Supervising Offenders in the Community by Maurice Vanstone

Author:Maurice Vanstone [Vanstone, Maurice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Penology, Social Work
ISBN: 9781351896931
Google: ZmdQDwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-09-29T00:00:00+00:00

Some Memoirs and the Handbook of Probation

Commentators like Mary Ellison (1934) who worked for six years as a probation officer, avow that the technical nature of reformatory effort was in the minds of those who framed the 1907 Act: ‘[t]his curative form of supervision is best understood by those who are properly trained and experienced in such methods’ (xii). She writes about environmental difficulties, motivation and the ‘equipoise’ required between the needs of the community and the offender. She places emphasis on the effects of poverty and unemployment on people’s behaviour but she also reveals her leanings towards more individualistic explanations for people’s offending. Middle-aged shoplifters ‘are no ordinary offenders! The root cause of this delinquency is physical. Such women need medical care and skilled supervision’ (96); and on theft, ‘[psychologists say that theft is often a love substitute. This was obviously demonstrated by two girls in different walks of life, whom I knew well’ (97). She is less liberal though in her attitudes to some women subject to domestic violence:

[t]hey are neither mentally nor morally deficient within the meaning of the Act, yet they have no backbone nor sense of responsibility. They produce endless children in whom they take no interest, who are brought up at the ratepayers’ expense. Their jolly, care-free ways and splendid physique attract them to men of much the same calibre, who keep them for a time while the fancy lasts […] These are girls for cave-man methods; the hiding and the black-eye answer where reasoning would be futile (65).

Furthermore, she believes in hereditary, biological and environmental causes of crime. Therefore, ‘gangsters are both born and made’; the growth in gangs is due to increasing unemployment; in large cities young offenders are drawn from ‘boys and girls of more than average intelligence’ and ‘feeble excitable adolescents of low grade mentality’ (78); and ‘delinquency is often due to a deficiency of sugar in the diet’ (99). She admits that her beliefs can be confounded sometimes; for example, the fact that parents of low intelligence can produce intelligent attractive children surprises her. While she argues for adequate training, at the same time she believes in the supernatural, recounting an instance of a colleague feeling intuitively that she was needed at a prison, turning up, and finding that the woman she asked for ‘was longing to see her’ (145).

Ellison conveys not only a combination of professional and lay perspectives but also a blend of sympathetic interest with gendered, class-laden antipathy. In her discussion of alcoholic women, she bows to the authority of Dr. Hall Morton, the Governor of Holloway prison who had stressed in an article in the Howard Journal that institutional treatment using probation and conditions of residence was essential for those in the advanced stages of the disease, and urges psychological help for such women. However, she has little regard for what she describes as ‘border-line mental cases’ who drink: ‘[t]hey are disagreeable, slovenly, immoral, unpleasant people and of such poor material that there is little to appeal in them’ (179).

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