Abstract
Working with people convicted of extremist offences who have either offended, or are perceived to have offended, for ideological reasons − whether supportive of a political or religious identity or for the rights of animals − presents challenges to the supervising probation officer. Despite it being impossible for a service user to prove categorically that they are no longer supportive of ideological views that advocate harmful behaviour, there can still be an expectation from offender managers, MAPPAs, Parole Boards and offenders themselves, that evaluating enduring sympathies with harmful groups forms the main part of risk and offender management. How then can service users and probation staff work productively together, without an offender manager being excessively naive or collusive, or the offender receiving supervision reliant on disproportionate, and possibly counter-productive, levels of control?
Keywords
Introduction
I write as a probation officer within London Probation Trust (LPT) 1 , based in the Extremism & Hate Crime Unit, which is a team of three probation officers managed by a senior probation officer. Whilst, thankfully, the number of LPT cases that are convicted under one of the Terrorism Acts, or otherwise related to extremism (including ‘extreme right wing’, ‘extreme left wing’, animal rights extremism and other so-called domestic extremism) are small in relation to its overall caseload (70,000 cases a year), there are enough across the wide geographical area that LPT covers to have required the formation of a dedicated team to contribute to establishing effective practice and a fair, consistent and proportionate approach across London. As a team we have shared in the supervision of 60 offenders with TACT convictions on licence since 2009. This represents more than 70 per cent of all convicted TACT cases released on licence throughout England and Wales. In addition to that the unit has also contributed to the assessment of more than 400 convicted offenders where there have been concerns about their exhibiting potentially extremist behaviour whilst in custody or under probation supervision.
Being sentenced under one of the Terrorist Acts (TACTs) inevitably carries with it an assumption that an offender holds political views or religious beliefs that are harmful to others, as opposed to, say, an offender who has exhibited behaviour that is harmful, but whose political/religious beliefs are largely left a private matter. It is the job of the offender manager (OM) to have a thorough understanding of the risks that a service user presents – but how does an OM go about getting this for people whose offending is deemed to be motivated by something as difficult to categorically prove one way or the other as their beliefs? If someone’s beliefs have become less harmful, how can that individual demonstrate this to an OM, a Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements (MAPPA) Panel or a Parole Board? With the professional demands of public protection and the expectation that one does not simply take a service user’s word at face value, how are realistic, ongoing risk-assessments made for an extremist offender?
Those who work for any statutory service may well have had the chance to take part in the Home Office’s Workshops to Raise Awareness of Prevent (WRAP), Prevent being the pro-active, diversionary part of the government’s counter-terrorism Contest strategy. Within WRAP, pains are taken to demonstrate that there is no clear profile of a terrorist, or even of someone vulnerable to extremism. While certain profiles of offenders may be useful for people carrying out research into violent extremism, our experience in London concords with the message of the WRAP, and I would argue that the unique quality of long-term supervision of a service user renders such profiling limited in value beyond that of an overview of, or introduction to, a case.
It is worth noting early on that extremist/TACT offenders all having problematic political/religious beliefs is neither our experience in London, nor necessarily borne out by research. One paper notes a: … disjuncture between the largely ideological focus of current de-radicalisation programmes and the factors found to motivate individuals’ entry into and exit from terrorist organisations. (Morris et al., 2010)
Bearing in mind, then, that it is possible for an offender to end up with a TACT conviction more through their association with harmful others than through their own, committed, harmful-ideologies; there is a potential for an offender to be subject to a sentence plan and treatment expectations that may not reflect the actual criminogenic factors – but as the ideological risk factors sought to be addressed in such cases can be largely internal and conveyed mainly through self-reporting, how is the offender manager able to get the treatment needs right?
In response to the questions I have posed, I would like to review the array of processes and interventions that can be used to assess and respond to someone with an extremist conviction, many of which would normally be available for all harmful offenders, and some of which are more particular to ideological offending.
