The life of a probation officer is part social work, part teacher, all about connecting with people on a human level. This anonymous account takes us to the ground level of the industry.
The hotel, perched on a London ring road, was sky blue. Everything else was grey: the flyover, car showrooms, a dirty river that ran alongside the building. Sometimes swans would glide down there, looking like they had taken a wrong turn. The probation service only took up half of the hotel’s ground floor, but that included the front entrance, so often confused looking families of holidaymakers would haul their luggage into reception where the murderers and restraining orders waited. I was a probation services officer, a position you can get without qualifications or training. Judging by me, they would take anyone. The difference between my job and that of a trained PO was the calibre of offender you dealt with: no sex pests, repeat assaulters, or anyone ‘high risk’ – in other words, someone who posed an imminent, serious threat to the public. The assessment didn’t always fit the crime; for example, a woman who harassed someone online could be riskier than a murderer, if the stalker in question wouldn’t leave her victim alone. The murderer had a job, a partner, he was chill. His victim was out of the picture.
People sometimes asked me if I got scared. Security – a spotty guy in a suit who looked like he was on work experience – did not put my nerves at ease. His predecessor was more like it: a cage fighter and minor gym influencer, but they couldn’t afford him anymore. The overall feeling was a bit like air travel where, regardless of the data, you couldn’t shake the feeling that something terrible was about to happen. There was a panic button that called the police, but I never got to use it.
The advertising poster said, ‘An extraordinary job. Done by someone like you’: the implication being that you were nothing special. You were lucky to be here. Just like for the people on probation, it could be a lot worse. If they were on licence, they were liable to go back to prison at any point. We reserved that right. And they had to make a request if you wanted to travel. Mr Bey, a family man who had been away for so long that his double Diesel denim had come back into fashion, had two places in mind: Mecca and Disneyland. When he sensed his chances diminishing, he said to forget about Disneyland. I could have told him that. My boss, Ankhi, was just as impervious to his spirituality as his leisure. A funeral was your best bet, she’d say. Maybe your own.
On a brighter note, I helped them get jobs. My young guy – the background checks were getting to him. Even in construction, a refuge! I tried to focus on the positive: his biceps. It was just his natural physique, augmented by cell workouts. ‘You turn the chair over, there’s a bar between the legs: use that to do the push-up.’ When I visited his flat, there was a web series about a coke dealer playing on his 150-inch screen. He kept one Airpod in at all times. I liked to imagine the score for that show was in his ear, giving our meetings a high-stakes feel.
‘My girlfriend said I have weak hips,’ I said with respect to my running gait.
He started laughing. ‘Don’t tell anyone that. Especially not a woman.’ Somehow I kept the conversation going, like the host of a radio show only God listened to.
‘You box?’ he asked, for the first time sounding interested, or at least not embarrassed on my behalf. ‘How long have you done that for?’
‘A few years,’ I exaggerated.
‘You must have good stamina.’
‘Makes up for the weak hips.’
He liked that. Another good one. I was all about connecting with people.
My colleagues leaned heavily on the verb ‘present,’ i.e. someone ‘presented well,’ instead of seeming or being well. Someone’s house ‘presented as clean.’ Was this just the self-important language of bureaucracy or something deeper: a fundamental mistrust of appearances? As long as neither the vocabulary nor paranoia crept into my life, I could live with it. But sometimes there was slippage. Ismail. A promising young footballer. Attacking centre-back. Played to a decent standard in Italy, fifth or sixth tier. He was softly-spoken and easy to influence, a mark, who looked like the love interest in a Netflix series. My colleagues enquired about him. In other words, he didn’t belong there. The way he sold it to me: a sort of mentor figure gave him anti-anxiety medication and then took him shoplifting. The pills turned him into Icarus. Just when I thought I’d reached him, he spread his wings in TK Maxx again. I knew it would end in tears, or to use the official term, ‘escalate.’ But Ismail piqued my interest and in his player compilation, which he proudly showed me before he reoffended, he presented like Piqué.
As long as they attended their appointments and didn’t make your life hell, you grew to like them. But one person I couldn’t get along with was Alan. It was hard to be a man in his forties or fifties on probation, having lost it all. There wasn’t a lot of help out there, little in the way of sympathy. He was an alcoholic who’d had altercations with his ex-wife and now couldn’t see his children. He was on probation for assault on an emergency worker, lashing out at the police after falling asleep on a bus. He didn’t remember. We didn’t get off to the best start. Asked about his interests outside of drinking, he had to think for a long time before answering: ‘I used to watch Chelsea.’ I joked that we could just talk about football and he said something like ‘Football tips,’ and I replied, ‘Oh, you bet?’ and he said, ‘What? No: tits. I said football and tits.’
