A devastating report by the Chief Inspector of Probation lifts a corner of the veil on the ineptitude, political correctness and professional implosion of the probation service. The report looked into the failures by Nottinghamshire probation service that allowed a drug addict, David Parfitt, who had been allowed out of prison on licence subject to drug testing, to kill PC Ged Walker after flinging him off a stolen car he was driving. As the Telegraph reports, Parfitt failed ten drug tests and failed to make numerous appointments with his probation officer. The chief probation officer David Hancock, who said not only would he not resign but that none of his officers would be disciplined, blamed the pressure of work.

'He said Parfitt's original probation officer had been adequately briefed on national guidelines to deal with his drug testing programme, but she had "failed to absorb" the finer detail of the requirements. He refused to say why feeling ill after taking heroin was deemed an acceptable excuse not to turn up for a drugs test, or why the officer was allowed for so long to apply her own criteria as to what constituted a breach of licence. He said she should not face any action because she was overworked and that was the management's fault. Mr Hancock also blamed a raft of Home Office initiatives imposed on his service, which had confused staff.'

But although the report does cite overwork and red tape, this response misses the point. As PC Walker's widow protested in the Telegraph yesterday, neither overwork nor red tape explained the grotesque attitudes by the probation officer towards drug-taking and failure to comply with the probation service's own requirements. As she said:

'If you are released early on the condition that you don't take drugs, and then you regularly fail drugs tests, what excuse do you need to revoke his licence?... Being high on drugs is a major cause of crime yet it's deemed an acceptable excuse. The probation service was complacent and look where it's got them...It's obvious he has to commit crime to buy drugs, so why do they let him carry on doing it? They were turning a blind eye to his drug-taking, but in doing so were accommodating law-breaking.'

What happened here was sloppy practice, based on an indulgent approach towards both drug-taking and rule-breaking. For the probation service, of all people, not to understand the importance of holding people to account for breaking the rules and the law is bad enough. For it then to fail to grasp the need to take responsibility for its failings is twice as dismaying. How can it hope to teach offenders that everyone must take responsibility and be held to account for what they do when it refuses to do so itself?

Is it any wonder that, as the paper reports elsewhere, most drug-addicted criminals sent by the courts for treatment, under sentencing orders created by the Government as an alternative to prison, are failing to complete the programme and many re-offend? Isn't it time to put the probation service in order?

Posted by melanie at March 26, 2004