Welcome to Probation Perspectives insights into
Community Justice, the podcast where we dive into the world of
probation, rehabilitation and community justice.
Each episode we explore the themes, challenges and skills
that underpin effective probation practise.
Whether you're just starting out on the P quip, have years of
experience in the field, or are simply curious about the
criminal justice system, this podcast is your space for
practical insight, expert perspectives, and meaningful
conversations. In today's episode, we're joined
by Andy Briley, Senior Lecturer and editor of The Good Prison
Officer, a book that challenges us to rethink what effective and
ethical prison practise looks like in today's justice system.
Having an impact on how someone feels about you is how to
develop trust in relationships. Not how clever you are or how
robotic you are in doing the risk assessment processes, but
how you make them feel whilst you're doing all of that stuff I
think is the trick. We speak with Andy about the
importance of developing trust and legitimacy, both for prison
and probation officers, and the value of reflective practise.
In just changing that word from engaging to connecting, it just
means that you recognise that you also play a role in how you
knocked on the door, your facial expressions, your tone of voice.
It's a powerful conversation that brings together insight
from lived experience and frontline practise, highlighting
what it means to be a good practitioner in often complex
and challenging environments. Let's get into our conversation
with Andy. So we're really excited today to
have Andy Brierley with us. Welcome, Andy.
So just to begin, it'd be really great if you could tell us a bit
about your background and what led you to your current role in
academia. OK.
So first of all, obviously, thanks for having me come on and
speak on your podcast. It's a privilege.
So I'm going to jump around a little bit because I suppose
it'll make sense as as we go through.
But I actually started working in youth justice in Leeds in
2007 and they were called yachts back then.
So they were called Youth Offending Team, I forget that
sometimes and call them Youth Justice Services during my time
in and around youth justice. So we say to from 2007 to 2021,
I included various rules. So part of that I did case
management. So it was risk managing young
people in the community or well, they were either on supervision
orders, we originally called them and youth rehabilitation
orders later and while they were serving like detention training
orders. So when they were on release
from custody. And then towards the latter
years, I did different roles, employed for a, in a strategic
role. I actually got the title.
It was called Child Looked After and Care Leaver Specialist.
Yeah, I, I often say you don't want a title like that in the
criminal justice system because all it means is that everybody
comes to you for answers. And I'm not social work trained.
And probably, you know, I'll explain why I got that role in a
minute. And I also have worked and
continue to work in whether it be young offenders institution
and during COVID it was also seconded to work in Adelbeck
Secure Children's Home. So I've had a varied youth
justice career in different roles.
However, two years prior to knocking on the door at leisure
of justice service, I was actually released from Lindon
Prison and that was a fourth prison sentence.
So I started coming into contact with the criminal justice system
when I was about 15 and I won't go into too much detail, but
that was really, I had similar experiences to lots of young
people that come into contact with the youth justice system.
So care and being removed and placed in care system, myself
also being excluded from school and being quite dysfunctional
and I ended up addicted to heroin.
So I spent about four years in and out of prison between the
ages of 17 and 23. And that's pretty much shaped
most of them, what I've done in youth justice, my perspective,
etcetera, and how I worked with those young people up with.
And then in 2021, off the back of writing some stuff because I
had this unique entry into youth justice, I thought I'm going to
start writing about some of my perspectives on the criminal
justice system, on how the criminal justice system works
with young people in particular. And someone actually came to me
in 2021 and said that they just won the contracts for the
unlocked masters at Leeds Trinity University and that used
to go and do the odd lecture there.
And she said, have you ever thought about coming and
teaching, Andy? I can remember it being quite
jarring teaching and then even more so, It was like teaching
prison officers, those people that used to put me behind the
door. So it was quite an interesting
question. But I'd spent 15 years in youth
justice practise and was ready for a new challenge.
And so I agreed, applied for the job, was successful, and I
suppose you could call that a complete 360 really, from being
locked behind my door to teaching prison officers how to
work with those that they lock behind their doors.
So it sounds like you're quite surprised by someone suggesting
that to you to walk into that role as a teacher and training
prison officers. Yeah, I think it's because I
wrote two books while they were in practise. 1 was a memoir and
one was a a textbook. So I wouldn't say I wasn't
academic. I am quite a naturally kind of
dynamic and engaging person. And so I think part of the part
of the idea of having me on the team was probably partly because
I had a specific background. But I think because of the work
that I've done with young people and the passion that I've got, I
think they wanted that passion in the classroom as a kind of
diverse person who made-up the team.
But I felt it was a real privilege, if I'm being honest,
to be able to make that positive contribution to prison practise.
Thank you. So we'll put it as a link note
in our episode show notes. But I'd really recommend anyone
listening to read your book, the memoir you talked about, about
your story, because it's great that you've managed to share
that. Yeah.
