What on earth do you do with a Sociology degree?

by Michelle Buckberry, Keele graduate in Sociology

(On the left, Michelle now; on the right, Michelle when she was at Keele)

I graduated from Keele University in 2001 with a BA Joint Honours in Visual Art and Sociology. About two months before I was due to sit my finals, I went into panic mode. What on earth was I going to do with this degree once I got it? How on earth was I going to integrate my two main interests, art and society, into some kind of paid employment come July? It was a scary thought, and one I began to wish I had considered sooner. The spectre of the real world was looming and I didn’t have a clue how I was going to survive in it.

So, what did I do? Well, I read a self help book. Something that many of you (including my friends – you know who you are) will scoff at. However, this wasn’t any self help book. This was the guide to careers for artists and unconventional people. When I saw it in a bookshop in Nottingham, I thought I had been saved. Any maybe I was. Several quizzes, personality tests and soul searching sessions later I figured out what I wanted to be. An art therapist. It was perfect. I get to work with interesting people and paint at the same time. My dream job.

There were two obstacles to this dream. One was a rather costly MA. The other was the need to have experience working with vulnerable adults. Luckily a mature student in the year below me was less naïve about the wonders of work and pointed me in the direction of Society Guardian. Eagerly I scampered to the nearest newsagents and, after a few false starts, found a couple of jobs I could apply for that did not require any previous experience. One of them was working for Mencap as a support worker for adults with learning disabilities down in London. So, off I went on the train from Stoke on Trent and attended my first interview. The rest, as they say, is history.

I worked for Mencap for four and a half years, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Yes, it was challenging at times, but I look back on that first job with fond memories. But it became apparent quite early on in my career that I like change. I did a bit of voluntary work to widen my experience, first at a clinic for sex workers, and later at a hostel for rough sleepers where I ran an art group. In 2005, however, I knew it was time to move on. I had been promoted at Mencap and was now a deputy manager, and it was time to either move onwards or upwards. Literally, in fact, as I hopped across the river from good old Lambeth to Camden.

My first job at Camden Council was as a support worker for homeless families, but I soon moved on to work with ex-offenders and drug users who needed support moving into and living in privately rented accommodation. It was certainly an eye opener and my first proper glimpse into the Criminal Justice System. But, after about two and a half years, I was ready to try something new.

For the last two and a half years I have worked with Prolific and other Priority Offenders (or PPOs) and their families. My remit is to work with some of the most prolific offenders in Camden who are not currently under any statutory supervision from the probation services, in a multi agency team alongside London Probation, the Metropolitan Police and the Drug Intervention Programme (DIP). It has certainly been a challenge to say the least. My experience is that you can lead a horse to water…, which is certainly true of offenders, especially those who seem to have had their anti-social behaviour ingrained within them by the age of eighteen. However, every now and again we work with an offender who turns their life around, and some of them even end up working in the field themselves.

As for the Art Therapy? Well, I did apply to do a course a couple of years ago and was delighted when I was offered a place at Goldsmiths University. Unfortunately I ended up turning it down due to the sheer amount of time and money I would have to commit. However, I have yet to give up on the idea. Who knows what the future may bring? One thing is for certain: If you had told me when I graduated that in ten years time I would be knocking on the doors of burglars with the police and popping along to HMP Wormwood Scrubs on a regular basis, I don’t think I would have believed you.

Background to the Dano Sonnex case

By Professor Anne Worrall

The former Chief Inspector of Probation, Rod Morgan, said in The Guardian today (5 June 2009) that the killing of two French students had become the ‘Baby P of Probation’. What did he mean? In the past few years, probation officers have been subject to the kind of media attention that was previously reserved for child protection social workers. When known offenders, under the supervision of probation officers, commit what are termed serious further offences, there is an understandable public demand to blame someone (other than the offenders) for not doing their jobs properly. This has been happening to social workers for decades ever since the death of Maria Colwell at the hands of her stepfather in 1973. But until recently probation officers have escaped this scrutiny because, historically, their job has been viewed (inaccurately) as being more about ‘advising, assisting and befriending’ offenders than about controlling them and protecting the public from them. Probation officers have always attempted to balance the ‘care’ and ‘control’ aspects of their work but the emphasis on ‘control’ has increased sharply in the past 10 years and particularly in the past 5 years since the formation in 2004 of the National Offender Management Service, which has combined the Prison Service and the National Probation Service in an attempt to provide ‘end-to-end’ or ‘seamless’ management of offenders through their imprisonment and eventual release on supervision in the community.


When this ‘seamlessness’ unravels so dramatically as it has done in the Dano Sonnex case, it is right that we should ask how this ‘was allowed’ to happen and how these crimes might have been prevented. There have been several reports on the case (see the Ministry of Justice website) and they point to a number of errors of judgement and poor communications. Sonnex went to prison in 2003 for a violent offence and was initially considered to be very disruptive and dangerous. He applied for parole (early release) twice and was refused twice by the Parole Board. He was released at the latest possible legal date and subject to a licence supervised by the Probation Service. But by that time he had calmed down in prison and, on release, was assessed as being of medium risk to the public. If he had been assessed as high risk, he would have received more intensive supervision under ">Multi Agency Public Protection Arrangements (MAPPA) but that didn’t happen. Nevertheless, his probation officer became sufficiently concerned about his behaviour that she initiated procedures to have him recalled to prison for breaching his licence. Her managers delayed signing this off as they wanted more information and, meanwhile, he appeared in court for a relatively minor non-violent offence. The magistrates had to adjourn the case because it was not ready to proceed but they thought he would be recalled to prison that day anyway, so granted him ‘technical’ bail. But the recall papers weren’t ready and he went free. When the recall papers were eventually completed, the police delayed acting upon them and failed to arrest him until it was too late. As one report points out, if any one of these errors had not happened, the French students would probably still be alive.

But this is not the first time this has happened to the
Probation Service. In 2005, two cases with similar characteristics to the Sonnex case resulted in similar media coverage – the case of Damien Hanson and Elliott White (who killed John Monckton while they were on prison licence supervision) and that of Anthony Rice (who killed Naomi Bryant while he was on prison licence supervision). All these cases raise serious questions about how realistic it is to aspire to the ‘seamless’ management of offenders. They raise questions about communication between various criminal justice agencies, about resources, about training and about the nature of risk assessment. But, more fundamentally, they raise questions about the overloading of our penal system with thousands of relatively minor offenders, resulting in the system being unable to devote sufficient attention to the few highly dangerous offenders who fall through the cracks with tragic consequences. As Rod Morgan says, ‘The big lesson from the Ferez and Bonomo case is that the attention of penal services needs to be reserved for offenders who merit it. The system is overloaded with offenders who don’t.'