A panoramic view of probation: Can undercover journalism keep us safe?

Abstract

Undercover: Can Probation keep us safe? – the Panorama programme which was shown on BBC television in May 2024 employed an undercover journalist to investigate the quality of supervision provided within an approved premises. Over the past three decades, public debates that often follow apparent failures to protect the public from individuals under probation supervision do not necessarily illuminate the complexities of public protection but, it is argued, the particular approach adopted by the Panorama programme was counter-productive to the wider public understanding of the work of the probation service. The approach, content and ideological positioning of Can Probation keep us safe? obscured rather than enlightened the debate about probation's role in rehabilitation and the assessment and management of risk in protecting the public.

Introduction: Can probation keep us safe?

I suspect that like those of us interested in the work of probation or employed within the probation service, I anticipated the showing of the BBC Panorama programme – Undercover: Can Probation keep us safe? (BBC, 2024a: 23^rd May) with a mixture of resignation and concern; resignation in that probation would surely attract heavy criticism based on examples of apparent failures to supervise individuals properly and concern that such failures would be highlighted without adequate explanatory discussion of the relevant agency, policy and political contexts. In both these senses, Can Probation keep us safe did not disappoint, but the programme cannot simply be dismissed as an unwarranted attack on probation and the efficacy of the rehabilitative endeavour because it did, through the undercover approach deployed, provide both concerning and embarrassing evidence of poor practice and administrative incompetence within an Approved Premises in Kent.

The Panorama programme ran for just under 1 hour and is centred on one approved premises in which the undercover reporter, Max Beeching, spends 6 weeks employed as a residential worker. The programme itself, however, begins with an interview with the relatives of a family where four members were murdered at the hands of Joshua Jacques. The programme commentary then frames the work of the probation service within the context of its responsibilities for supervising dangerous offenders leaving custody before returning to filmed evidence of poor practice within the approved premises. Beeching highlights a number of lax and poor practices including problems with drug and alcohol testing, curfew enforcements and technological failure in relation to tracking individuals. Interspersed with the film and its commentary by Beeching, there are a number of brief interviews with the former Director General of the National Offender Management Service Philip Wheatley who provides his opinion about the nature of the failings. In addition, other victims or family members of victims (not associated with the approved premises) are interviewed. There is also an interview with the wife of a probation manager who took his own life and one with a probation staff member still working with the Service.

Essentially then, the programme implied a clear failure to protect the public more widely from dangerous supervisees and in pursuit of this aim, the programme used specific cases not connected with the approved premises in question to reinforce that failure of duty and responsibility. The programme did, however, try to demonstrate the profound human costs for staff trying to work conscientiously in the most difficult of circumstances and in a slightly disjointed manner, also highlighted some examples of strategic policy, staffing and resource decision-making since 2014 that had undermined both the probation service's operational capacity and its professional strengths.

Despite these limited attempts to contextualise the undercover findings though, I was nevertheless left with major concerns that the flaws – in terms of both the programme's approach and content as well as ultimately, its implied ideological positioning – left viewers with a confused, disjointed and incoherent sense of the work of the probation service. The programme seemed to lazily accept a view of probation's role and its treatment of individuals that simply reflected the apparent wisdom of punishment and control without exploring the context and wider ideological and political notions of criminal justice, punishment and rehabilitation. In other words, whether by accident or design – it conveyed a subjective and ideological consensus that many would contest. By way of a simple example, this was demonstrated in stark fashion by the Panorama team's writeup for the programme in their choice of title – ‘Dangerous criminals run away from probation hostel’ (BBC, 2024c), inferring of course, that approved premises are some sort of custodial establishment in the community from which escape is something that the service could prevent! Indeed, little attempt was made to provide operational or policy context to the development of approved premises over the recent past (see Marston and Reeves, 2023: 152–157). There is finally another set of concerns about the very nature and implications of undercover investigations to which I will return to later in the context of the approach and content of the programme.

