Anton Shelupanov of the Centre for Justice Innovation talks to London Probation Trust Chief Executive Heather Munro about the challenges of motivating her staff to take risks and try new things, her commitment to greater offender engagement in the design of services, and her ideas for improving the criminal justice system more generally.
How are you feeling about your first year on the job?
We’ve achieved a lot. One new thing is offender awards for those who comply with their orders and turn their lives around. Offenders can also nominate staff to receive awards. We received over 100 such nominations. The member of staff who won was put forward for the UK-wide Probation Life Achievement Award. To some, the awards may seem like a small thing, but small things are important.
Improving the relationship between probation staff and offenders seems like a priority for you. What steps have you taken in this area?
We’ve tried to push for greater offender engagement, and to move towards seeing offenders as the consumers of our services. We’ve been working with the charity organization User Voice to this end. We’ve had representatives of offenders meeting with the senior management team on certain issues, making concrete action plans to address them. A user council for offenders has been established, with offenders themselves electing their representatives onto it.
We’ve also started to change the culture of staff, to try to move more towards doing quality work and away from tick-boxing. We are changing the conditions staff members work in and offenders visit and already we are getting amazing feedback.
Can you give me an example?
When I first took over, I was shocked at the state of the interview rooms where staff met with offenders. They were not conducive to a positive atmosphere. I asked staff what they wanted to do and they took the lead to re-design and pilot them. We knew it was working when an offender was surprised at being invited into a re-designed interview room – he said that he thought it was kept only for special people. The problem with the old-style rooms was that even if an offender felt positive before arrival, they would feel gloomy when they entered. Now in some waiting rooms there are books, Sudoku puzzles, water – all of which are really popular.
During the recent riots, our building in Tottenham was attacked and suffered some damage. But we were pleased that the nice features we’d introduced (wall hangings, plants) were left untouched.
How did you get staff to buy into the interview room redesign?
It’s important that staff members own a project from the moment it’s introduced and are involved early in its development. After we set out to change the rooms, the project was evaluated and changed mid-course – things had to be done more gradually to ensure staff had ownership of this.
What is one no-cost change you would make in criminal justice?
If I could make one no-cost change, the National Offender Management Service (NOMS) would no longer be the commissioner of services. The London Probation Trust would be the sole
commissioner. In my opinion, it makes little sense to have a national commissioner for local services. We want to be able to commission more work that’s locally appropriate – restorative justice interventions, work around guns and gangs, prevention work with non-statutory offenders (those who come out of prison having served less than 12 months). If NOMS allowed us to do that, practitioners would be up for that.
If we had a significant extra investment, I would put it into frontline services. The national contract for information technology could be scrapped, and we could record information via laptops.
What challenges do you face in trying to encourage innovation?
The challenge is that the system doesn’t encourage innovation from the bottom up. Often projects which are deemed innovative are forced on localities from the centre by NOMS in a top-down fashion. The truth is that staff do innovative things and there are ways to support that.
To date there has not been a strong enough voice from practitioners influencing policy and that needs to change. We need to be more upfront about and proud of the good things that are going on, of which there are many.