What we wanted to talk to you a bit about today was you were
recently editor of a book called The Good Prison Officer.
So that's what made you think this would be an important book
to write? Well, I suppose it's a nice
segue in from the from, from a previous explanation into going
and teaching on the unlocked masters.
It's not that I was affair with the literature on prisons per
SE. I was I was more kind of
familiar with the youth justice literature, you know, child
first policies, etcetera. But when I got to reading some
of the classical prison research from Sykes Goffman, Alison
Leibling, Ben Crewe, I felt that there was something missing.
And I know I'm doing my PhD now, but a lot of it obviously is an
interpretation of what you're seeing, which is fine.
That's how it has to be, the research in prison.
Actually, I think some of the scholars like Leibling and Crewe
are really, really good. But when I was reading the kind
of whether it was about the prison culture or whether it was
about the prison officer practise, I just felt that how
that is received as a prisoner was just missing in the
literature. Now I knew that there was a
group of researchers called Convict Criminologist that
started in the US in 2000, but they'd not really taken on the
receiving prison officer practise per SE.
The the other bit that is probably worth mentioning is
because I like to challenge myself.
Probably didn't think this throughout the time, but a lot
of the people who come into convict criminology were people
that often have human, cultural or social capital prior to going
to prison. Some of them actually have
degrees and masters before going to prison and then come out and
continue on that trajectory. Again, absolutely fine.
But with my background and the people that I moved with in
prison, it wasn't that group of people.
So to get that raw authenticity, I set myself a couple of
criteria. So the first one was that
obviously they had to have been to prison, but they had to have
been in some kind of professional role because I
wanted them to be able to have that kind of broader perspective
of the criminal justice system. And then on top of that, I
wanted them to have been in experienced youth incarceration,
the care experience, substance misuse and recovery.
So then I started to think, well how many of these people kind of
exist to contribute to this book?
But low and behold, I actually found them probably be something
to do with the circles that was keeping myself.
I approached 6 people and they all agreed to write a chapter
but they had to focus on both good and bad Prison Officer
practise the creative edited handbook that can help prison
officers really understand the impact of their work.
Because I think in prisons and the morale gets down because all
they see is their failures. They they don't really see their
successes. So it would the book was
symbolic as much as anything else because the end of it was
that these individuals wanted prison officers to be trapped,
well paid, well trained and if we do that, they're more likely
to have a better outcome for prisoners.
I wasn't expecting that when I set off in the journey, but lo
and behold, that was the outcome.
And it was really interesting the way that you you were able
to identify the positives and then pick out ways that they
could develop their role and really identify key themes
there. So many of our listeners are P
quip training probation officers here at the start of their
probation journey. In your chapter on the good
prison officer, you emphasise the importance of trust.
So we just wondered if you could tell us what you think the key
messages are for training probation officers in relation
to these these? Well, I think trust and
legitimacy is pretty much everything when you're working,
whether that's in prisons or in probation.
Probation isn't just about intervention plans and
objectives and ticking boxes. Without trust, sometimes we can
become barriers because of those processes and we can be
expecting people to do things that are outside of their
functions in their everyday life.
So if we're going to do that and expect that to happen, it's got
to be advantageous for both the person that you're working with
and yourself. And I think if you don't develop
those trusting, compassionate relationships with the people
that you're working with, the whole intervention can become
problematic. For licence periods with
probation and was supervised on community orders.
Now I say this all the time and I don't know anybody else when
they've come through the desistance process and they're
they're kind of sitting on the other side of the non crime lie.
Sit back. If you say to him what made a
difference, I've never heard anybody say, well, it was that
banging assessment that that probation officer did and the
objectives that they set and how they manage my risk, it was
incredible. So I, I know from practise that
those things are absolutely important to keep the public
safe and accountability and defensible decisions are
absolutely critical to practise. But if you think about getting
people to the other side of the desistance process, if you're
going to be the kind of conduit that holds a hand and takes them
from one place to the other, I just don't know how you do that
without legitimacy and trust. So could you give us more of an
understanding of what trust looks like from prison officers
and examples that you've seen from probation officers to help
those listening to identify what it could be and how they could
build that legitimacy and trust in their practise?
Yeah. Well, so when it comes to
prison, so even broader from like my own experience, but
across the themes, across the chapters of the book, most of it
seemed to come from like the humanistic role that people
played. It wasn't about the
interventions, the plans, the objectives, the supervision,
knowing what HMIP are going to come in and expect.
We know that those things are important.
But actually, when you read through the chapters, it was
they're talking about football, the banter that people were
having, the interest that you have in people's family members,
you know, the, the fact that you'll take time to listen to
the kind of intricate things and the details that they're
interested in, in their lives. And that was certainly the case
for me. I remember 1 probation officer,
let's call her Sarah. When I used to go in to meet
Sarah, she wasn't scared of sharing some of herself.
