The Bucharest Probation Service has been housed on the 5th floor of a very old building in the downtown of the city since 2013. There is, however, no sign stating its existence there and no guard.
Between the 19 probation officers and the 4,300 offenders placed under their responsibility by the courts of Bucharest in the last year alone, there is only an A4 piece of paper glued to the door, right as you go out of the elevator.
This situation doesn’t seem to bother anyone too much. Those who must come here monthly or weekly know where it is. It is also not something to be proud of. A man in his 60s, with a soldierly appearance and a briefcase in his hand, enters door number 10, the office of probation officer Mocanu Crina.
Seated in front of the person who will monitor his life until 2022, month by month, Mr. X does not hesitate to answer his mobile phone and say "I'm out, for an interview, talk to you later."
The first commandment: Do not judge!
Mr. X was sentenced to a suspended sentence of three years, with 6 years in prison if he doesn’t manage to respect his obligations. He’s part of a famous group of convicts – all white-collar criminals – and alleges that he is not guilty, being just a collateral victim of political harassment.
He comes to Mrs. Mocanu monthly and is obliged to tell her if he has a job, if he changed his residence or if leaves town for more than eight days. The frequency of visits is established at the beginning by the probation officer, until they get to know each other and a relationship is established. Then, considering how the person meets the deadlines and other aspects, the visits can become less frequent, as a reward for good behavior.
Though retired, Mr. X said that he had no trouble to find work because of his record, as "at the construction company where I work there are more criminals." He smiles ironically and tells the officer he has the same monthly income as the last time – which is several times higher than the salary of a probation officer.
Other "clients" of Mrs. Mocanu’s are not as lucky as Mr X. Many fail to find work, unless they don’t mention their criminal record. Some even lose the job they already had after being convicted for petty things, such as a small car accident. A young man convicted of drug trafficking is fortunate not to have lost his job in telecommunications, but said that in the two years since he registered with the probation services, he received a better employment offer from another firm, but they changed their mind when they heard about his criminal record.
Some companies do not ask, so the future employees do not mention that they are tied to the Probation Service. Others find work abroad, because nobody asks there for a criminal record from Romania.
Thus a few hundreds of those supervised by the Probation Service from Bucharest (SPB) actually live in other European countries: 33 in Spain, 146 in Britain, 26 in France, 39 in Italy and 26 in Germany. They come to Bucharest every 3 months, or more often, and "are nice" to the probation officers – they prove they have a job, that they live there legally and comply with the obligations imposed by the court. Then they keep on with their life.
This is, according to Gabriel Oancea, SPB’s chief, normal. Probation officers have to help people integrate. Those who do go abroad often go also because nobody judges them there for their past.
"In the top of the rules of relating to people who come to us this is the first commandment: do not judge them. Their condemnation is often just the end of a long chain of wrong decisions. That we can all do someties. Even white collars," Oancea says.
Oancea thinks that the number of people reaching the Probation Service is not something that came from God, but a result of how society works. And then society doesn’t want to see them again. It actually wants these people to be locked away somewhere outside the cities, with the key thrown away, never to be found again.
According to Oancea, "In Bulgaria those sentenced to community work may even get to work on the victim’s street. The victim is consulted on where the convict is to be put to work. Sometimes it helps to see that the person wants to move on, to pay for her mistake."
The second commandment: Tell a good word
For some of those visiting the probation officer, the session can at least have some therapeutic effects. The second commandment of a probation manual could be to teach the person in front of you that they are worth something and that they can do good and move on from breaking the law. Some of the convicts hear such words for the first time in their lives when they get to the Probation Service. Mocanu Crina says she is trying to open the appetite for reading in the case of a juvenile that she monitors by bringing him books from her children.
All probation officers have their success stories, that motivate them to stay in the system, despite the difficulties of the work. The average salary of a probation officer revolves around 2,000 lei (470 euros), so money is not what drives people to hold on to such jobs.
Gabriel Oancea says that, although at the TV we can see only celebrities that came to a point where they received a suspended sentence and had to go the probation service, in reality the professional challenges are different:
"These famous people are actually very well integrated, there's nothing to do, nothing we can help them with. They know very well that they were wrong, why they were wrong, they already have a place in society and they do not need us. But when you have a case to which not even you give too many chances to in the beginning, and yet a few years after you see that they managed to stay afloat, or even overcome their condition, then that's a true professional satisfaction. I have a girl who told me at one point that she could no longer do what she did, because if she gets caught she will think of what would I say. Because often I get to know about them here, at this desk, even more than their families know."
Of course, not all people are the same. There are also thefts in probation offices, from the hand-bags the officers live in sight, and some "clients" come here to vent their fury. In the probation offices there is no magic wand. People who committed a crime come and stay for an hour with the probation officer, but then they return back to their lives and that does not change. Often their entourage awaits them rights at the ground floor, in the antique shop.
Working with a probation officer should be similar to going to a priest or a psychologist: visits should happen weekly, or the officer should come to you. That cannot however happen with the current workload of the officers. When a probation officer is responsible for 2-300 cases, as it often happens, the probation work turns from working with people to working with papers. The situation has been like this for more than 3 years now, since the entry into force of the new criminal code, which changed the regulations related to punishment.