Can Probation keep us safe? was prefaced by an interview with two members of a South London family who had lost four of relatives – Denton Burke, Dolet Hill, Tanysha Ofori-Akuffo and Samanatha Drummonds – killed by a probation supervisee Joshua Jacques on the 25^th April 2022 and who was subsequently found guilty of their murders on the 21st December 2023. Programmes of this nature obviously take time to plan, undertake, produce and schedule but it is not made clear whether this tragic case was the critical incident that sparked Panorama to commission the making of the programme. Although not unusual to have news media coverage about the probation service in response to critical incidents or the publication of reviews of notorious criminal acts that highlight institutional and professional failure, Can Probation keep us safe appeared to arrive on our screens without any significant surrounding media or political debate. Even the programme itself made no connection between the fact that Joshua Jacques had spent a period of time in an approved premises (not the one featured in the programme) for 2 months from the 11^th November 2021 until the 11^th January 2022, just a matter of 10 weeks before he committed the four murders. It is also a tragic irony that the nearest public event to attract criticism of probation to the showing of Can Probation keep us safe was the publication itself of the HM Inspectorate of Probation's Independent serious further offence review of Joshua Jacques on the 7^th March 2024 (HMIP, 2024).

The moving sands of critical attention

The programme then did not seem to be broadcast in response to or as part of the usual maelstrom of opinion and argument when politicians and the news media engage in a frenzy of immediate denunciation when a case gone tragically provides the ideological and political turf for a debate on crime and punishment. This is interesting when compared, over the past 30 years or so, with how critical occurrences have prompted highly charged political and public debate for those engaged in front line politics, often aided and abetted by a news media, ready to publicly criticise the work of the probation service. It is therefore worth briefly reviewing probation's exposure over the recent past because it highlights both the politicisation of the Service's public role but also provides a contrast with the type of exposure that Undercover: Can Probation keep us safe? delivers and which I will argue has serious implications for the public understanding of risk and rehabilitation in working with those who commit serious offences.

As probation came out of the shadows of a criminal justice system historically dominated by the police, courts and prisons, through its increasingly defined role firstly as an agency delivering punishment and then public protection (see Robinson and McNeill, 2004), attention has increasingly if intermittently been focused on probation's apparent failings. This attention however, it can be argued, was preceded by the heavy lifting of an overt politicisation of crime and the criminal justice system in the 1990s which Bottoms then characterised as creating a public discourse of populist punitiveness (1995). In superficial terms, this was reflected in the then Home Secretary Michael Howard's statement that Prison Works in his 1993 speech to the Conservative Party conference and later complemented by Prime Minister John Major's utterance in the wake of the conviction of Robert Thompson and John Venables for the murder of James Bulger in 1993 that we should understand a little less and condemn a little more (see Collett, 1993). This was ideological in the widest sense of reflecting and endorsing a harsher neoliberal economic and social vision of the future where individuals have be held to account for their individual failures whilst the brightest and the best would deserve all the status and economic rewards that ensued through their hard work, determination and apparent natural talent.