Now, I never found out where she lived or what her husband's name
or anything like that, but just in the organic humanistic
conversations that we were having, it didn't seem
transactional. Now I know now I'm on the
professional side of it, that in the back of her brain she's
doing her risk assessments and thinking about, oh, how does
this think? What's he doing when he leaves
here and who's he spending time with?
Because I'm going to have to record it on the system.
But it the trick is to get those trusting relationships because
I've had it from prison officers.
When I first rang up League of Justice Service, it was actually
a prison officer's statement that said everybody loves a turn
around story, Andy. That meant when I heard over the
radio that League of Justice wanted volunteers, lo and
behold, it was that prison officer's voice in my head
saying do it, you know. So he was almost like a
springboard for my desistance journey.
Now, I don't put it down to him, I don't put it down to Sarah.
It fundamentally lies with the individual.
But having an impact on how someone feels about you is how
to develop trust in relationships.
I think not how clever you are or how robotic you are in doing
the risk assessment processes, but how you make them feel
whilst you're doing all of that stuff I think is the trick.
Not easy, but I think that's the trick.
Genuine belief in people, so no thoughts about doing a good
probation officer book at all? I have had a conversation with
some scholars about the potential of a good probation
officer book. Well it almost like lend it.
It's a series to some degree, isn't it?
So watch this space. I believe in your ability to do
it there, Andy. Just to go back to your previous
point, Andy, about I'm trying to develop like genuine interest or
building that trust with someone.
So from when I was a probation officer, it's much, I think with
some individuals it's easier to do than others.
So sometimes we talk to trainees on the course and say that
individual that you might find really difficult or maybe you
don't even really like them. How have you got any tips for
how do you kind of do that when it is a bit challenging?
Well, I, I always think there's a social discipline window.
I don't know if you've come across it, but in Leeds we used
to, we used to say we were a restorative city and there's a
social discipline window within restorative practise.
So it's not restorative justice, but restorative practise.
And there's a, there's a lovely social discipline window in
there and it basically has four columns to it.
So you've got with two and four and the kind of pendulum on
either side is that you end up, we all do it.
I've got a nine year old daughter, so I'm trying to get
her to tie her shoelaces at the moment.
So the ideal is the ideal doing it in the with box.
The restorative box is that I help her, support her and get
her to tie the shoelaces. But sometimes if I'm busy and
we're running out the door, then I can't do things with her.
I end up doing it for her. So, and I think that that is a
good way of looking at it, that we all come out of that with box
for numerous different reasons. And I would think for me, I
would always promote the assistance, but I've worked with
young people that have committed murder and, and I've had my case
closed down and had to go to an inquest and had to defend the
decisions that I made, the referrals that I made.
So there are sometimes in an ideal situation, in this
context, you would be working with people just to get them on
their desistance journey. That's utopia.
Not everybody's ready to go on the desistance journey.
Some people are. Let's take Ben for example, 11
young person I was working with called Ben, He was stealing cars
and, and whizzing them around Leeds.
And when I sat down with him in an ideal world from my lived
experience said to him maybe you shouldn't steal cars, Maybe
that's putting people and yourself at risk.
And I could tell from the conversations that we, he had
absolutely no drivers to stop stealing cars.
And whilst he was under my supervision that that young man
went on to cause serious harm to somebody else.
And so for some people you have to step out of the whip box and
you have to step into the do things to them because that is
just a part of the court order. People in my my experience, both
lived on practise. People go around this cycle of
change continuously and you just got to be ready to jump in at
the right time and know when that time is to try and get them
back on that. It's assistance journey, but
it's not easy when you're working in the criminal justice
system and I think that we we can sometimes try to,
particularly through the assistance literature.
I feel it comes a lot from recovery and there are two very
distinctive differences between recovery and stopping offending.
The drivers are different, the behaviours are different.
Usually when somebody's at point in the recovery, the addiction
stage where they're asking for recovery, they've hit rock
bottom. I don't think that's true for
crime. You know, lots of people commit
crying for different reasons. There's so many variants.
So it's a really good question. But I would say that when you
can get into that with bot, then do so.
But recognise when you're not there in that with box, it
sometimes can be because you have to be in the toolbox
because part of our job is about protecting the public as well.
Thank you. Yeah, that's really helpful.
So a lot of the trainee probation officers, the P quips,
won't really have a good understanding of what prisoners
like. Some will, and they're probably
going to go on placements. But for those that don't really,
what do you think is important for them to be aware of when
they're working with individuals who either are in prison or are
released on licence? Yeah, OK, Good question.
So for me, I think understanding the way humans interact or
experience prisons is important because prison leaves a mark on,
I think it leaves a mark on the soul.
So sociologist and historically called it prisonisation.
