Strengthening Probation as an Important Step in Reforming the Penitentiary System. Column by Olena Kochura for the Yurydychna Hazeta

In 2022, the Government adopted the Strategy for the Penitentiary Sytmen Reform for the next four years. It envisages strengthening probation as a distinct action area. Having alternative sanctions in the criminal justice system is not only one of the aspects to reform in the criminal justice system, but also the imperative of our time.

Despite Russian full-scale military aggression against Ukraine, the probation reform continues. Many important legislative regulations have been adopted, in particular, probation supervision has been introduced. It is a new type of alternative sanction that does not involve imprisonment.

It is common for society to be concerned about such innovations. Some citizens mistakenly assume that probation is an option to avoid punishment for unlawful behaviour. However, this is not the case at all. The authorities, together with civil society activists and journalists, have to explain the public that probation is a fair punishment. It is proven to be effective, and widening its scope is consistent with the goals of justice.

In most cases, the opportunity for people who have committed minor offences to atone for their guilt and set out on a path of rehabilitation without isolation from society speeds up and improves educational processes and significantly saves the budget by making prisons less overcrowded and reducing the expenditures on prison population maintenance. For example, it is more than 10 times more expensive for one person to serve a sentence in prison than to be on probation. It includes not only the costs of food in prisons, but also utility bills, staff salaries, facility maintenance, etc.

Probation is not only about monitoring how a person serves their sentence. It is also about a whole new philosophy and a desire to understand, help and assist. In recent years, we have seen a clear transition from a punitive and solely monitoring approach to an individual one.

Since 2017, the scope of using probation has expanded significantly: before, probation applied to only persons sentenced to non-custodial punishment (community service, correctional labour, prohibition to practice certain activities)and those with conditional sentences. Probation now covers the pre-trial stage (a pre-trial report based on a risk assessment and recommendations to the court on the possibility of rehabilitating a person without isolation from society and prescribing responsibilities that would best contribute to the rehabilitation of that person), supporting a person while they are serving their sentence or on probation, and working with convicts who are about to be released from prison. International best practices, working methods and tools have given impetus to these developments.

The best principle of working with offenders in the whole world - case management - is also used in Ukraine. This approach includes assessing the risk of reoffending, drawing up an individual plan based on the identified criminogenic needs, and continuous monitoring and analysis of both the plan implementation and any changes in the person’s circumstances.

For example, at the request of the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine, experts of EU Project Pravo-Juctice have designed a unified risk assessment tool regarding reoffending. They are also helping probation staff to pilot it. Before creating this tool, we conducted thorough research involving a survey of probation staff, analysis of thousands of cases from the Unified Register of Convicts and Detainees (URCD), and exploration of international best practices.

Effective reoffending risk assessment is an essential element of strengthening probation. We expect that piloting the unified reoffending risk assessment will improve the likelihood of a person’s re-entry into the penal system, the quality of filling out risk assessments, and upgrade the level of assessment development to the 5th generation. The new approaches imply that a unified risk assessment form will be used in pre-trial probation and probation supervision. It is expected to increase the correlation between the pre-trial report and probation supervision from the 20 per cent observed now to 80-90 per cent. Moreover, it will improve the assessment of the overall level of reoffending resulting from "static factors" (with a coefficient of 60% from the overall level of risk of reoffending) and "dynamic factors" (40%). Furthermore, we have developed guidelines on how the court can prescribe responsibilities and social and educational work (probation programmes/ their modules, etc.) that would best contribute to the resocialisation of a particular probation client.

To improve the assessment and efficiency of resocialisation efforts for convicts and probation clients, EU Project Pravo-Justice provided financial and expert support to develop a dashboard visualising these individuals’ criminogenic needs. Why is it important? Until now, the staff probation and penal institutions manually calculated convicts’ criminogenic needs using both high-quality and low-quality risk assessments. The presented dashboard automates the collection and analysis of information using only high-quality assessments. Thanks to this, we now have the most up-to-date information on the criminogenic needs that require the greatest extent of intervention. We will also be able to develop special rehabilitation programmes for convicted persons or probation programmes for probation clients to effectively respond to the identified criminogenic needs. This dashboard will also help to identify priority areas to direct community resources to reform convicts’ behaviour and minimise the risk of them re-entering the criminal justice system.

So far, considerable efforts have been made to reform probation. However, there is still a long way to go, and the experts of EU Project Pravo-Justice will continue supporting the Ministry of Justice and dedicated institutions in implementing the required changes. Humanising the penitentiary system and building a safe society are common goals that we will definitely achieve.

Olena Kochura, Key National Expert on Supporting Penitentiary System Reform, EU Project Pravo-Justice.

The text was first published in Yurydychna Hazeta.