Throughout the 1990s and into the New Labour period in government, crime and disorder became an increasing obsession and priority (see Blair, 1993; Burke and Collett, 2015: Chapter 3) for Labour administrations fixation with targets and outcomes – deployed as proxies for measuring the Service's efficacy in reducing reoffending and protecting the public. That attention became increasingly toxic and personal. In May 2006, an HM Inspectorate of Probation report (HMIP, 2006) was published into the circumstances surrounding the murder of Naomi Bryant by Anthony Rice – a discretionary lifer released after 16 years in prison. The then Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, was reported as describing the probation service as ‘the dagger at the heart of the criminal justice system undermining public confidence in criminal justice as a whole’ (Daily Telegraph, 21^st March 2006, cited in Allen and Hough, 2007: 566). Replacing Clarke in May 2006, John Reid the incoming Home Secretary, in a speech to staff and prisoners at Wormwood Scrubs prison in the November of that year stated that the probation service was letting people down and needed fundamental reform. He highlighted two recent high profile murders – Naomi Bryant who was murdered by a convicted rapist Anthony Rice and John Monckton who was stabbed to death by Damion Hanson and Elliot White – all of whom were subject to probation supervision (see Burke and Collett, 2015: 60–62). This type of approach clearly emboldened Jack Straw, the incoming first minister of the newly formed Ministry of Justice. In the aftermath of the murders in June 2008 of two French students, Laurent Bonomo and Gabriel Ferez by Dano Sonnex, a young man being supervised by London Probation Service, highly personalised, disgraceful and dishonest interventions by the Justice Secretary saw David Scott, the Chief of Greater London Probation Service lose his job, resigning in February 2009 (see Burke and Collett, 2015: 57–63; Collett, 2013; Fitzgibbon, 2011: 93–97). Gone was any attempt to balance and contextualise such tragic events whilst importantly and necessarily holding public services to account. These types of interventions, personal in the sense of highlighting and apportioning blame to an individual, were nevertheless underpinned by political and ideological intent as the design for a contestable probation service took shape. Probation had to wait until the incoming Coalition government of May 2010 for matters to be taken a stage further. Ken Clarke was the newly appointed Justice Secretary and in December 2010, he outlined his plans for a Rehabilitation Revolution in the form of the Green Paper, Breaking the Cycle (Ministry of Justice, 2010). In his response to the consultation process, Clarke made it clear that community orders were not to be seen as alternatives to short prison sentences but as the means to stopping offenders from reoffending: ‘Punishment is our first and most important response to crime but is not sufficient to prevent offenders from re-offending’ (Ministry of Justice, 2011: 6). The Justice Secretary was soon, however, embroiled in the aftermath of the 2011 riots and despite his supposed liberal inclinations insinuated in the above quote, Clarke talked of those involved in the riots in highly disparaging terms but also signalled a shift in the focus of blame from the rioters themselves to the failure of the rehabilitation services within the criminal justice system (Clarke, 2011).

Gone quiet for a while?

This hard-headed switch from concern about individual failure to apparent organisational ineptitude, was a significant driver in an ongoing series of probation reforms implemented from 2010. Notwithstanding the significant and complex relationships between the news media and the political process however, what is interesting in terms of attacks on its own institutions and staff, things seem to have become less frenzied since Clarke's Rehabilitation Revolution reached its denouement in 2017 under Justice Secretary Grayling's disastrous Transforming Rehabilitation Strategy. This was abandoned in the face of criticism from every part of the criminal justice system including the then Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Probation who was moved to comment in her annual report published in March 2019 that the probation model delivered by Transforming Rehabilitation was irredeemably flawed (HMIP, 2019: 3). The sheer organisational mess created by Transforming Rehabilitation and the focus and energy required to unify the probation service, made it in my estimation, politically difficult if not impossible to go to war on a probation system that had been brought to its knees by the successive conservative administrations. This, despite a continuing number of apparent failures to keep the public safe from individuals under probation supervision – perhaps the most disturbing being the multiple murders and rape committed by Damien Bendall in September 2021 for which he received a whole life tariff in December 2022. As with the case of Joshua Jaques, HM Inspectorate of Probation undertook an Independent serious further offence review of Bendall, highlighting not only a catalogue of mistakes in his supervision but the environment of staff shortages and necessary expertise available to supervise this man effectively (HMIP, 2023a). Interestingly, no mention or reference was made to Damien Bendall by the Panorama programme which itself appeared in a period of relative calm in terms of political gaze if not media attention.

Ironically, within weeks of Can Probation keep us safe? being aired, the political and public ire currently being articulated about the criminal justice system is focussed on prison overcrowding. The crisis inherited by an incoming Labour government has required emergency action to maintain a functioning prison estate at full establishment and the debate moves between those who want more prison places built and those who think those resources could be better spent on the development of public services including the enhanced delivery of direct rehabilitative work by the probation service to keep individuals out of prison (e.g. Spurr, 2024).

So what was panorama up to?

The relationship then between how individual politicians and the political process interact is complex with a powerful and an ever-present news media hungry for reflecting and perpetuating public responses to apparent failures. The journalist and academic Jon Silverman in his Crime, Policy and the Media (2012) reminds us that who is using whom and for what purpose is particularly complex; politicians like Blair, he argues, even saw criminal justice as a means to secure a wider political ascendancy well beyond instrumental concerns with law and order, whilst the news media's capacity and reach on its own is such that it can wield significant power in exploiting and promoting populist punitiveness (2012: Ch 2).