There's been a debate in the literature about whether it's an
importation or whether it's a prisonisation, whether people
like me, for example, you know, by the time I was incarcerated
at 17, I've been excluded from school, being in care, being
addicted to heroin. And now in all my time in youth
justice, I didn't meet many people that were addicted to
heroin. That's how dysfunctional my
childhood. When my mum was pregnant with
me, she was just 16 years old. She was in care and experienced
abuse and neglect. So when I landed into prison, it
was, I would say it compounded the experiences that had already
happened, the adverse childhood experiences, the trauma that had
gone prior and understanding that, or at least attempting to
understand that because I think it's almost impossible to
understand it if you've not experienced it.
Like, I was there when my wife gave birth.
Yeah. So I actually seen it, but I've
got no idea what it's like to give birth.
And that's OK because I could just have empathy and try to
support my wife while I was going through that experience.
So I've called this carceral habitus as Caputo Levine as
well. She did some work in America.
She's called this carceral habitus.
So in fact, actually I've got this here because I never get
this quote right, But habitus, according to Pierre Baudieu,
who's a sort of French sociologist, is how we
experience the world and the habits that we develop as we go
through our life experience. So he says, when habitus
encounters a social world of which it is a product, it is
like a fish in water. It does not feel the weight of
the water and takes the world around itself for granted.
And we can all relate to that because when we go into an
environment where we feel uncomfortable with a fish out of
all, we can feel it straight away.
And so when you come out of prison, my best way is I'm going
to articulate from a lived experience perspective.
And I've left prison four times. It's very, very difficult to
shake off the residue of the carceral habitus.
I, I'm not a tough guy really. I can look after myself, but I
would walk into a room and project to people that I could
fight. And that was a safety strategy.
Now, when you do that minute after minute, hour after hour,
day after day, month after month, it's hard to shake that
off when you come out. So you may not be able to
understand that as a probation officer, but that's where lived
experience comes in and listening and compassion and
again, that trust and legitimacy because it impacts on people
differently. So learning about how that
individual experienced it, the impact on their behaviour from
their own perspective, I think is critical to the intervention.
Yeah, that's really helpful, I think.
And it's part of sharing interest, isn't it, about how
did they find that? And it might take a while for
someone to be able to feel, to be open with you and honest with
you about how they did find it. I thank you.
Yeah, really important reflection, so thank you for
sharing that. So you've spoken and written
really powerfully about your own experiences of the criminal
justice system and you've shared some examples already in the
podcast. So how would you say these
experiences have shaped your views on probation practise?
So I've gone, I've gone on a bit of a journey personally.
I'm going to get a bit philosophical, so I'll prepare
you for it, right. But I've just read Michelle who
calls the birth of the prison. So it's a kind of well cited
book and it kind of, I think I should have read it a while ago
because I think it probably might have helped me.
I do think that when it's youth justice or probation or social
care or even education, whatever institutions have been created
through kind of modernity and industrialisation and how
society functions in the West, I think there's obviously going to
be a limitation to what we're able to achieve in those
institutions because they become bureaucratic.
So the reason why I mentioned Foucault is because he talks
about it evolving into a mechanism of discipline now, not
necessarily a punitive sanction, but fragmenting everything off
in a way that you can create expertise in a particular field
over there, right. So what do you mean by that?
So if you, if you are a blessing, you're a probation
manager, then you'll need to know what HMIP you're going to
come in to inspect. You'll need to know how your
staff are keeping on top of their plans, intervention,
supervision, etcetera. You, you know, you'll need to
know all the purest processes and bureaucracy and the data
that's important for your service.
There's nothing wrong with that. That's that's inside that,
that's knowledge. But I think what Foucault would
say is that that's knowledge for probation.
Then you've got knowledge over there for prisons and they've
got knowledge over there for youth justice and knowledge over
here for 3rd sector organisations, Prison Reform,
etcetera, etcetera. So you might think what you want
about Andy. Well, it's the reason why I say
it would have been helpful for me to read that because I was
trying to articulate that in a book I wrote while I was in
practise called Connecting with Young People in Trouble.
When you come through the system, you don't care about
that. Probation officer managers
ability to know about HMIP, none of that matters to you because
you're on the margins of society.
And I, I just wrote a paper from a PhD, from a literature review
on PM mentor reading. And a lot of the, the, the
studies that I looked, they, they all had this theme of what
I termed as the conflict of warrants to knowledge.
And I think it's because when you come through, if you're me,
I'll come through and I learnt about APIs model and assessments
and all, all, all the stuff. I learnt it all.
But really I just packed it all over there when I went and
worked with the young people because I was like, listen, I
get it. It's shit.
Yeah, forgive my French. Like, so none of that's really
important for you. What's important for you is
what's important for you, and I'm going to help you and try to
work with you through that. So that's what I mean about get
becoming full of philosophical. It might sound like really
sociological what I'm saying, But if you aren't at least on
some level considering and thinking about some of these
institutional challenges when you're working in somewhere like
the criminal justice system, I think you become a part of it.
