The probation service needs more men to help bring a male perspective to cases involving violent offenders, including cases of domestic abuse, the head of the service in England and Wales has said.
In her first interview since taking up the role of chief probation officer in February, Kim Thornden-Edwards told BBC News that the service also needed more older people with life experiences, including those who had been on probation themselves.
“Sometimes it’s really good to be able to allocate a case where they think the gender will be important,” she said. “It might be really good for a woman to be leading on a domestic abuse case, but also it might be good for a man to be challenging those kind of issues around masculinity and power from a male perspective.”
The workforce, she added, had been “stuck” at 75% women for 30 years.
Recent reports have revealed the probation service, responsible for supervising 240,000 former prisoners and offenders serving sentences in the community, is struggling to protect the public.
An investigation into the service after the murder of Zara Aleena, a law graduate from Ilford, who was killed in a brutal attack when she was walking home last June, found that dangerous offenders were being let out with minimal supervision because the probation service in England and Wales was unable to cope.
The report concluded that Jordan McSweeney, who raped and murdered Aleena nine days after being released from prison, had been convicted 28 times for assaults on police and civilians, theft and racial harassment, yet his risk level was classified as “medium”.
The probation inspectorate report found most of the service was working beyond its capacity. Some officers had workloads twice as large as they should, it said.
Figures from the Ministry of Justice suggest one person has been murdered by someone on probation every week since 2010. Higher-risk cases are supposed to receive more resources but whistleblowers have reported facing pressure to lower the risk rating to offload work.
His majesty’s chief inspector of probation, Justin Russell, has said it is impossible to be sure the public is safe because of the quality of work in parts of the service.
Admitting “unmanageable workloads”, Russell added that staff shortages in parts of the country were severely affecting the service’s ability to manage offenders, including those who posed a serious threat to the public.
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Thornden-Edwards said the recruitment of men was an issue the service had always been “unable to crack”. She added: “It’s been suggested in the past that associations of the probation service with social work has leant it to be viewed by women as more of an attractive career than men.”
The findings of the unpublished research – seen by BBC Radio 4’s File on 4 – said the service needed to hire more “career changers” in their 30s, 40s and 50s, who could bring skills from different sectors.
Thornden-Edwards said the probation service would open a non-graduate route for trainee officers – this year with GCSEs the only qualifications needed.
The probation union, Napo, has highlighted staff shortages and huge caseloads as the main problems facing the service. A survey of more than 900 members, conducted by Napo and passed to the BBC, suggested that more than a third of staff were considering quitting.
