Probation and Re-education
- Author:
Elizabeth R.
Glover, M.A., late Deputy Principal Probation Officer for London. Routledge & Kegan Paul. 12s. 6d.
” Probation Officersa learned Magistrate told the 1936 Committee on Social Services in Summary Courts, ” suffer from too much illconsidered praise and too little well-considered criticism.” Since then, a dozen books by magistrates and lawyers have lauded the probation officers … and left us ignorant of what they do and how they do it. Miss Glover’s book tells us what and how. The style of the book, with its interest directed always to the probationer rather than to the author, is itself an object lesson in social work.
Chapter I should be read by Juvenile Court magistrates and clerks. The next six chapters constitute a manual of practice for probation officers, and the rest of the book discusses the probationer’s personal relationships.
Miss Glover’s approach is summed up by her welcome to psychiatry in the Courts, which leads us ” from the purely legal and moral approach to the scientific and curative one. It has taught us that all conduct, good or bad, has a reason; and one must find the reason before one can hope to correct it”. Yet she retains the moralistic pre-occupations of the ardent social worker and has no use for treatment which deters from further offence without altering character. One can accept the aspirations implied in the chapter on Probation as Treatment while admitting what Miss Glover does no’t admit: that most probationers resolve to keep in future within the law, not because of fundamental emotional changes or altered moral standards, but because they have been brought to intellectual acceptance of the common belief that petty crime does not pay. Society pays heavily for the locksmith, the ticket collector, the policeman and the hanging judge; who keep theft, swindling and violence within tolerable bounds. Probation officers need not deny that they are part of this machinery of prevention and deterrence.
The author’s ideal probation officer is intensely thoughtful as well as active, and uses no rule-ofthumb, routine approaches to situations which are superficially alike. The standards she sets imply case loads of forty to fifty (with no extraneous duties)?the case loads advocated in Appendix I. Even then, it is shown that in twelve months’ probation the time actually spent with the officer is about ten hours. It is in her emphasis on personal relationships and contacts, as opposed to the mere mechanics of escorting, advising and job-finding, that Miss Glover’s practical exposition differs from the external observations of other writers. ” The officer’s sharing each disappointment may be of more value than actual success ” (p. 120). Some magistrates expect that a process of ” settling down ” will follow their brief and barely understood admonition. The probation officer knows that people, unlike fermenting liquors, do not attain maturity through stagnation.
It is a sign of the times that the references to local authority functions in juvenile courts, and to their welfare services, are already out of date. Miss Glover pays tribute to an interesting list of fifty books, some unexpected. K.H.B.
Disclaimer
The historical material in this project falls into one of three categories for clearances and permissions:
Material currently under copyright, made available with a Creative Commons license chosen by the publisher.
Material that is in the public domain
Material identified by the Welcome Trust as an Orphan Work, made available with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
While we are in the process of adding metadata to the articles, please check the article at its original source for specific copyrights.