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Post articles, reports, documents, links that you think others might find useful.  Add your own brief comment too.....

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A Thematic Inspection by Her Majesty Inspectorate of Probation.

How involved should the voluntary and community sector be in probation work?

Transforming Rehabilitation sought to increase the involvement of the voluntary and community sector. The first line of the foreword of the report sets the tone for the findings - "It seems
that the third sector is less involved than ever in probation services".

The HMI inspectorate reports offer some helpful insight into probation work. You can keep up-to-date by signing up for alerts on the HMI Probation website.

Andrew

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Well know report on learning difficulties - again from tye PRT.

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Well know report on learning difficulties - again from tye PRT.

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Anne

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You can watch film and documentaries through SHU Player. Use library gateway to search for an item you would like to watch.

Out of Jail and on the Streets was filmed in 2013 and documents probation officers working in the National Probation Service. It is available through the library gateway and SHU player. Although the landscape in practice is different many of the practice issues represented are relevant. Particularly around how you cope with probation work and look after yourself.

Andrew

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Literally just published and know I could have done with it when I was in practice - a report on people with learning difficulties and autism who sexually offend.

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Literally just published and know I could have done with it when I was in practice - a report on people with learning difficulties and autism who sexually offend.

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Jacky

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Here is a link to Cheshire Greater Manchester CRC website and an article about the experiences of women's centre users.  This is a dwindling resource, despite demonstrating positive outcomes.

Linking this to the Corston Report as well as the more recent reviews/literature published as the report reached it's ten year anniversary should prove useful.

Laura

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Women have praised a centre they say has given them a life-line.

The Together Women's Project is for people sentenced to probation or on licence from prison. Crucially, it can also be attended by people at risk of offending or who are vulnerable.

Across Cheshire & Greater Manchester 81 per cent of female service users successfully complete their orders and licences, which is six per cent above national targets.

These positive results are being driven by 10 successful women's centres across Greater Manchester. Each is supported by the Cheshire & Greater Manchester Community Rehabilitation Company (CGM CRC), Greater Manchester Women's Alliance, the local authority, and a range of partner agencies.

The Together Women's Project (TWP) aims to support 134 women over a 12-month period, and is well on track to accede this target. Women can access a wide range of help five-days-a-week; from anger management through to debt advice, support overcoming domestic abuse, drug misuse, unemployment and cookery - to name but a few.

Four women (pictured with staff above) spoke candidly about why they believe TWP plays a crucial role in their lives.

Amanda Fletcher is in recovery from alcohol addiction and is one of many attendees who has successfully completed a community order, but still visits for support.

She said: "Quite simply if not for this place, I think I'd have committed suicide.

"I've been coming here now for two years. I have a long-standing illness and suffer from anxiety, but my problems stem from drink. I've had bad periods where I've drunk from the first moment I opened my eyes until passing out.

"The TWP, the people I meet here, my friends - this is my support network. They all give me a reason to get out of the house, to stay abstinent, and keep motivated."

Amanda has had long periods of abstinence for the last four years, and is three months sober.

Teresa Campbell served a 13-month custodial sentence for theft from an employer and is supervised on licence by CGM CRC's probation case manager Louise Dawson.

She said: "I really didn't want to go in when I first visited Salford probation office, it wasn't welcoming for women and I felt it looked like a prison. I was embarrassed and felt ashamed.

"My probation officer - who is brilliant - referred me to TWP and sees me here. I started talking to the other women, and realised the problems I was experiencing are felt by others.

"I'm glad I ended up coming here and wouldn't change things for the world because I've found this place has become so important to me. I come here when I'm fed up and it never fails to make me happy."

Amanda, who was referred to TWP by her housing officer, added: "When women go to prison they lose everything, and that makes it tougher for them when they come out. For many of us, if we'd have known the centre existed before we got into trouble, we wouldn't have committed any crime in the first place.

"That's why I feel so lucky I was told about this place before I went on another downward spiral. I was that close to coming unstuck and ending up in prison, or worse."

TWP is staffed by key workers and two probation case managers from CGM CRC. Louise Dawson has a caseload of 45 women and has worked at the project for seven years.

She said: "I enjoy coming here to work, it's a more relaxed atmosphere and working with partner agencies like the TWP is beneficial because service users can access support from key workers every day of the week if they need to.

"When women service users feel relaxed and in a supportive environment, they are far more likely to attend and comply with their orders than if they were required to attend a normal probation office where most of the attendees are male, and where a good percentage of them will have committed domestic abuse.

"When women attend regularly they access the support and wrap around services that we provide, and that in turn can help them make the positive changes they need to implement in order to successfully rehabilitate.

"I don't have many women at all who don't comply."

Louise added: "In addition, just because someone has successfully completed doesn't mean they cannot come here anymore. The drop-in centre can be used by people when they need it. That is so important."

Amanda added: "I needed to find my backbone, to get my moral compass, and this centre has helped me to do that, and to identify which relationships in my life are destructive, and which ones are positive. I cannot repay the debt I owe this place and these people."

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Together Women's Project a life-line - Cheshire & Greater Manchester

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Women have praised a centre they say has given them a life-line. The Together Women's Project is for people sentenced to probation or on licence from prison. Crucially, it can also be attended by people at risk of offending or who are vulnerable.

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For a slightly different angle, this is an easy read about unconscious bias from The Conversation. The article focuses on gender but the theory relates to all aspects of diversity (a little more on this in Understanding and Addressing!).
Jacky

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Tanya Shatseva

The words of my doctor from earlier that morning were still ringing in my ears when I found myself slamming the brakes of my car to avoid a nasty collision. An incompetent driver was cutting across two lanes at a roundabout just in front of me. Still perspiring somewhat I carried on to drop off my screaming child with the nanny. It was a hectic morning.