And I think PM mentors like myself, we're really good at
getting in the margins. And I think if you can get in
the margins of these institutional processes and the
person, the human that you're working with, I think you can,
you can operate better. But reading that has helped me
realise this isn't a individual thing.
This is broader than a single probation officer or a single
youth justice practitioner. But we can all be human in the
margins. I think that's what I take from
my lived experience and my writing and probation.
Being a human within their role, really interesting working with
the the people that are just joining probation and their
desires and the reasons why they're joining the service.
And it's often because they want to work with people and they
want to help people to change. Sometimes as they progress
through their role, they feel frustrated by in the system that
they're working in, how difficult it is to do that
because of the focus on risk, because of the bureaucracy,
because of things that are changes that are being brought
in by government. So it is interesting because a
lot of the motivations still really are about working
directly with people, helping people.
Can I give you 2 quick examples? When I worked with children in
the youth justice system, it was most often in the last years it
was those that have experienced social care removal.
So they were, I looked after children or care leavers and I
used to do what they call a participation project with them.
I do it now in Wetherby, young offenders and I get them to
stand up and talk to senior managers about how the systems
can work together to get better outcomes for them.
Really it's grounded into systems because I don't think
they're going to change the system, but I want them to feel
good about what they're doing right now to move away from
their past and into this kind of new education role, so to speak.
But they used to always say when we used to get the management in
the same, they used to use the word system.
And I remember one of the guys who was the head of the looked
after services said we need to get these kids to stop saying
system because we're supposed to be their corporate parent.
So he was saying, if they're saying system, you don't talk
about your parents system. So that's so the, the premise
starting point is flawed. And I think that's why
children's social work services is has the outcomes that it gets
because I'm not quite sure you can parent corporately.
And I think that's what we're trying to do.
Another example is when I came on to unlocked, most of the guys
that come on to unlock the criteria was that they don't got
a 21 in their undergraduate degree.
So they were they were going into the prison system thinking
they were going to change live. We were talking to about the
assistance literature. We were giving them all the
springboard that they needed to inspire to change and to
motivate. And then they were landed on the
prison landings and realising that they were open and closing
doors and getting people's apps. Yeah.
Now, if I had the answer to to some of this stuff, I'm probably
on more money than I am now. But I think the system, the
terminology that's used, it can be just as damaging for people
that work in it as people that are on the receiving end of it.
But what the answers is, I'm not quite sure.
But at least I think years in practise make you realise that
the system is limited not because of you, but because of
the kind of inner, the inequality and the bureaucracy
that's that we're all operating within.
Thank you for that. Some really great reflections
and points there. So thinking about our training
probation officers who are working with individuals who may
have had similar life experiences to yours, you've
shared some of your life experiences so far in the
podcast. What do you think they should be
mindful of and what key areas could they focus on in their
practise? So I, I, I come at this
completely subjectively from, from working in youth justice,
but where I think understanding how people's let's go back to
habitus, understand how they've become who they are is critical,
vital. If you would have asked me when
I was, say, 20, if I'd have had a rough upbringing and I'd
probably said no, right, Because everybody I knew had some level
of adversity. It's not until you get older and
then I start moving in all these middle class spaces and I'm
like, wow, that was bad. Yeah.
But if I don't know that I've been shaped by these historical
experiences and nobody's talking that through with me, how am I
supposed to change it? Right.
So the first point is listening and guiding the conversation,
not telling them, oh, you've had a really upbringing?
Because that's not going to go down well either.
But I suppose just being that curious person that's like, oh,
that's really interesting. I was saying if some nobody ever
asked me in all my years in the criminal justice system, why do
you think you gravitate towards people that are involved in
crime? That would have been a killer
question that would have tore my head in bits.
Why do why do why do you feel comfortable with people that
commit crime? Well, the obvious answer to that
would have been everybody I've ever known has been involved in
crime as far back as I can remember.
OK. There wasn't a choice then
really the. Funny thing is as well is that
if you dig into that and you're curious about that, you
understand just how difficult it is to move on.
Me and Max Denny are currently writing an article putting
status into desistance because it's I think we think it's
missing. Colin talked about kind of
working class boys in the he's and talked about status
frustration. So we're using that.
But actually it's a massive thing to ask somebody to do.
Like even if you, even if it's Ben stealing that car, he's
known for stealing the cars, he's known in his area for
stealing the cars. That's where he gets his status,
his recognition, his, his identities, all that.
And if we're asking people to leave that behind, that's a big
thing to do. So I think that curiosity of
helping them unpack their own experiences if you're working
with someone like me is critical.
And I think you're just reminding me of someone that I
work with who I think had been kicked out of school, didn't
have any qualifications, who was like fairly young.
