What is social about criminal justice social work in Belgium?

ABSTRACT

This paper is concerned with how ‘social work’ is constructed in policy documents of Belgian criminal justice social work, applied to the Houses of Justice, Department of Offender Guidance (previously called the probation service). We argue that Belgian probation has been indeed under influence of controlling tendencies, however, these are masked in a managerial cloth rather than an open punitive stance. Second, we notice that social work values are interpreted in a very limited and methodical manner, namely with reference to the systems perspective of the Palo Alto school of Gregory Bateson and Paul Watzlawick as the work method for all Belgian probation tasks. Hence, from this analysis, we argue for a more radical debate on the relation between probation and social work.

ABSTRACT

Deze tekst beschrijft hoe ‘sociaal werk’ wordt geconstrueerd in beleidsdocumenten van justitieel sociaal werk in België. De analyse wordt toegepast op de Justitiehuizen, en meer specifiek op het departement Daderbegeleiding. We stellen vast dat de Belgische Justitiehuizen niet gevrijwaard bleven van internationale tendensen in het justitieel sociaal werk, maar zien dat - in tegenstelling tot andere Europese landen - deze toenemende invloed eerder onder de noemer van managerialisme valt, dan onder punitiviteit. Ten tweede stellen we vast dat sociaal werk waarden, zoals vastgelegd in beleidsdocumenten, vaak worden geïnterpreteerd in enge zin en op een beperkte methodische manier. Zo wordt er bijvoorbeeld gesproken over het naar voren schuiven van het systeemtheoretisch kader van de Palo Alto school van Gregory Bateson en Paul Watzlawick als werkmodel. Naar aanleiding van de analyse van de gegevens pleiten we daarom voor een radicaler debat over de relatie tussen daderbegeleiding en sociaal werk.

KEYWORDS:

• Criminal justice social work
• Belgium
• probation
• social work values

KERNWOORDEN:

• Justitieel sociaal werk
• België
• daderbegeleiding
• sociaal werk waarden

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Aline Bauwens is lecturer and researcher affiliated to the Department of Criminology at Vrije Universiteit Brussels (Belgium).

Rudi Roose is professor of social work affiliated to the Department of Social Work and Social Pedagogy at Ghent University (Belgium).

Notes

1. ‘Probation’ in this article is understood as defined by the Council of Europe Recommendation CM/Rec (2010) 1:

Probation relates to the implementation in the community of sanctions and measures, defined by law and imposed on an offender. It includes a range of activities and interventions, which involve supervision, guidance and assistance aiming at the social inclusion of an offender, as well as at contributing to community safety. (Part I: definitions).

2. Incremental change as opposed to transformational change: transformational change is the form of change characterised by radical shifts in strategy, reorganisations of systems and structures, changing values and changes in the distribution of power across the whole organisation.

3. In 1999 probation officers became officially ‘justice assistants’. This name change was the result of global reorganisation of the probation agencies and the establishment of ‘Houses of Justice’ in each jurisdiction. This reorganisation has to be understood within a broader political attempt to regain legitimacy by taking the para-judicial agencies out of the often alienating court buildings and bringing them closer to the public. After having been part of the Directorate General of the Judicial Order and then the Directorate General of the Prison and Probation Administration, they became a separate Directorate General of the Houses of Justice within the Ministry of Justice on 1 January 2007 in order to enhance their professional status and organisational legitimacy.

4. The exact title in Dutch is the: Dienstorder ter verduidelijking van de deontologische principes van de justitieassistent - Belangrijke deontologische principes en bepaalde methodologische aspecten.