionnaire revealed that there were around three or four occasions in a two-year Probation Order period when the client could ideally benefit from receiving Probation Officers advice, their help, or merely lending an ear while they let off steam. The questionnaire also revealed that the most significant experience that the client best remembered about their Probation Officer, was not how often or how little they saw them, but ‘were they available when they really wanted help on the three or four occasions during their period of statutory supervision?’
The nature of any Probation Officer’s workload involves dealing with regular emergencies that crop up daily. Such emergencies would involve the Probation Officer concerned dropping everything else planned because of the need to rearrange their day at the last moment. When the Probation Officer’s clients reported to the office that day (usually reluctantly), they would be told by the receptionist that their usual officer was unavailable, and they would be referred to see another Probation Officer instead. Whenever that happened, while it would not normally have mattered (because the client did not want be reporting anyway), sod’s law decreed that ‘today’ was one of those rare occasions during their statutory period of contact, when the probation client wanted to see their Probation Officer, but their Probation Officer was not there to help them! My questionnaire revealed that this was the most remembered experience when it came to assessing the quality of the service they had received! Clients did not remember the previous forty consecutive weeks you may have been there to see them(when they did not want to see and would have preferred to have been doing something else). The experience they remembered was the one time they really wanted and needed to see you, and ‘you were not there!’
Whenever I hear the song I sing today, it is this lesson in life I vividly recall. Never tell anyone with a conviction, “I’ll be there’ if there is any possibility that you will not be. And that is why the best of friends, workmates, lovers, partners, spouses, soulmates, or family members (and PROBATION OFFICERS) is someone who will ‘be there for you’ in times of need.
Love and peace Bill xxx