Supervision
Whilst clearly not being, nor attempting to be surveillance, probation supervision does have value and weight in terms of having the potential to develop a pro-social working relationship between the service user and a government agency. It would be rash to assume that the dynamic power of that relationship alone invariably leads to positive personal change, but it has been seen to be a valuable dynamic that can enable the service user to feel listened to; to tolerate and explore expressions of grievance; as well as perhaps exploring dissonance within the service user where fair and humane treatment is at odds with views that are strongly anti-establishment. Tyler (1990 cited in Maruna, 2010) asserts that ‘people are most likely to respond to punishment when they feel they have been treated fairly’. This is an observation worth serious consideration and application.
A natural question that can arise when thinking about the dynamics of working with a particular cohort of offenders, is whether it is beneficial to marry up certain demographic traits between the service user and the OM. For example, in the case of a male, Muslim, ‘Al-Qaeda inspired’ offender: Is a male, Muslim OM more suitable in terms of forging an effective working relationship? (‘Al-Qaeda inspired’ (AQi) is a shorthand term to label behaviour in allegiance to an ideology that United Kingdom law views as promoting un-lawful, Islamist-related violence.) I do not know if any research has been done into this, and the findings of any such future studies would be of value to probation services – I can offer the thought processes behind the practice in LPT, which is for OMs to be allocated offenders on the largely practical basis of who has the workload capacity at the time of allocation. This means that some OMs holding AQi TACT cases will be Muslims, most will not, some will be male, most will be female, some will be older, some will be younger, i.e. a general reflection of the OM population in LPT. Through this random allocation, it seems to me that whilst a pairing in certain demographic factors can facilitate a more ready trust in the OM by the service user, more important factors might be whether the service user perceives the OM to be actively supportive of their rehabilitation (e.g. that the OM is listening to them, and has an eye on combining their public protection duties with a belief that rehabilitation is possible); in other words, that their OM relates to them as being more than the label ‘terrorist’. Occasionally someone with an AQi conviction states that they are not actually interested in religion, and can anticipate that a fellow-Muslim professional − whether OM or mentor, etc. – might be someone who will judge them unfavourably on their lack of religious observance and identification; or that statutory probation supervision could become a forum for the unwelcome promotion of a particular religious practice or allegiance adhered to by the professional.
One could argue that the process of rehabilitation for an AQi offender must necessarily include some element of restitution of the relationship between an extremist offender and mainstream society – and that an OM who does not share obvious racial/ethnographic factors with the offender can still demonstrate a commitment to pro-social rehabilitation and the offender’s well-being, whilst at the same time representing a different personal heritage, and thus model a positive experience of working together despite the diverse personal factors present.
Different probation areas will no doubt approach the supervision of TACT cases in different ways. In LPT, due to the number of extremism-related cases and OMs managing them, the most expedient way to offer a standardized approach in terms of sentence planning, risk management and service to the offender was by setting up a small unit of dedicated probation officers whose role is to co-work TACT cases alongside the OM in the field. This enables the OM to maintain such cases alongside their normal caseloads, and provides the service user in question with offender management that is knowledgeable, informed about extremism issues and related training, interventions and risk assessments in the form of the PO from the dedicated Extremism and Hate Crime Unit (EHCU). Clearly this adds another layer to the management of an offender, and has the potential to be more complex than when an OM is operating alone; however, TACT cases attract attention from many levels, including ministerial, and from a dedicated unit within the Metropolitan Police, so having more than one probation practitioner involved in the case can give the OM, probation and the rehabilitative agenda adequate weighting in the multi-agency mix.