Now let's stop to take a breath and ponder on this story. Was the doctor you imagined male? Was the bad driver female? And what of the nanny and the narrator? Females too? If so, you have just experienced unconscious gender bias. You are not alone. Even the almighty Google image search "thinks" 75% of doctors are male but in reality women make up just over half of GPs in the UK. In fact Google has been accused of unconscious bias in its own operations as over 79% of its managers and engineers are male. Apple, Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo are not far behind.

What exactly is unconscious gender bias and why do we have it? Unconscious, or implicit, bias happens outside of our control and awareness. It's automatic and reflects the associations we acquire as we socialise into the culture we grow up in. You can test your own implicit biases more scientifically by taking this Implicit Association Test. The test was designed to capture the brain's learnt automatic associations. Since it is based on time reactions it can bypass our social desirability concerns and tap into unconscious biases. As such it is reportedly superior to self-report measures of prejudice in predicting behaviours.

Implicit bias is a result of our mind developing mental shortcuts to navigate the complexities of reality efficiently. It is often evolutionarily adaptive. For example, we automatically favour flowers over insects, which protects us from being stung by something that might harm us - a spider for example. This is both a normal preference for most people but has also been seen in implicit association tests. However, implicit association studies also show that we favour the young over the old, the white over the black and heterosexuals over homosexuals. But what about unconscious gender biases?

Wonderful people

Women are wonderful, or are they? You may be surprised to learn that research reports that we consistently prefer women over men and mothers over fathers implicitly. This is akin to the WAW ("women-are-wonderful") effect - women being perceived positively on the whole as they are stereotyped as supportive, nice and gentile.

This effect, however, disappears, and even reverses, the moment women step in to the "male domain" or otherwise challenge stereotypical expectations. For example, people implicitly ( and explicitly) prefer male to female authority figures, male to female leaders and non-feminist women to feminists. My own research shows that female students implicitly prefer housewives over businesswomen. The implicit pro-female preference also reverses in men when they expect to interact with a superior woman as opposed to an equal or subordinate one.

We only need to look to the recent American presidential election to see some real life examples of this effect. Donald Trump himself claimed that "nobody respects women more than I do" just three months before a record of his boastful groping account was revealed.

OPOLJA

So what about implicit bias towards men? Are they wonderful too? Again, it depends. Women implicitly prefer an egalitarian to a sexist or "typical" man, while men prefer that same egalitarian male less. Male public and private sector workers in my samples show slight implicit preference for a househusband over a businessman male type - perhaps due to the homely men's greater likeability. Still, when compared to women, traditional males - such as those in authority or leadership roles - are preferred.

What can we do about it?

Why does this matter and what can we do about it? Unconscious bias is particularly problematic in the world of work and education. Even in a supposedly objective academic setting male applicants for lab manager position in one experiment were hired more often and offered more money when their name was John as opposed to Jennifer - despite identical CVs. When professional women become mothers they suddenly are perceived as less competent - a trade-off which does not affect men when they become fathers.

Unconscious bias limits, among others, people's occupational prospects. The first step to deal with this is an awareness of the problem. The nature of our cognition and thinking processes means that all of us are vulnerable to various unconscious biases and all of us may be subjected to them. For example, one study showed that men under-performed on social sensitivity tests (for example decoding nonverbal cues) when they were told that the test assessed social sensitivity and produced better scores for women than men. Men who were told that the test assessed information processing did not under-perform.

Being aware of our own unconscious bias can help. However, prevention requires motivation. Therefore, anonymised recruitment processes, mentorship, carefully managed collaborative work environment and training can also help.

However, since unconscious bias has its roots in the social world we live - where we learn associations from the gender roles we see around us - the surest way to diminish it is to provide alternative associations.

This could be achieved by encouraging equal participation of men and women across traditionally gendered social roles. Once all doctors, drivers, nannies and world leaders are split fairly between male and female - and we see this represented across the media and elsewhere - over time we can move towards equal implicit associations. In the meantime we need to at least make the unconscious conscious so that it is less likely to play a trick on us.

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Think you're all for gender equality? Your unconscious may have other ideas

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The words of my doctor from earlier that morning were still ringing in my ears when I found myself slamming the brakes of my car to avoid a nasty collision. An incompetent driver was cutting across two lanes at a roundabout just in front of me.

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Here's the link to thw Women in Prison website#

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Here's the link to thw Women in Prison website#

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Women in Prison - National charity providing specialist support services for women

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Women in Prision - national charity providing specialist support services for women by women

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Counted Out - a hard-hitting report about BAME women in the CJS

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Counted Out - a hard-hitting report about BAME women in the CJS

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b

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Gypsies and travellers don't often get a mention, but here's an interesting report highlighting their needs.

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Gypsies and travellers don't often get a mention, but here's an interesting report highlighting their needs.

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Women and housing - from the Prison Reform Trust

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Women and housing - from the Prison Reform Trust

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Prison Reform Trust > Press & Policy > News

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Here is a copy of the prison & probation Ombudsman Learning Lessons with Transgender Prisons from 2017, more to follow

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Here is a copy of the prison & probation Ombudsman Learning Lessons with Transgender Prisons from 2017, more to follow

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Kelly

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Here's a copy of the Young Review - well worth dipping into.

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Here's a copy of the Young Review - well worth dipping into.

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Anne