The purpose then of tracing the recent history of probation in terms of the public, political and media storms that erupt from time to time is to underline the complexity and consequences of this tripartite interaction. It also, I would argue, prompts a series of questions about why Panorama decided to investigate probation at this time and undertake that investigation in the way that it did in terms of both the programme's approach and content. It may also take us to wider concerns regarding how issues of rehabilitation, control and public protection may be presented for public debate in future.

Approach

We can rage all we want about the ethics of undercover reporting and there were certainly some questionable practices and editorial decisions involved in making the hour-long programme – naming hostel residents for example and filming those individuals without anonymising them, broadcasting a technical issue regarding a particular brand of mobile phone on which monitoring software did not work. Assertions were made about the behaviour of an individual resident tracking a known victim without providing any supportive evidence. Artistic licence was heavily employed with the phrase ‘Panorama can reveal’ being used to describe reading and quoting from freely available government statistics as if this was some form of scoop.

However, how many times have we applauded undercover investigations that show the appalling treatment of people with learning difficulties, elderly residents of care homes or the treatment of youngsters in penal and care settings as Panorama itself had recently done? (2024b). In the case of Undercover: Can Probation keep us safe? significant weaknesses in administrative processes, failure to enforce licence conditions particularly around drug and alcohol testing, some extremely poor practice (signing a resident back into the hostel at a knowingly incorrect time) and failing to coordinate the recall of a dangerous individual were discovered by the undercover journalist Max Beeching. These are all matters of public concern. Beeching did provide some context for the exceedingly difficult operating environment within which probation more generally was now struggling to deliver its protective and rehabilitative services in the light of a post Transforming Rehabilitation unified probation service. It also presented, in a vivid and heart-wrenching manner, the dire consequences of conscientious staff attempting to deliver services to the highest standards. The widow of James Bamford outlined how the demands and responsibilities of the job as a senior probation officer overwhelmed her husband who ultimately took his own life.

My main concern, though, is that the nature of undercover approaches inevitably leads to drama based exposures that presents the viewers with what apparently will be construed as poor practice or behaviour. Clearly in the case of teachers or care workers physically abusing youngsters in their care or as in the recent incident at Manchester airport where a police officer is videoed kicking a prone man in the face and then stamping on his head (BBC, 2024c), context may help to understand the incidents but never justify them. It may well be that in closed residential environments like care homes or children's facilities, undercover journalism brings to the fore, staff behaviour and practice that might remain hidden. The context within which violence towards vulnerable individuals takes place may well be extremely complex but such violence simply crosses the boundary of what is acceptable. On the face of it, some of the staff behaviour exposed within the approved premises seemed hard to justify but the context in which it took place required a much more detailed and nuanced analysis than the programme provided – is, for example, a decision not to breach a hostel resident for a breach of the rules necessarily a poor one or indeed one that puts the public at risk? Without a more nuanced approach, the drama of the approach delivers the decision as an open and shut case of poor practice. It also assumes that the poor practice necessarily led to catastrophic outcomes which may or may not be the case.

The Panorama approach then was thin on context and analysis and lazily relied on relaying its message through the impact of the drama. From personal experience, I can compare this with a Channel 4 news item in which I was directly involved in 2010. Although a news item on the evening news fronted by Jon Snow and lasting only six and a half minutes (Channel 4 News, 2010), the programme producers went to the trouble of asking every probation chief executive in England and Wales (with the support of the Probation Chiefs Association) to complete a detailed questionnaire regarding the capacity of probation areas to keep the public safe from serious offending. Andy Davies, the reporter, had assiduously planned the approach including being fully briefed about the resource issues, had researched evidence of problems about public protection including accessing contemporary government and parliamentary committee reports (referenced in the item itself) and importantly, skilfully linked the crisis in rehabilitation with that of public protection rather than compartmentalising and separating risk of harm to the public from the efficacy of rehabilitative work with individuals. In the contemporary context of multi-media outlets and endless competition, it may be too much to expect that the BBC invests resources in the kind of high-quality investigative journalism exemplified by the World in Action series which ran between 1963 and 1998. Employing well respected journalists, it used innovative approaches including undercover operations, provided a forensic analysis of its sources and was sustained by consistently high viewing audiences. The BBC approach provides drama but does it provide a more sustained and deeper public understanding of the subject at hand?

