Through the Eyes of the Probation Officer

Abstract

I do think of Mrs. Rose now as one of my friends but that was not the way it was when, as a new, young probation officer in 1955,1 opened the request from the Ascot Court for a pretrial enquiry on a Mrs. Rose charged with defrauding the National Assistance Board. Ascot had only given me a few days' notice. Enquiries frightened me; I always expected to find people hostile to me because I came from the court which they must hate. I had yet to learn that few people dare be openly hostile and that many are relieved to talk about their fears of what is going to happen. Even knowing this has not taken all the anxiety out offirst meetings. But it has helped. In fact I never saw Mrs. Rose until after she had gone to court and had been placed on probation. Later, when she told me of her terror of being sent to prison, of being chained up and made to sew mail bags, I was sad not to have seen her before the court because I could have lessened her terror a little. I had been taught that one must not predict what courts will do and that in casework one should not reassure, but these seemed harsh rules when face to face with frightened people. Quite quickly I had found ways of saying that, although no one could be certain, courts did not usually send mothers of defective daughters to prison for petty offences. But this Mrs. Rose found out for herself since she had already left for Ascot when I was knocking on her van door in an attempt to make an enquiry. I met her when I went to serve the probation order. This was not the way I liked to meet my probationers, as people are easier to get to know in a crisis when their future is uncertain, than when they know the worst has not happened and they have been 'let off' with probation. I also felt safer knowing something of my probationer's family history. I could ask for that when I had the excuse of a court report but I was not yet profession ally secure enough to tell my clients I needed to know about them in order to help them. I would have expected them to rebuff me and to say I could not help them anyway, which was what I feared myself. So I felt at a di§