Interventions
Of course terrorism is no modern phenomenon, but over recent years, work has been done in the National Offender Management Service (NOMS) and in London Probation Trust (LPT), among other trusts, to respond effectively and accountably to offenders with TACT convictions. This work broadly aims to define and categorise risks, using the Extremism Risk Guidance 22 + (ERG) compiled by the NOMS Interventions Unit (NOMS, 2011a), in order to be able to record any changes in risk assessments as the offender moves through his/her prison sentence. The ERG explores 22 known potential risk factors from areas of engagement in extremist causes/groups; intent and disinhibition to cause harm and capability of undertaking malicious behaviour, building up to an assessment informed by, ideally, several professionals involved in the case, as well as an active discussion of risk factors with the service user where at all possible. It is an invaluable tool, not least since it gives a voice to the ways in which an offender may be working hard to address and reduce their risks following the major life change that getting a prison sentence can be. In an arena of terrifying potential risks, there can be pressure on the OM not to give too much weight to demonstrations of reduced risks and stability. Following an ERG assessment, there are interventions available for one-to-one work with the extremist offender. The NOMS Healthy Identity Intervention (HII; NOMS, 2011b) has been written to specifically address most of the risk factors that are assessed in the ERG and there is also provision to build up a working relationship of productive engagement with the person delivering the intervention by using tools such as the Good Lives Model (for example Ward et al., 2007), or mindfulness training. LPT, in conjunction with NOMS, have created a toolkit, Developing Dialogues, to cater for service users where concerns have been raised about intent to cause harm (for example from behaviour in prison), but where there is no extremist-related conviction. Developing Dialogues uses ‘pick and mix’ style worksheets to help enable both the service user and the OM to discuss issues that are important to the service-user in terms of relevant religious/political/ideology with a view to considering together any areas of potential legal concerns around causing harm, and empowering the service user to meet their needs without attracting unwanted attention/concern from the authorities. Both of these interventions utilize a different approach from what we commonly think of as ‘de-radicalization’ and focus more on examining the pros and cons of disassociation from a harmful group, than in changing someone’s political views – which has the real potential to be ineffective. As the national cohort of offenders with TACT convictions is small, such interventions are unlikely to be able to be tested enough to be viable for accreditation, but the NOMS Intervention Team is currently undertaking a full evaluation into the effectiveness of the ERG and HII.
Self-Reporting
As with all victim/offence-focused interventions, a lot depends on what the offender is bringing to the table and is willing to share with their offender manager. This leads to the thorny question of how does a criminal justice system professional relate to the offender’s presentation of themselves? This can be a tightrope walk between credulous naivety on one side, with the unchecked risks of harm that are associated with that; and a cynical aloofness on the other − with the less obvious risks that may stem from reduced engagement from the offender, or an increased instability resulting from the offender’s sense of frustration at the lack of control that they have in the rehabilitative process. None of us want to be duped or seen to be naive, and conversely, not believing anything an offender says about anything can be, albeit strongly defended, a way for us to disengage with the actual risk-reduction work in hand in favour of a more static risk control. It seems to me that assessing risk is essentially a passive (though necessary) activity, in contrast to managing risk, which makes more demands of professionals and actively engages the assessor to create ways to facilitate the reduction of identified risks of harm. The real agency to reduce risks normally lies with the motivation of the service-user in question, whose partaking in the supervision process is therefore not something we want to overlook too readily.
One TACT offender spoke of how a prison officer commented on his record of being very well-behaved in prison, adding that ‘of course it could all be just an act.’ As those intervening with offenders, and perhaps especially with this cohort of offenders, we are never going to be in a position of being able to completely verify the truth of what an offender is saying in terms of describing any intent to cause harm to others, and trying to, as it were, expect full ‘ownership’ of his/her ‘truth’ can pose problems: it puts him/her in the impossible position of never being able to prove it. In some cases this can cause offenders distress where the link with the OM carries a hope that they will be treated as being more than solely a ‘terrorist’ worthy only of suspicion. Offenders can find themselves doing things like playing down the importance of religion in their life for fear that it will be seen as a risk factor – when denouncing an important part of one’s life to please ‘the authorities’ could be seen as de-stabilizing and contrary to a stable resettlement. Perhaps one strategy to consider is to be clear with the offender that, as probation officers, whilst we always have to reserve critical judgement on what is shared between the offender and ourselves, we can, at the same time be equally interested in their observable behaviour − the way they are choosing to present themselves beyond something that we can or cannot verify, and how best to work on that together to enable the offender to take responsibility for reducing their risks of harm and re-offending.
