The Prison Welfare Officer--A Case of Role Strain

Abstract

The Probation Service in England and Wales is currently faced with a crisis of identity. All around great changes are taking place with the emergence of unitary local authority social work departments; of a united professional association for social workers; of new strategies which stress participation and client power. Far from taking part in these developments the probation service has found itself increasingly involved with the penal system-more pre-sentence reports to higher courts, responsibility for voluntary after-care and parole supervision,and most tangible of all the provision of a welfare service within prisons themselves. There is evidence of considerable strain within the service which has for a long time teetered along the ideological tightrope between control and 'client-centred therapy'. Voting on the proposals for unification of social workers' associations revealed probation officers almost evenly divided between going in and staying out of the British Association of Social Workers. Some argued that they were 'caseworkers' whose professional identity and capacity to help 'clients' can only be safeguarded by public assertions of unity with other social work specialisms. Others welcomed the growing involvement with the prison system as a way of retaining a measure of independence. A unified penal service, embracing prisons, probation and courts, has been projected either within the Home Office or as part of a Lord Chancellor's Department. The implications of this idea have not been worked out in detail but the prison welfare function can be seen as the beginning of a collaborative process between prison and probation to be administratively consummated as soon as decency permits. It is proposed in this paper to examine the role of the prison welfare officer with particular emphasis on the clash between the competing belief systems of 'casework' and 'custody'. There is a vast and growing literature devoted to role theory. Its attraction for sociologists is that it offers a way of describing individual behaviour which d6es not rely on biological or psychological theories of motivation. No clear consensus exists about a precise definition of role