Content

Clearly insinuated within Panorama's overall approach was, from my perspective a corresponding and indeed inevitable lack of relevant content that would have provided context to the lives and difficulties of those who probation staff work with day in day out. Within the first few minutes of the programme, a member of the family who had lost four members at the hands of Joshua Jacques states ‘I blame probation for the death of my family 100%. If they had done their job properly my family would still be alive.’ I cannot and do not challenge that statement – it had heartfelt authenticity – but why did the programme immediately highlight (reveal in their words) that offenders on probation supervision have been charged with two killings and three rapes or sexual assaults every week? It then switched to the undercover operation within the approved premises without any discussion of the HMIP review of the Joshua Jacques case (HMIP, 2024). If it had done so, the complex context of an offender's background, the issue of the availability of mental health services and accommodation, the power of the courts to sentence individuals like Joshua Jaques and the role of community organisations including the formalised partnership arrangements under MAPPA (Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements) might have provided an informative platform for the programme to proceed. This simply did not happen.

Instead, focus was immediately switched to the approved premises without any recognition that Joshua Jaques had been a resident in one. What followed, notwithstanding the uncovering of poor practice, was a description of the difficulties within Fleming House that puts probation centre stage in the proceedings with the programme clearly misunderstanding what other organisation were involved and who was responsible for what – the Police Service and private sector organisations for example. The content was thin and even when the focus of attention moved away from the approved premises to other cases of supervision where serious mistakes had been made, it would have taken little trouble to review publicly accessible reports and documents that could have provided so much context and questions for public engagement. There was really no excuse for this given the documentation relating to public protection arrangements (CCJI, 2022), serious further offences (HMIP, 2023c), two further recent serious further offence reviews (HMIP, 2023a, 2023b) and a relatively recent review of the role of approved premises (HMIP, 2017) were all readily accessible. Napo was surely right in its immediate response to the programme, that if it had been approached before the programme was broadcast ‘we’d have been able to help them make a better informed programme’ (Napo, 2024). This is not to argue that the programme should have been built along the lines of an academic or professional seminar but in an hour-long showing the balance between context and drama was woefully imbalanced.

Napo were not involved with Panorama at any point and indeed, no-one with direct experience of working at senior leadership level within the probation service appeared on the programme; nor were criminal justice or criminology academics with expert knowledge of the operation of approved premises or the management of dangerous offenders – and of course, no expert practitioners or managers contributed (other than one person who commented anonymously). Instead, it consulted Philip Wheatley, a former prison officer who became Director General of HM Prison Service in 2003 and then in 2008, Director General of the National Offender Management Service (NOMS). Wheatley's comments were largely perfunctory. However, he was someone associated during his time as director General with the increasing exercise of power and control by the Prison Service over probation and the formalisation of probation's resultant subsidiary status under a heavily centralised National Offender Management Service. A senior leader from a probation background may well have influenced the narrative account of the programme and provided a different analysis of what was happening within the current probation environment.

Conclusion: Ideology as evidence

One thing that the programme forcibly brought home was that some of the most vulnerable members of our communities are prey to appalling victimisation at the hands of individuals that the probation service supervises. Lucy, a youngster made vulnerable by her learning difficulties eloquently attested to the past criminal behaviour and potential future victimisation by one of the residents of the approved premises. The father of another victim – Michaela – murdered by an individual under supervision with 47 previous convictions points to failure in the assessment and management of risk as a consequence of the part privatisation of the probation service in 2017. Programmes like Undercover: Can Probation keep us safe? are a necessary part of an overall process of professional scrutiny and public accountability in order to improve the safety of current victims, protect us all from future victimisation and, at the same time providing the opportunities of individuals to leave their offending pasts behind them.

However, as I indicated at the beginning, the programme left me with major concerns that the flaws –as well as its implied ideological positioning – could be more detrimental to public understanding of the complexity of probation's role in public protection than when politicians and the political process engage with the media demands for sensation and condemnation. An informed public audience is well able to understand that critical incidents are used to wage wider political and ideological battles. By contrast, it felt as if the Panorama programme used drama as an alternative to content and analysis but at the same time conveyed a sense of objectivity and reason that was above politics and ideologically neutral – a form of client journalism that delivers a message rather independently informs the debate (see Oborne, 2024).