But his main thing that he probably enjoyed and thought he
was good at was stealing from shops.
And he wasn't even that good at it.
But actually that was probably his main achievement.
Do you know what I mean? He hasn't really achieved much
else. So it is trying to help him find
out what else he can do that he could be really good at.
So I remember being on Doncaster Wing and a guy, he's actually
got a life sentence for murdering somebody eventually in
Leeds, right? But I remember him coming in, I
didn't know him at the time, and he came in for armed robberies.
We must have been 20. And he come on the wing And and
I always remember being in gaol. I was quite, I could look after
myself, but just a bit reserved, right?
This guy flap open as soon as he walks on the wing, right?
And I thought, wow, yeah, this is his space.
Now they've been caught for armed robberies.
But there's no, you can't be, you can't be bad at crime.
It's like, that's why I think people do it.
You go to gaol and it's just like if you're trying to
succeed, if I'm trying to do this PhD and I don't get through
it and I fail, I'll be like, you know, and, and, and people say,
I'm sorry, Andy and all this kind of stuff.
You don't get that. If you get caught committing
crime, you go to gaol. It don't do anything.
You don't, you don't ruin your status at all.
And that's why I think people get stuck in it, because, like I
said, you're asking them to come out and come into a situation
where actually they've got no capital, they've got no skin in
the game. They've actually got to start
from the bottom. And status collapse is probably
an interesting way of framing it.
But you can't come to those conclusions.
But you ask open questions. Yeah.
And you get them to come to their own conclusions about
their experiences. And it's interesting because
those of us on the outside of crime and prison, we might view
it as the, the worst thing that might happen in your life, being
caught being sent to prison. But it's, it's really important
to hear that doesn't impact your status and it doesn't feel like
that. So if a probation officers
working with people that haven't had that experience themselves
recognising and understanding that.
Yeah, and that's why I say lived experience is one thing when
it's important when you speak to one individual, but and
everybody has a different experience.
So. So I never felt any stigma
coming out of prison, you know what I mean?
Like in fact, in the circles that I moved in, people were
celebrating Yo, Andy's out, you know, so your.
Status perhaps? Yeah, 100%.
And I think when we talk about stigma, sometimes I think we're
looking at it kind of through a middle class lens.
So if you've got social capital, employment, education and you.
And also I'm thinking about somebody when I say this, when
you drink, you drive a car, you're somebody down, you go to
gaol, you feel when you walk out of the irony of all of this is
that you're stigmatising other people because when you come out
of prison, you feel like I'm not really like them, right?
I, I'm only talking from my experience, never felt any
stigma, never felt any stigma. Went back into spaces where
actually I went into nightclubs and people were like, Oh my,
when did you get out? And I think understanding all of
this is the point of kind of engaging and being curious with
people. Don't assume that they
experienced stigma because from my experience, I certainly
didn't. And people that I know, my
brothers, they, they didn't either.
Now the stigma comes when you step out of those spaces.
If you were trying to get jobs in different roles, perhaps.
Yeah, when I knocked on the door.
It leads you of justice service. Do you think I didn't know about
DBS? Check.
I soon found out and then the stigma kicks in.
But again, thinking about all this, why do people stay where
they're at? Well, there are rational reasons
why they do. Interesting, really interesting
reflections that you're bringing out here, which leads into the
next question we've got. Yeah, so a big part of the
probation training programme is reflective practise.
So getting the trainees to reflect on their practise all
the time, thinking about what does the literature say, how is
that helping, informing what I do it?
How's that impacting on my work with individuals?
But from your point of view, why would you say it's important for
probation practitioners to be reflecting on their practise?
Yeah, well, in my book, Connecting with Young People in
Trouble, what I wanted to do at the end of it, after I've done
the kind of an exploration of my experiences of being on both
sides of the youth justice system, the guy called Dan
Siegel, who's an expert in neuroscience.
So he created it, but I slightly amended it for you of justice
practise and what Dan Siegel talks about, his presence of
human resonance and trust. So I thought actually that's how
I operate in practise with my lived experience.
I wanted to share that with other people.
We should all be sharing knowledge, lived, learn and
practise. But important for the question
that you're asking there is I change resonant to connecting.
So my acronym is packed presence, attunement, connection
and trust. Why did they do that?
Well, in the youth justice system, I would hear people say
they're not engaging and it never sat right with me.
I was like, what do they mean by?
So you go in and knocking on the children's home of a 15 year old
boy who's been abused and neglected and then he's been
removed from his view, kidnapped from his family.
And you've come out as a practitioner because he's got a
referral order or a youth rehabilitation order.
And and you're knocking on the door and saying, well, the court
says that you've got to do XY and Z but to a traumatised,
marginalised kid. So what I tried to do in my
model was to say, OK, if that guy knocks on the door of the
residential home and comes back and says to me, Andy, I've
knocked on the door, they're not engaging.
