Textul care urmează a fost scris, în urmă cu ceva timp, cu gîndul publicării într-o revistă europeană de probațiune. De aici limba engleză. Dar pentru că nu s-a putut, am decis să îl public aici. Mai bine decît nicăieri.

I was a probation counselor for nine years. My job as a probation counselor was my first proper job after college and with time probation became my home. I did run away from home once, but I came back. In 2012, after my first five years in probation, I gave in to the call to adventure and took a job in Alaska, where I worked as in the field of developmental and intellectual disabilities. At some point I started hearing another voice calling me back home. And by home I really mean home, not probation but my friends, family, the complex system made of people, language, a certain way of being, and in general the virtually infinite sea of things that make up what we generally call a country or a culture. I listened to this voice as well and returned home precisely at the right moment: in 2017 there was a large recruitment just starting in the Romanian probation system so I decided to return to my professional home as well. Working one’s way through the admission process is a long and challenging road, but I was determined to get my probation counselor job back, and I did.

I remember my second first day in probation quite vividly: August the 1st, 2017, ten years after I first begun working in probation. We were a large group of fifteen new employees sticking together, a group large enough to shield its members from the natural anxiety of a first day on the job. But I needed no shielding because I was returning home and I very much enjoyed the feeling of being both new and old at the same time. Yes, there were new people I didn’t know and yes the probation service was now in a new building, but I knew most of the people and a building is just a building. My enjoyment was short lived, however, because soon I discovered that a different kind of change had occurred while I was gone, a change that was both more momentous and harder to pinpoint than any change of personnel or building.

From where I am standing now it is easier to find words for what I experienced then as an overwhelming but hard to define impression. If I were to call it a shift towards authoritarianism, I might be saying too much, but I can find no better way to put it. What do I mean by a shift towards authoritarianism in probation? Firstly, I am referring to a certain shift occurring in day to day probation practice, not in theoretical approaches to probation. There is a vast corpus of literature dealing with what works and what doesn’t work in probation where one can witness numerous and sometimes dramatic shifts between support and control, the two pillars of probation. But the life of probation, by which I mean the actual day to day activity of probation in a specific place and time, not the academic disputes, has its own course which is sensitive to a set of factors quite indifferent to the purely academic arguments about what works and doesn’t work. I believe there are many things to be said about the effects of power on a probation counselor, but that is a discussion for another time. Here I will only say that recourse to authority as a means of exercising power over the client is tempting among other things because it is the easy way to do one’s job as a probation counselor. And this sliding towards power was the source of I perceived to be a very chilling wind that hot August day in 2017.

All institutions function in way that more often than not has very little to do with their philosophical or ideological foundations or official raison d’etre. We need not look further than the church or the university in order to realize that it is in the nature of bureaucratic institutions to easily lose sight of the reason of their very existence. We all know that saving souls is not the absolute priority of the church. And the same goes for the university, where education is not the primary concern. What matters above all is that the bureaucratic machine works and no one really wants to ask whether students coming out of the university have undergone a process that can be, in good faith, called education.

Inasmuch as probation is a beaurocratic system, and it certainly is, we should not be surprised to observe a similar phenomenon. It is much more difficult to ask what social reintegration actually means and how can we measure it, than making sure offenders strictly observe the conditions of their court order, that they never miss an appointment, that they behave properly while on the office premises and always speak respectfully with their probation counselor, that they complete their community work and reintegration programs and so on. A court order is, in a sense, holy, so it needs to be obeyed to the letter. Sure, but we are still left with the crucial issue of how to do that. Because when dealing with people the how is just as important as the what. The spirit in which probation is undertaken will have a decisive impact on the outcome.