Probation - an efficient service in terms of rehabilitating offenders and lowering the relapse rate (5-6% versus 70% the relapse rate of those who go to prisons) - has become in Romania a concept almost entirely drained of substance. The new laws on probation charged these services with many tasks, but along the way the state forgot to also hire more people. That made that the number of cases going to probation services doubled overnight, between 2013 and 2014. If until then the probation service was expecting up to 220 new cases per year, in 2015 the increased by 1380. Currently in Romania there are 58.718 such cases, handled by the 330 existing probation offices, with no signs in sight of the situation improving. Each officer has to handle about 200 cases at a time, although they can’t possibly work efficiently with more than 60 people at once.
A great source of new cases in the past two years are traffic violations. According to the old law, the suspended sentences for traffic related crimes – from drunk driving to accidents with victims – were not monitored; by anyone. Now they all go to probation services.
Third Commandment: Be honest
An example of the "knife to the neck" style in which probation services must work can be found in the cases where judges order "daily assistance" – which happens especially in cases involving juveniles. In such situations assistance can’t be provided in practice more than once a week. One such case is that of Y -a 17 years old boy, with dark hair and long lashes - caught stealing mirrors from cars in April 2016. He is very close to finishing his 6 months of probation – that is the maximum usually minors get for petty crimes. Within these 6 months however he didn’t respect the most basic rules of the program – he did not go to school, he did not tell the officers when he left town or when he changed workplace; nor was he punctual for the meetings with the officers.
Probation officers are aware that in the current situation the result of their work relies more than ever in the mutual sincerity between them and the offenders. It might seem like a paradox to rely on the sincerity of a person caught stealing, but sometimes things actually work out, because a conviction is in many cases likely to teach people a lesson so they stop doing mistakes. In addition to that, a probation officer can, at any time, withdraw the suspended sentence, which would throw the offender directly into jail.
Mocanu Crina says that the systems doesn’t actually function in the case of juveniles. The maximum period of time for which they are usually placed in probation is of 6 months during which, with the current workload, there is time for just a few counselling sessions. For minors there are also just a few integration programs; schools sometimes refuse to give them a "second chance" or the 6 months are into the middle of the school year, when new registrations are not accepted. Employment agencies have no trainings for minors, so the 6 months can easily pass without the minor seeing any change in their life. The only thing that could actually make a difference is luck or some unusual form of personal determination.
We are an experiment and we will be exterminated
Crina Mocanu’s last client from a day which started at 9 and finished at 17 is a deafmute person, which got a 4 years suspended sentence, with 7 years of imprisonment if he doesn’t pass probation, for robbery. The guy, who is in his 40s, is smiling and seems open but hardly understand anything the special interpreter brought from the Deaf Association tells him, so he answers with whatever crosses his mind. The interpreter says this is because the convict has not learned properly the sign language and the number of words he knows is really limited, which makes it very difficult for him to actually say something, so he uses signs that he invented himself. This makes work extremely difficult, to his probation file contains very little information.
What they know is that he has a few children; they do not know how many, how old are they or who is/are their mother/s. Nobody knows where he works or how much he earns. Seeing how difficult communication with him is, I ask how did things go during the trial, how did they manage to convict them. They say the judge asked if he stole the bag, the interpreter translated in sign language, he answered yes, and that was it.
Crina Mocanu asks the questions, the interpreter translates, but the answers are awry. At the end of the meeting all that we know is that he recently became a father, that he likes to feed his two children (a girl and a boy) with the baby bottle, that the children are growing and becoming chubby, that his wife washes clothes and lays them on the wire. The interpreter has finally managed to find that the man works three times a week at a church at the end of the trolley line no. 96, and that he gets paid with 60 lei (12 Euros); it is not clear if that pay is per day or per week.
The situation seems absurd, but it certainly illustrates more than one might think about the situation of the probation system. People have been complaining to the Ministry of Justice for over a year now about all this, making protests and strikes. The dialogue didn’t, until now, work. Nothing changes and the number of cases reaching the probation services is higher and higher. For example, SPB is now in the situation of having more than 100 new cases sent by judges from July onwards, which are not even taken on yet. The offenders came to the SPB with the papers from the court, but they were told "leave us your phone number and we’ll reach out to you."
Since the entering into force of the new laws, probation officers feel that they were abandoned. To start with, they are not receiving any specialized trainings and the delays in hiring new staff puts such a disproportionate burden on the frail shoulders of a few lawyers, sociologists, psychologists and theologians. "Probation services have an elite corps of professionals, therefore hiring new colleagues cannot damage the quality of staff," explains Oancea.
But his colleagues would really prefer to move forward with the hiring. "Quality, quality, but we can’t do it anymore. We are an experiment, but soon we will be exterminated by physical exhaustion," said one of Mocanu Crina’s colleagues.
Probation is a civilized solution, which has shown to be effective in many countries when it comes to the reintegration of prisoners; but, as many other services, it stumbles into everyday realities: lack of money, lack of space, lack of specialized personnel, lack of viable opportunities in the labor market or lack of social services complementary to probation services which should help ex-convicts, so they do not reoffend.
Romanian society does not know how and it does not try to learn to forgive and to accept its failures. Some people get thrown into jail, without anyone wanting to hear about prison conditions; some other are sent to probation services. No matter what happens to these people during their sentence, society does not want to have anything to do with them after.