His record mostly consisted of petty, embarrassing offences, like racially abusing Tesco staff or jumping over a chicken shop counter because his food was taking too long. With certain people, you wondered if a jail sentence might serve them better. Alan agreed: ‘I just need to be locked up.’ On the other hand, that removed his agency. He needed to be the change. And it was easier said than done. The man smirked or wept; there was no in-between. He was secure in the knowledge that probation couldn’t hurt him yet was horrified at his immunity. It was probably like drinking more than a few beers and not feeling drunk. There had to be a line.
He would only agree to report at 6:45, just minutes before the office shut. These hours were reserved for people with jobs. ‘I’m in Harlow,’ he said, like it made any difference. ‘What are you doing?’ ‘That’s my business.’ I should have said it was my business, because if he couldn’t give me a valid reason, he had to come when I instructed. Instead, I lied and said I had booked someone else then. Got my months mixed up. He almost felt sorry for me. Even an unemployed, depressed alcoholic knows what month it is.
In a meeting, I asked if any of his friends could stage an intervention for him. He stared into space then shook his head, like he’d almost remembered something.
‘Do you have any kids? A house, or a flat?’
‘I’ve lost two kids and two flats. Repossessed. It’s just – I come in here. And I have so much more life experience than you. It’s not to knock you, mate, really it’s not.’ He raised his hand against an objection that never came.
I was noticing his fragility: matted hair, snub nose, glassy eyes, almost innocent, the complexion of a newborn after a traumatic birth. His mouth was like a child’s drawing of a bird in flight. ‘Sometimes it feels like you’re the teacher and I’m the student. When it should be the other way around.’ I gave this some thought, possibly too much – because if I had spoken, he might not have said next: ‘No offence.’ And I wouldn’t have replied: ‘Alan, you could never offend me.’ In retrospect, it might have been the harshest thing you could tell someone, although I’d meant it in a nice way – you’re cheeky. But it came across more as: you’re such a loser.
He stood up with his carrier bag, and, to the chimes of his glass bottles, said, ‘You can breach me, I don’t give a fuck.’
If they were breached they had to go back to court. It was a lot of paperwork. I marked his entry: ‘Attended – complied.’ Since then we’d agreed a truce. He had started going to AA meetings. He said he was addicted to them, in a way. He was still drinking. Someone had offered to be his sponsor. ‘He’s Jewish, I’m not. I don’t care what he is. At first I was worried he was some kind of molester but I looked him up on Facebook and he’s got two sons, like me.’ At the end of the meeting you collected a chip for how long you had been abstinent: years, one year, six months, one month, one week, or 24 hours. ‘I want that 24 hours one,’ he said. Last week he tried and came up short.
‘I wanna see the chip, Alan,’ I said, starting to get into it – there was a hint of an evangelical preacher about me. ‘You can do it. Next time you’re here. Show me the chip! A whole stack of them.’
He nodded, crying. Tears oozed fat and puslike down his red face. ‘Yes, I will.’
Ankhi’s idea was to get him to write a letter to his sons. I was nervous about that. It seemed a little Hollywood. But he had already cried, so here we were.
‘No, no,’ he answered hastily. ‘I don’t want to put my stress on them. I text them.’
‘What do you text them?’
‘Your dad’s going through a tough time, stuff like that.’
‘Does “tough time” cover it?’
He shrugged, wiping away a last tear, then folded his arms and looked over his shoulder.
‘If you’re keeping the stress from them,’ I went on wisely, ‘you’re keeping it to yourself. You don’t have to send the letter. You can just write it for you. Or show it to me, whatever.’
He started to nod. He took his phone out. ‘Do you mind if I write that down?’ He typed and slowly mouthed ‘keeping it to myself.’
‘We got off on the wrong foot… I’m sorry about that. Sometimes you’ll say something and it just catches… Yeah, you’re pretty good, yeah.’ He was fighting back the tears again.
‘I’m alright,’ I said. I gripped the edge of the table, on which someone had lightly scratched the word ‘HOAX,’ and unconsciously swung back in my chair.
These were our people – our PoPs (people on probation). You weren’t supposed to call them this – ‘service user’ was in vogue. Client. Or case. Nothing quite covered it. Experienced probation officers would say ‘my guy,’ sometimes qualified by the crime, ‘my DV guy.’ The possessiveness was twofold. It was suggesting that you couldn’t let them out of your sight for a second. At the same time, a diabolical character guaranteed you an audience.
Ankhi was sceptical. ‘They inflate their cases to elevate their status,’ she told me. ‘But murderers don’t go around murdering people; they’re afraid to cross the road. It’s other people you need to watch out for.’ She gave me a brisk look. ‘A murderer? It could even be someone like you.’