It is a basic fact of human nature that it responds well when it is addressed in a positive manner, with respect and trust and kindness. Yes, in probation we frequently encounter challenging clients, but inasmuch as they are human, and they certainly are, they also respond well to respect and trust and kindness. Probation theory acknowledges this fact about human nature and integrates it in its main theoretical frameworks. A simple look at motivational interviewing, one of the core models in probation work, will prove that. Isn’t motivational interviewing a wonderful example of how to use totally non-violent interventions in order to re-shape what is problematic, in order to obtain compliance with the court order? It certainly is, but the question is not whether motivational interviewing is a sound model of intervention, but rather, does the echo of motivational interviewing can still be heard in the crowded, agitated, stressful probation offices? How many in their day to day activity remember that compliance – by which I mean genuine compliance, actual desire to change and to improve oneself and one’s life – cannot be imposed from the outside by raising your voice or issuing a written warning, but rather by finding another way, which is not always easy, on the contrary, it is always the harder and longer way, because it requires patience and understanding and calm and yes, kindness?

When I first started as a probation counselor, probation in Romania was young and small and animated by high ideals and those ideals were vivid and present so much so that one could feel them in the air. Or at least this is how I remember it. Maybe my memories are not entirely accurate, memories never are, and maybe I do remember a romanticized version of the past. But even so, there is an undeniable difference between now and then.

Of course, what has been irremediably lost has most of all to do with the magic of small groups, the feeling of unity, of working together almost like a family. Yes, we even had “parents” in the guise of probation experts from countries with a long and rich tradition like The Netherlands and UK, who were there to teach us the right values, methods, to show us the path. Yes the salary was a joke but who cared about money when one was infused with a deep sense of meaning and bright hopes for the future. Fast forward a decade or so and things are very different. The population in probation has greatly surpassed the one in the prison system and the body of probation was forced to grow and adapt. But this was a rapid and forced growth, marked by various internal or political crises, a growth that, understandably, didn’t always result in the best shape the body of probation could have taken. Exceedingly large workloads, problems with office space (and we cannot understate the importance of proper and sufficient physical space for the activity of probation, since an overcrowded office, besides affecting the quality of the probation act, tends to bring out the worst in people, both personally and professionally), frustration regarding salaries and other rights, big teams that are hard to manage and where conditions for conflict abound, these are just some of the most significant factors that may help explain the new atmosphere in probation, an atmosphere where taking the easy way, that is, the way of power, in relation to clients, tends to become an increasingly popular approach. This is the picture that produced the strange gust of cold wind I was struck by on that second first day on the job.

I didn’t think I could adapt to this new landscape, to this new breeze in which the scent of the old ideals was barely perceptible, if not completely gone. But of course, no one could stop ME from trying to be a nice person, which is, I think, the key to being a good probation counselor as well. In any profession personal qualities can make a difference, but this is the case in probation more than in other fields of work, to the extent that even in the scientific literature there seems to have occurred a shift of focus from what works in probation to who works in probation. But how do you select the right persons for the job? You don’t. I don’t think that is possible. What is possible, I believe, is preserving a living connection with the fundamental mythos of probation, which is a story of redemption, and redemption, let us remember this fundamental fact, is never effected by force, but only willingly, only by winning the one you want to save, making them want to save themselves, because no one can save anyone against their will. So what matters most in probation is getting to the will of the offender in order to have it on your side. That is the only way any real change will occur. Which is to say, the only way probation gets to fulfill its purpose. Trouble is, many professionals today have lost connection with that founding myth. They think probation is first and foremost just an instrument whose main purpose is making sure the offender complies with the court order and follow it to the letter. But this is where they forget to ask an essential question: what is the purpose of the court order? Is it to punish? If so, a certain approach to it follows. If its purpose is not to punish but to promote rehabilitation, change, then a different approach follows. Those who see themselves primarily as punitive agents, will find it very hard to take the hard way in dealing with their clients. They will resort to authority, to issuing warnings, to calling the guards to “calm down” their client, forgetting that they are much more qualified to calm down an offender than a guard. They will show very little tolerance to a client who doesn’t behave properly, who uses the wrong words, indeed they will bring their own attitude into the game and build up a conflict which they will later use to justify that their client deserves to be punished, maybe even sent to jail. They will treat their client as a criminal and will remind them frequently, with their words and tone of voice and gestures that they are precisely that. They will insist on the offender completing their community work as soon as possible with little regard for their life situation, ignoring their pleas to wait a couple of months because they have a new job and they can’t afford to take the time off, or a new baby that turned their life upside down. But no, for this kind of probation counselor, an offender has a simple life in which no complication should impede the proper complying with the conditions of the court order. So they will insist that the offender comes on a Monday at 10.00 am sharp for their monthly appointment, even though the offender pleads, pointlessly, for mercy and understanding objecting that they cannot take the time off Monday morning, that it would be better for them if they came in the afternoon, when work is lighter and their boss will be more willing to let them go. No, you will be right here at 10.00 am sharp because this is what your calendar, which I made, says. And if you don’t comply with the calendar, well, you will suffer the consequences.