Maybe they need breaching, right?
OK, that's fine. If we just slightly change the
word to Andy, I've just knocked on the child's door, we're not
connecting. Yeah.
In just changing that word from engaging to connecting, it just
means that you recognise that you also play a role in how you
knocked on the door, your facial expressions, your tone of voice,
because I haven't talked about children, but I think it works
with adults. But it's, it's when you're
talking about in terms of reflecting, it's just placing it
in the reflection. What are they seeing when they
see me knock on the door? Have they had previous
experience? Is it a woman and they've had
bad experiences with a man? So you know that does that's not
your fault, but you're a man present in her space.
So I think if you just think about connecting rather than
engagement, I think that really helps with the reflection
process when you're working with marginalised people.
I think that's really helpful because you're right, a lot of
people are difficult to engage, but we also need to look at,
well, was I really stressed and busy, so actually how did I come
across? By the way, the answer is
probably yes to that question. Yeah, yeah.
Exactly. So it is and I reflect back now
and think, OK, like one example that I have that someone that
got transferred to my office and I thought, well, I'll go down
and be really friendly and just say hi, do you like just want to
see me? And he got really annoyed
because he didn't know he was going to see me and he, I think
he thought, Oh no, she might take me in like 1/2 hour
appointment. So I, so I didn't quite realise
at the time, I just thought he's not wanting to talk to me.
But actually from his point of view, he probably was, I'm being
forced to come here, but I didn't, I was going to be told
to see you. But yeah, you're right.
If we reflect back, because there might be lots of reasons
he didn't want to see me in the 1st place anyway.
But it's helpful to think how do I impact on it rather than
they're just not engaging. Relationships are reciprocal in
some way, aren't they? We all play a role and it's not
easy to recognise that in the criminal justice system.
I mean, look, I've married 10 years.
My wife would tell you I don't always recognise it in our
marriage. So it's not easy, especially
when you're working with people that can sometimes present with
really difficult behaviours. But sometimes because we're
busy, I think we can become lazy and we can use words like these
people are complex, they're not engaging.
And it's not because we've got negative intentions, it's just
because, again, going back to the system bit, we're all busy.
So being reflective in that space can be difficult, but
connecting is a better way than an engagement I would say.
Thank you. So there seems to be kind of an
increasing recognition of the value of involving people with
lived experience in shaping probation practise or the
criminal justice system. And you've written this book
about the good prison officer. But how do you think lived
experience or those with lived experience can help shape the
probation service to improve it? Big question this.
I've just, I've just written something with my friend and
colleague Paula Harriet that's trying to get to the complexity
of some of this stuff. So for me, lived experience
isn't very well conceptual. So if we say is lived
experience, as we've already outlined, is it critical to
working with people in the criminal justice system?
Absolutely, it has to be because their own experience and having
an understanding of where they've come from, where they
are and where they're trying to go is essential that you like.
Without it, you can't really have a desired outcome.
So that's the first part of the question.
The second part of the question is I don't know whether there's
any cheques and balances or gatekeepers on lived experience
knowledge. So I think because of the things
that we were talking about in terms of systems and Focal's
ideas of discipline, we know that we're not really having the
desired effect on a kind of systemic level.
So we're pondering out what do we do about that and how have
these people been marginalised and excluded and and become
voiceless and trying to elevate them.
Again, humble things to do. I'm not quite sure that equates
to somebody having been in prison understanding the answers
for how to run a prison. It's interesting because in my
PhD research, I'm going through the data analysis as we speak,
and a lot of the participants are saying they want to be
recruited because of their skills, not because of their
background. And we can fall into a trap of
recruiting peer mentors. So all the people that I'm
interviewing are professionals. So that.
So again, the terminology of peer mentors is interesting for
them because you're almost saying that they haven't gone
through a certain process when they have.
So I might be challenging that a little bit in my PhD.
It's probably more appropriate for prisoners, PMS or in other
prisoners, if that makes sense. Probably the right, the
definition is in the same age or social circumstance as the
meant. So, So we could be getting
people to come into conferences and talk about their experiences
again, trapping them in traumatic pasts rather than and
allowing them to become the person that they they want to
be. The other bit that I think needs
finding out is the integration of the digital revolution that
we're seeing and people like being now on social media and
challenging the system because they've got lived experience
through the kind of ideas of reform.
There's absolute benefits to that.
But I think we need a proper conversation about what some of
the challenges are as well, because there are some, I've
come off social media now partly because of some of this, but
you're seeing people talk about their school exclusion, their
care experience, and they're putting it regularly, almost
daily on social media. Well, we'd need to have a
conversation about not that we can stop it because social
media's it's own space. So I think if we think about it
two different levels, lived experience has everything to do
with practise. If you for your P quip learners,
lived experience is critical and essential.
