Patrick O'Deapleads for contemporary adherence to the core idea of probation - to advise, assist and befriend offenders trying to rebuild their lives
The Probation of Offenders Act 1907 directs probation officers to "advise, assist, befriend" offenders. A founding father of criminology, Leon Radcinowicz, said of the probation order that it was the single most important rehabilitative sentence of the 20th century.
The objective of probation is to enhance public safety through a programme of rehabilitation work with an offender. Prior to the Act, there had been informal systems of supervision and care of offenders provided by philanthropic agencies. However, now using probation orders, the courts could provide for the statutory supervision of offenders in the community. The order was a hybrid, with its foundation of legalism, overlaid with a layer of welfare, rehabilitation and correction.
Despite the existence of the Probation of Offenders Act 1907, probation as a disposition only came into extensive use in the Republic in the late 1960s. There was only one probation officer at the time of the establishment of the State. As before and in the spirit of the 1931 papal encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, charitable societies continued an involvement, most noticeably the Society of St Vincent de Paul, the Legion of Mary, the Salvation Army, and the Protestant Discharged Prisoners' Aid Organisation.
However, the Probation Service has rapidly grown since from seven staff in 1960 to 360 in 2006. In spite of its low public profile, the service now plays a major role in Irish criminal justice. It administers for the courts many of the non-custodial community-based sanctions, provides a welfare service to the prisons and further provides an offender risk assessment service (pre-sanction reports) to the courts.
The 1907 Act directs probation officers to "advise, assist and befriend" offenders. The shape and content of that "advice, assistance and friendship" have changed to accord with the prevailing philosophical paradigm.
Probation work in the early decades of the last century was religious in outlook; the endeavour was devoted to the saving of souls.
By the end of the 1930s, the view had become that the offender was susceptible not to grace, but to cure through scientific treatment. The offender was more a patient and less a sinner.
By the 1970s, disillusionment with the effectiveness of offender treatment programmes grew in terms of their capacity to reduce reoffending and recidivism. This school of thought on offender rehabilitation was known as "nothing works". It was influential in the US, Canada and the UK. Its influence reached Ireland at least a decade and a half later and has profoundly affected practice methodologies.
More recent examination of the research literature on offender treatment has been far more positive and indicates that some treatments do work and points to the more effective principles and practices to rehabilitation work with offenders.
There is a climate of public anxiety over crime and there is hope, which lies in the growing body of promising approaches to rehabilitation. This matters, most importantly, for public safety.
"Advise, assist, befriend", operating effectively, makes its significant contribution to community safety. It also has a normative place as the embodiment of particular values within the justice system. For reasons of humanity and safety, I exhort that these values would hold and deepen their place in our system of criminal justice.
• Patrick O'Deais a lecturer at the school of social work & social policy in Trinity College, Dublin