Social_Welfare_Annual_Report_1963-1964 — Page 21

servants of the courts, as well as members of the Social Welfare Depart- ment. The aims of the Probation Section of the Department might be described as collaboration with the other authorities who have to deal with offenders--the courts, the prisons and the police-in creating a social machine able effectively to contain, if not in fact to reduce, those negative forces in the community which are destructive of humanity and civilized economy; keeping their part of this machine sufficiently strong and efficient to take the strain of any likely increase in offenders on probation or in demands by the courts for more social inquiries; keeping their attitudes of mind and methods of treatment (particularly when serving in institutions) flexible and appropriate to changing social habits and to their own growing experience; and diversifying their approaches so that follow-up and aftercare treatment of 'out-patients' form a continuous and compatible process with the training given in detention.

34. The establishment of the Probation Section is now twenty-nine officers, but the effective strength this year was lower because of the unavoidable demands of training, both in-service and overseas. Eighteen of these officers worked in the Probation Service proper, which was responsible for the supervision of over eighteen hundred probationers and others. A grand total of well over one thousand persons were under supervision at the end of the year. Many detailed figures are given in Appendix 7. Despite their separate origin (the Probation Service left the Prisons Department as recently as 1948) and their special position in relation to the courts probation officers consider themselves in every respect as social workers first and foremost, and if ever there were a tendency to treat them as generically different and in a watertight com- partment, it was as wrong then as it is non-existent now.

35. Probation officers still carry an abnormally heavy individual load of work. This is evident from the fact that while five years ago eleven officers supervised about two hundred and seventy cases, at the end of the present year the eighteen mentioned in the last paragraph were supervising one thousand and seventy-six. It remains surprising therefore, though a matter for some pride, that the technical 'success' rate, that is to say the number of those who completed their periods of probation without perpetrating any further offence, rose to four in five, compared with about two out of three a couple of years ago. The twenty per cent of 'failures' were mostly sentenced after their fresh crimes to a training centre or to

15