Probation officers claim staffing crisis due to soaring number of offenders

PROBATION officers who have been key to bringing freed rapist Larry Murphy back under supervision said they face a staffing crisis due to the huge number of offenders being referred to them.

Union representatives say they are down 20% on frontline staff at a time when demand for their services is rising rapidly, but the Government won’t lift its recruitment ban. Probation officers are already working with 154 serious sex offenders who were released from jail with supervision orders.

They are also responsible for a further 142 who are in prison but have supervision orders attached to their sentence and will have to be monitored on release, and that number is growing each year. There are many others who, like Larry Murphy, were sentenced before supervision orders were introduced in 2001, and are engaging with the probation services on a voluntary basis because they realise they cannot cope on their own.

David Williamson, spokesman for the IMPACT trade union, said: “He is not the first sex offender to be released who wasn’t subject to the 2001 act but who has accepted voluntary support and supervision.

“When you put all those who are subject to statutory supervision together with those who are not subject to supervision but who we are trying to assist, I don’t think we have seen the peak in numbers by any stretch of the imagination.”

Mr Williamson said staff had welcomed the supervision programmes and readily trained for them, but they were time-intensive and labour-intensive and officers doubted their capacity to carry out their full range of duties. “Larry Murphy’s engagement with the Probation Service on a voluntary basis is welcomed, as it can provide an opportunity for enhancing public safety and addressing the risk he poses.

“But it has to be recognised that in order to do that, along with all the work that we’re supposed to be doing on a statutory basis, at a time when the minister has blocked any recruitment for frontline staff, is making things very difficult.”

As well as the growing use of post-release supervision orders for sex offenders, a 2006 law introduced supervision orders for other types of convicted criminals who get suspended or partly suspended sentences.

There were 141 such offenders in 2008 but that leapt to 528 last year. In addition, the service works with a huge range of less serious offenders both before and after sentence. In total, 8,273 offenders were referred to the service by the courts last year and IMPACT said there were only about 260 probation officers to deal with them.

The Department of Justice said the Probation Service received additional staff in the years before the recruitment cap.

IMPACT says there was disproportionate emphasis on administrative staff rather than probation officers.