Zara Aleena, a law graduate from Ilford, was walking home from a night out last June when she was killed in a brutal attack. Seven months later, the chief inspector of probation concluded that Jordan McSweeney, who raped and murdered Ms Aleena, would not have been free to attack her that night had it not been for a series of blunders. McSweeney had previously been convicted 28 times for assaults on police and civilians, theft and racial harassment, yet his risk level was only classified as “medium”. The concern is that dangerous offenders are being let out with minimal supervision because the probation service in England and Wales is unable to cope.
Reports from the probation inspectorate point to a creeping internal malaise: officers feel overwhelmed and overworked, with large numbers of people off sick and inexperienced staff taking on complex cases. Most of the service is working beyond its capacity. Some officers have workloads twice as large as they should. Planning for the release of sex offenders has been described as “nowhere near good enough”. It is alarming that figures from the Ministry of Justice since 2010 suggest that one person is murdered by someone on probation every week. Higher-risk cases are supposed to receive more resources, but one whistleblower recently told Channel 4 they faced pressure to lower the risk rating to offload work.
The most recent hole blown in the probation service was the Transforming Rehabilitation initiative, the brainchild of the former justice minister Chris Grayling. This policy, which partly privatised the service, led to a sharp rise in “serious further offences” and crippling caseloads, with the number of service users climbing by 74% between 2015 and 2020. In an indictment of the policy, probation services were renationalised in 2021, but this alone won’t solve this crisis. “There are no magic bullets here”, as the chief inspector of probation said at the time.
That’s because many of these issues date back further than Mr Grayling’s reforms. Over the last two decades, top-down reorganisations have centralised the probation service and subordinated it to prisons. When probation works, it is supposed to prevent people from reoffending by connecting them to local services such as mental health support, education and housing. In Scotland, probation has long been known as “criminal justice social work” – a title that is more befitting of officers’ responsibilities. Prior to Mr Grayling’s reforms, local probation trusts across England and Wales allowed officers to work closely with the police and councils. Yet austerity has left these other services threadbare. This was grimly encapsulated in the finding that some people were given tents upon release from prison because their probation officers couldn’t find them housing.
Fixing these failures will require more than just resources, although that would be a good place to start. The government has already hired more probation officers, but it will take years to build up lost expertise. Probation should be treated as a profession that requires specialist skills, with wages that reflect this. Making probation separate from prisons and further devolving the system would be an improvement, allowing officers to link up with other local services. Yet the government is moving in the opposite direction, with recent plans to streamline prisons and probation. A crunch has been building for years, leaving officers “crossing their fingers [and] hoping for the best”, in the words of the former chief prosecutor Nazir Afzal. Tragedies like Zara Aleena’s show that isn’t good enough.