Mentors
In LPT we have found that the involvement of mentors can assist in the rehabilitative process. The majority of the current TACT service users are deemed to be ‘Al-Qaida inspired’ and Muslim, and whilst an OM and a service user may both be Muslims, the OM role is inescapably a role of enforcement which could involve recalling the service user back to custody. A Muslim mentor can work alongside the service user in a different way, offering: a sense of religious legitimacy where necessary, in terms of knowledge about their faith and an active, public practice of that; an understanding of certain social/cultural/religious matters, and if necessary can advise probation staff accordingly as well as contributing to discussions around risk – for example by advising if certain literature in the offender’s possession is a cause for concern or not; a potential sympathy to a political cause without espousing to any terrorist ideology, such as around issues of some current UK foreign policy; a subsequent role-modelling of that.
Again there is potential for such a contrived relationship to be unworkable, but as it is a voluntary opportunity for the offender, there is no enforcement action if the relationship isn’t productive, and normally it is valued by the offender. For example, one TACT offender spoke of the sense of security he found by having his mentor attend MAPPA meetings and help temper his uncomfortable experience of being subject to the powers of a largely anonymous, yet authoritative, panel. Again, the small-scale of this work does not readily lend itself to robust evaluation, and as such the use of mentors is very much something that is offered only to the extent that the service user wants/accepts it. In cases where the use of a mentor is not seen to be contributing effectively to the risk management plan, this can easily and swiftly be reviewed and discontinued.
Police Intelligence and MAPPAs
As with all MAPPA Level 2 and 3 cases, the police will take part in the multi-agency information sharing arrangements, and in the cases of extremist offenders, active police involvement can be particularly useful in terms of providing information which either supports or contradicts what the offender is conveying in supervision. However this can be countered by some disadvantages of the MAPPA process, often exacerbated for those with extremist convictions. Frequently a TACT offender will be required to live initially in Approved Premises (AP) on release and, due to the licence condition of having no contact with other TACT offenders, there may be limited availability of AP bed spaces meaning that, for example in London, an offender is resident in an AP outside of their home borough. This means that, whilst during the pre-release phase, the home borough MAPPA have familiarized themselves with the case, debated some of the finer risk-issues and prepared for release; the offender is released to an AP in a different borough, necessitating a change of MAPPA and a great pressure on the new MAPPA to come ‘up to speed’ with the additional anxiety of the offender now being in the community. It can take time for MAPPA representatives to feel comfortable with such a transfer, and as such, decisions based more solely on risk aversion seem to me to be more likely. If the offender is recalled and subsequently re-released to a third area with a new MAPPA again, you can imagine how this problem can be further compounded. In LPT there are ‘central MAPPA’ arrangements – where a local MAPPA is held centrally with one core panel sitting on different, pan-London TACT cases, which is joined by the representatives from the respective local panels. This was founded originally to provide one stable chain of command/responsibility leading up to the London Olympics, but still utilized for its ability to offer a degree of constancy and consistency across the London area for the management of TACT offenders being released into the community. My reflections on that process are that, whilst it can present practical difficulties for the home borough in terms of being required to meet in central London for a meeting that may be an hour or less, the fact that there are core personnel from police and probation can enable some of the routine risk aversion I’ve described above from being repeated with each new release.