Where, for example, did the programme attempt to hold politicians to account for the disastrous and costly part privatisation of the probation service under Transforming Rehabilitation? Some £680 million and counting was squandered on an initiative that almost everyone with a knowledge of probation predicted would be a disaster and the long tail of this debacle continues to wag in the form of a depleted and demoralised workforce operating within an absurd and controlling civil service structure. Poor management and practice cannot be justified or condoned in any circumstances but as the undercover journalist Max Beeching commented at the end – ‘If I was doing this just as part of my job, I don’t know I’d have coped with it’.

This failure to incisively hold the political process and key individuals within it to account is not the only significant failure of the programme. More far reaching and insidious is the underlying assumption that the way to protect the public is to control individuals who may represent a risk of serious harm. There was a real sense in which control is conveyed as the default position agreed by all and probation should be judged on the basis of how well this function is performed. Wheatley comments for example that increasing the number of controls over an individual if properly monitored and enforced would allow for timely action – ‘It would be easy to get him failing than wait for the end of the day’! Where does the rehabilitative endeavour feature in this pessimistic and dystopian view of those who offend as only amenable to control, oversight and sanction? The programme researcher could have accessed two excellent recent publications which specifically discuss the role of rehabilitation within approved premises including those who have committed sexual offences against children (Marston and Reeves, 2023; Roberts et al., 2024) Without the promise of rehabilitative work with individuals alongside control and oversight, we enter a nil sum game where individuals are continuously returned to prison until presumably they can be returned no more and are then free from any oversight or rehabilitative input. There will always be practical risks involved in attempting to rehabilitate and control those who pose a risk of serious harm to the public. However, the political risks are clear for probation – as McNeill observes:

…..when probation commits itself to the assessment and management of risks, it exposes itself not to the likelihood of failure, but to its inevitability. Not all risks are predictable and not all harms are preventable. Even being excellent at assessing and managing risks most of the time (assuming that this could be achieved) would not protect probation from occasional, spectacular failures and the political costs that they carry.

(McNeill, 2011: 10)

The persistent narrative throughout the programme was that probation should unquestionably deliver and rigorously enforce control based punishment and anything less is a failure. However, the issues of risk and dangerousness cannot be separated from the wider responsibilities of probation to assist and support individual rehabilitation but when resources are inadequate and professional skills depleted, control becomes the default approach – one that many of the individuals featured within the programme demonstrated was counter-productive and ultimately put the public at further risk.

Encouraging public scrutiny, engagement and debate about offender rehabilitation, punishment and public protection, however difficult, should be seen as part of the democratic process, not just at election time or when a high profile incident occurs. Additionally, as a service that aspires to profession status, its practitioners, managers and leaders have a duty to be open and accountable to the public for their professional conduct – but where and how should this happen? Probation constructed within a controlling and highly centralised bureaucracy is exactly the wrong place to locate a service that is locally delivered within an environment of complex partnership arrangements. It is at the local level where most crime occurs and most remedies can be developed and delivered and it is also where public understanding, accountability and engagement should happen alongside the responsibility of the Ministry of Justice at the national level. However, progressing understanding and accountability at the very least requires three things: firstly, probation leaders who are able to speak out without fear of censure and civil service control to promote the service's work; secondly the responsibility to speak professional truth to political power and thirdly a belief that the public can legitimately contribute to the debate requires that rehabilitative services be not only delivered locally but are locally accountable.

As the incoming Labour government is faced with crises in almost every part of the criminal justice system, the public debate about whether it is wise or prudent to imprison more people at the cost of investing in rehabilitative resources and community resources will take on a particular significance. Viewing control as the agreed means of protecting the public and holding probation to account for its efficient implementation as Undercover: Can Probation keep us safe? largely did will not illuminate the public debate and understanding so desperately needed and certainly will not increase the protection of the public from troubled and seriously troublesome individuals, some of whom featured in the programme.