Supervising the bad and the dangerous

Supervising the Bad and the Dangerous

Not long ago, the papers were filled with the case of Phillip Similane, the paranoid schizophrenic man who stabbed schoolgirl Christina Edkins to death on a Birmingham bus in March.  Similane, who had a history of violence and criminal damage, had been released from prison against a psychiatrist's advice three months earlier.  As always in tragic cases like this, fingers of blame were immediately pointed at the various agencies which should have been supervising him.  They were right of course - a dangerous man had been released into the community and he had certainly not been supervised sufficiently to prevent the needless death of an innocent schoolgirl.  Hands were held up and the usual statement that "lessons will be learned" was meekly trotted out.  How does something like this come to pass though? Similane's case is hardly an isolated one - in the past year thirteen people have been killed in random knife attacks in Birmingham alone.  Comparable figures can be seen in several other major cities across the UK as well.  Many of the killers have turned out to be people who were already on social services' radar.  How, the public must ask every time, can this keep happening when public agencies always claim to have leant their lesson from the last tragedy.  The sad reality though, is that no matter how much hand wringing is done and how many promises are made to learn lessons, even the best supervision cannot prevent such tragedies from happening.

Allow me to explain.  Most social work staff have personal caseloads of between a dozen and thirty individuals or families and only a limited amount of time to supervise them in. The time which can be dedicated to any individual case must necessarily be limited, especially when copious amounts of requisite paperwork are taken into consideration.  As someone who is often in the position of performing supervision on potentially dangerous people, I can attest to the fact that it can be extremely difficult to achieve.  If an individual fails to answer the door or keep an appointment, there can often be little option but to move onto the next case, as every other case must be attended to as well. If you cannot meet with your client, time constraints frequently mean that there will be no opportunity to meet again until the following week.  If a person insists on refusing to engage, there is often little that social agencies can do.  You cannot force someone to answer the telephone, any more than you can force entry into their house to check on them without a warrant.  If you suspect a mental health issue you cannot forcibly section them under the Mental Health Act either.  They must do it voluntarily.  The police, who also often shoulder blame, are the only ones who can forcibly subject anyone to a psychiatric assessment.  They are busy though, and generally require more tangible evidence than social workers' suspicions to take action.

In an ideal world we would provide 24 hour supervision, but reality means that only about an hour and a half can be dedicated to each person per week and even then, only if they choose to work with us. Even if they do keep appointments and seem to engage, there is often no way to observe what they do during the other 166 hours of the week.  Along with people who succeeded in finding the straight and narrow, I have also had clients who smiled and signed up for training courses, but later turned out to have been habitual burglars or muggers in their unsupervised time.

There are, of course, ways to try to regulate someone's behaviour.  Tags can be fitted and curfews imposed to limit mobility, but these are often notoriously ineffectual.  I recall one ex-offender I worked with whose door was fitted with a sensor, which would trip an alarm if it was opened after 6pm. She also received a telephone check each day at 6.05pm to confirm she was home. If she wasn't, she risked returning to prison.  Yet one day I saw her out with friends at 9.30pm.  I called her social worker next morning and was told that she had answered the curfew call and no alarms had been tripped.  She laughed as she told me she had simply climbed out through the window.  Another client subject to a curfew seemed to be fully committed to retraining as a plumber.  He turned out though, to be in the habit of inviting people to visit shortly before his curfew time and then holding them captive overnight under threat of violence, in order to extort money from them.  While these are not examples of random murderers, they do demonstrate the fact that outside institutions, people cannot be supervised 100% of the time.  Even the most engaging person may be hiding a dark and criminal side.

Not all ex-offenders are dangerous, but there are certainly many, like Phillip Simelane, who common sense says should have remained locked up.  The NHS though, is lacking thousands of the mental health beds it needs and lack of places in our prisons is axiomatic.  Managers sometimes have no choice but to move some of their inmates on before the next lot arrive.  When one of them then randomly attacks someone, there is justifiable public anger.  Who should take the blame though?  The support worker who tries hard to work with a person who refuses to engage?  The social worker with the overlarge caseload?  The police?  The prison or NHS manager who needs to find spaces for a steady flow of new occupants?  Or the person who opposes new prisons in his back yard?  I don't have the answer.  We just do our level best to help our charges to become responsible members of society.  When the inevitable tragedy happens, it will be one no-one could have prevented, but the public will still demand that lessons be learned.