But when we go into more reformist spaces, I think it's,
again, it's got a role to play, but I'm just not quite sure
we're heading in a direction that's keeping everybody safe.
So I do have some reservations about that.
Does that make sense? Yeah.
And it sounds like you're
working through your ideas around this as you're developing
your PhD as well. Absolutely, yeah.
So I don't have any answers. Interesting to see where you end
up. So thank you for that.
So now Andy, we're going to give you a special power, we're going
to give you a magic wand where you have the power to implement
one change to improve probation practise.
And we're intrigued what that power would be.
What? What would you do?
Well, it's an interesting question if you could change one
thing, like 1 mechanism of it, I think, and I'm not a probation
expert, but if we go back to before 1990s and what probation
was set up to do and how it functioned, my understanding is
it was embedded in kind of social work principles and
that's how people were trained. And then they had the
introduction of the 1991 Criminal Justice Act, which
reframed it as punishment in the community.
And you're even seeing that go a little bit further, saying that
it's going to be prisons in the community.
So that's the wrong direction. So I'm going to push back and
say let's go a different way. My perfect solution if I was in
utopia would be that if we go back to Habitus, if you want to
understand where people come from, you've got to be where
they are, you've got to be in their communities.
So I would come away from all the risk needs, responsivity,
the what works, the risk assessment processes.
We've got AI now. So when I worked out youth
justice and I come out of a home visit, I should have been able
to say baby sound or there's risk that needs to be worked
upon later on and then bounce off to another house and so not
back to the office. So if I could, I know it would
be a huge change. And I'm not saying I'm wiser
than Andrews and Bonter, but what I would say is that most
people come into probation because they want to help
people. And I think actually they find
out very quickly that they're basically administrative
workers. So I would strip all of that
back, go back to pre 1990 kind of principles and I'm not
looking back at a nostalgic kind of utopian sense, but I would
say free operation officers up to be in the communities to
understand the environment that people are coming from.
And I think they'd be far better at being able to help.
And by the way, I think probation officers would have a
far better morale if that's what they were doing.
Brilliant. I'm all for that one.
So turn back the clock. Yeah, a bit radical, but there
you go. Is that magic wand for good?
I like it. OK, so Andy, you've referred to
lots of literature in this podcast so far, but if you could
recommend a couple of books or articles for our listeners who
want to explore this topic further, what would you
recommend? We'll put them in the show notes
and they can access them. Well, I'd have to jump on to
full cause discipline and punish in the birth of the prison.
I wish I'd have read that earlier actually.
I think it helped me understand some of my frustrations and this
might be a surprise. Diana Johns did a book called
Being and Becoming an ex Prisoner and it was in
Australia. But I, I think it's the closest
thing that I've ever read where someone really got to grips with
the post prison experience and how to supervise and the
challenges there. So I would, I would recommend
that. And and finally, one of the best
books I've read. Nothing.
It's more around kind of childhood trauma is Bessel than
the Cokes. The body keeps the score.
It really does help. He uses case studies from his
practise around PTSD. That certainly helps me in youth
justice. But I do think we know from the
AC study that this stuff has a kind of live course effect.
So I do think it will be helpful for for probation officers as
well. A good range of recommendations
there. We will also include your
publications in our show so people can track those down
after they've listened to this episode.
Thank you very much for that, Andy.
Yeah. Thank you.
It's been great having you on the show.
But before you go, is there anything that you wanted to say
that you don't really have the chance to?
I think I would summarise going back to the restorative window
of four with and two and try to use desistance as a kind of
ideology rather than rehabilitation, because the way
I see rehabilitation and desistance is kind of similar
things. So rehabilitation, you know, is
an idea of doing things to people, whereas desistance is
doing things alongside people and putting them at the centre
of the intervention. So I always think that's the
best way I think about practise when I'm working with people.
Thank you. That's really helpful.
Because that's what we get the students to think about and
explore actually on the course about our rehabilitation
desistance the same. Yeah.
Lovely. Thank you so much.
Thank you really. Useful final thought there.
So thank you, Andy. You're very welcome and thank
you for having me on. Thanks for listening to
Probation Perspectives Insights into community justice.
We hope our conversation with Andy Briley offered new ways of
thinking about professional identity, values and the
importance of relational practise throughout the criminal
justice system. From what makes a good prison
officer to exploring how human relationships can foster change,
we trust this episode offered insight for both reflection and
practise. If you found this episode
helpful, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with
colleagues, learners, or anyone working across the justice
system. We'd also love to hear your
thoughts or who you'd like to hear from next.
A big thank you to Andy for sharing his experiences and to
the team behind Probation Perspectives for bringing these
conversations to life. We'll be back soon with more
episodes that shine a light on the practise, purpose and people
behind probation and community justice.
Until next time, take care.