Licence Conditions
In addition to the standard licence conditions, Probation Instruction 13/2010 (NOMS, 2010) details six additional licence conditions that are available for extremist offenders, as well as any bespoke ones that can be agreed with NOMS as being proportionate and necessary. Licence conditions essentially form a compact between a prison governor and a serving prisoner that enables their release into the community under the supervision of the related probation area. The nature of terrorist offending often implies a connection to a group or network of people who are inspired by the same beliefs/ideology, and willingness to harm innocent/unrelated people. As such the National Offender Management Service (NOMS) have approved a number of licence conditions that aim to limit access to such networks and the incitement of hatred to others. Enforcing these conditions poses its own challenges in terms of the greater scope of control they represent (only attending agreed meetings; rallies; places of worship and so on), and the many everyday activities that the wording of the conditions, if not the spirit of them, may incidentally reach into (such as going to meet friends in a coffee shop, going to the theatre or cinema). After tentative and defensive first steps from the service user on release, and once they realize that the conditions are there to support their being on licence in the community as opposed to ways to solely get them back into prison, a more productive and mature response to the licence can result.
Conclusion
In conclusion I’d like to consider the question of whether all of these interventions, approaches and special measures are working? The matter of how success is measured can be somewhat variegated in probation work. Normally the uncontested measure of success is whether or not the service user goes on to re-offend and accrue further convictions. Even when working from amidst the raised suspicions that I’ve noted go hand-in-hand with the extremist-related cohort of offenders, one would imagine that not attracting any further convictions would indicate some measure of successful rehabilitation. Even then, though, labelling a lack of further convictions as rehabilitation can represent something of a leap of faith for some people, and one that they do not want to make.
What about those cases where, like many non-TACT service users who may not straight away turn off their offending like a tap, further offending occurs, but is noticeably less harmful than previously? An example that comes to my mind is the serious substance misuser who after many years of cocaine misuse manages to demonstrate a period of desistance from cocaine, whilst however still misusing cannabis, and being liable for further convictions as a result. Such a cannabis-related conviction, as opposed to possession of a Class A substance, may still appear as progress to professionals working to motivate the service user to reduce their drug misuse. If one is involved with the supervision of a TACT offender who has completed a significant amount of extremist-related intervention work, who whilst on licence, and under an exceptional level of police scrutiny, is convicted for a matter relating to a less serious, non-TACT offence such as fraudulent completion of an insurance application, what can one conclude about their rehabilitation? Clearly any reconviction signifies problematic, anti-social behaviour, and no-one would claim this as success. However, when asked to think carefully about risks posed – as a probation officer would for a court report or reviewed OASys – it appears misleading and misinformed to categorise any further offending per se as indicative of a failed disengagement from an extremist group, cause or ideology.
Another factor that can make quantifying the success of working with this cohort of service users problematic touches on issues of personal agency. Whilst as probation professionals we are (sometimes painfully) aware of the amount of conscientious effort and diligence that goes into motivating and supporting a service user to successfully complete their period of supervision, the bottom line is that any change that the service user effects in their lives is from their own choice and volition. If a service user wants to cite his/her offender manager as instrumental in their successful rehabilitation, probation can happily take the credit offered and communicate that more widely to other agencies, respecting any issues of confidentiality of course. With this particular cohort of offenders, it appears less straightforward to publicize success. Firstly, a service user with a TACT conviction would typically not want that to be widely known. Beyond that, I think that due to the fact that extremist-related offending, and the interventions used to address it, can both touch on things that are deep and sensitive expressions of an individual’s identity – at the end of the licence it is not really a matter of ‘case closed’ or someone being ‘fixed’ by the criminal justice system, and personally I believe we need to be cautious before highlighting cases as successes for that reason. People with TACT convictions, like most of us, are autonomous beings who value their sense of their own agency – and who do not necessarily want that to be subtly taken from them by being a success story for a government agency. None of us know what the future holds, and the paths people may decide to take in the long term. Therefore, rightly or wrongly, I think that it is important for us to communicate to the extremist-related service user ending their period of supervision a sense that they remain in charge of who they are and become, and not try to package them as our successes even if it appears that way to us.
These reflections on working with this cohort of service users are clearly not conclusive or exhaustive, but aim to provide a sense of some of the particular day-to-day challenges that addressing extremist offending entails, and ways that probation staff are responding to these, with some indications of success. Working in probation with service users is work in progress, and ways of working with extremist offenders continue to be reviewed and honed as the TACT convictions embed themselves in the criminal justice system.