Poet laureate Simon Armitage on his years as a probation officer – and the redemptive power of poetry

When now-poet laureate Simon Armitage retired from the Probation Service, his dad was “a bit miffed”.

“I went into probation because my dad was a probation officer,” Armitage tells Big Issue. “He was always a bit miffed with me that I’d retired from the Probation Service before he did. I think he was a bit worried about me, because I was giving up my profession for this thing called poetry.”

The ‘thing called poetry’ worked out – Armitage was named the UK’s poet laureate in 2019, is a fellow of the Royal Society for Literature, a CBE, and a former professor of poetry at the University of Oxford.

But the Yorkshireman has never forgotten the eight years he spent working on a probation team in Manchester, monitoring offenders and attempting to reintegrate them into society. Today (20 March), he’s published a new ode to this work – A Life in the Day Of.

The poem details the day-to-day of those who choose this difficult profession, from finding housing for former offenders to dealing with those who breach of bail conditions. Armitage hopes his dad would like it.

“My dad died four years ago, and you know, one of the reasons why I wanted to get involved is because I was thinking a lot about him,” the poet laureate said. “I think he would have definitely recognised line for line, the things that I was talking about.”

“I like to think that if he’d still been a probation officer, he might have pinned it up in his in his office.”

England and Wales have the highest incarceration rate in Western Europe, at 141 people per 100,000. The prison population has risen by 80% in the last 30 years.

Reoffending rates are stubbornly high. Some 29% of former prisoners are back in custody within 18 months of their release – a proportion that surges to 63% of inmates who serve less than 12 months in custody.

Successive governments have claimed to be “tough on crime”,  but harsh sentencing doesn’t tackle the root of antisocial behaviour. A lack of re-integration support is the single biggest contributor to this vicious cycle – which is where a good probation officer comes in.

“It is about making life tolerable for people, it’s about rehabilitation, aiming towards an effective release – with the idea that, you know, if people come out of prison, they won’t go straight back in,” Simon Armitage says.

“I think of being a probation officer as sort of like an intermediary role, or almost like a translator between then criminal justice system and the general world outside.”

Officers “make a plan. Rip it up. Boil the kettle” the poem tells us – and walk the “high wire between care and control.” They need a “Big heart, thick skin, the patience of Job,” Armitage writes – it’s not an “easy job.”

On his own time in the service, the poet is blunt: “It was very trying.” Officers deal with high caseloads, managing individuals who may be resistant to change or struggle with addiction and mental health issues.  

“it’s not a frequent situation that you will you will see immediate progress,” ARmitage said. “But you will see slow progress.”

Unfortunately, too few people sign up to this vital role, a low rate that Armitage attributes partly to common misperceptions about probation. More than a third (35%) of adults know nothing about what it’s like to work within the Probation Service, new HMPPS research shows – compared to life working in teaching (15%), policing (22%), the ambulance service (22%), social services (22%) and the fire service (24%). 

“If you’re trying to recruit people to a profession and it’s something that you believe in, it’s a little bit difficult if the general public don’t really understand what that job is,” Armitage says. “It’s a long time since I was a probation officer, but I would tell people what I did, and they would slightly glaze over, or they’d seen American [film and TV] about the probation service, you know, the sort of gun carrying thing.”

“it’s a much more complex and varied role.”

It’s been some years since Simon Armitage himself worked in the service. His poetry career took off shortly after he resigned, and he hasn’t really looked back. But poetry and probation have more in common than you might initially think, he says.

“One of the ways that the poetry does help is that it reminds us that the world is made up of individuals. However much that poem might be describing the general situation, it’s come from me, and it’s my take on that situation. And I think poetry humanises for that reason, it reminds us that, you know, we all have slightly different views of the world. We all walk in a slightly different way.

“And I guess that was one of my motivating factors for going into probation, just to, you know, recognise people as people, even if they have a different angle to the universe than me.”

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