Should the offender commit the imprudence of talking about their drug problem, this same probation counselor will go to his or her supervisor to ask if maybe this drug user should be reported to the police. To me, such a confusion of roles is simply mind blowing. If anyone would have told me that there are probation counselors who entertain such dilemmas, I would have replied, get out of here, that’s not possible! But not so long ago I was forced to acknowledge that it is indeed possible. So let’s talk about this for a little bit and in order to address this issue let us go back to the basics. My job as a probation counselor is to be aware of the offender’s criminogenic needs so as to be able to, at the very least, motivate him or her to work on solving them, if not actually help them in a practical manner to solve it. It is the job of police to enforce the law and arrest those who have committed a crime, but some probation counselors, prompted by a serious confusion, seem to believe that it is theirs as well. In order to clarify that confusion, let’s just think about what it means to be a policeman for a second. When a policeman deals with a potential drug user, he will not start asking questions about family, education, history of mental illness or substance abuse. He does not care about that at all. All he cares about is whether the person he is talking to possess any illegal substances at that very moment. If he doesn’t, there is no crime being committed and if there is no crime being committed then he has no job to do. A probation counselor, on the other hand, has the duty to explore a territory far wider than the here and now with the purpose not of finding crimes but identifying conditions that lead to crime. So it’s ironic that while a policeman couldn’t care less if someone consumed illegal drugs yesterday, some probation counselors will wonder if they should report their client when he or she, during the initial assessment, admits to using illegal drugs. How can you, a probation counselor, expect your client to speak openly of their problems if the message you’re conveying is not that you are there to at the very least help them achieve clarity in regard to their particular struggle and motivation to keep moving on and moving up, but rather that you are there to help them get arrested? It is ironic and it is sad and even if the probation counselors entertaining such dilemmas were only an insignificant fraction of the mass of probation counselors out there, it would still be worthwhile thinking about it.

If this comes across as a little bit too passionate, it is because indeed my main drive here is passion. And given the tumultuous nature of passion, it can make all sorts of mistakes, and maybe I have made some mistakes here as well. But at the end of the day I am hopeful this passion is doing more good than bad. It may exaggerate the idyllic beauty of the beginning as well as the the faults of the present, but the fact that currently there is a significant gap between the fundamental meta-story of probation and the actual probation in its hectic day to day life, is a fact. And while all this is based on what I witnessed during the last fifteen years or so in Romania, I am rather certain no country and no probation system is spared from having to deal with similar challenges. Which means we, as individual professionals in probation, are faced with a choice. To be passive and observe how things fall apart while complaining about bad management, poor working conditions and so on. Or to do something about it. And what an individual can do best is do his job to the best of his abilities and in accordance with the best things he or she believes in. We can only change what we can get our hands on, and even though that may seem small and insignificant, it’s all we got. And if we act in good faith there is reason to hope that the things we touch will reverberate and bring new life to… the system. Let us remember the crucial fact that the system is made of people and that we are the people.