Minds Inside Minds

This is dedicated to my former Probation colleagues and all you fellow employees of the Criminal Justice System. If you don't fall into this category, but you love a crime drama, or you are fascinated by the inner workings of this agency and your interest is piqued, then you've arrived in just the right place to delve into this fascinating realm of 'minds within minds'.

This won't be a conventional crime drama 'review to watch' list but it will, I hope, give you food for thought and a bite-size insight into one of the most essential services that operate within the United Kingdom. There will, of course, be a passing nod to some of the best and most gripping crime and true-crime drama that television streaming services have to offer currently.

If you're here just for those, then quick tip, make sure you tune in to the next instalment of 'Line of Duty', now live at 9 pm on Sundays on BBC 1 or catch up on BBC i-player. If you haven't started this already, then skip this read and go start it from the beginning. If you appreciate good crime drama, you will not regret it, but watch it from Series 1 because it's well worth the binge.

Whether you work in the field of crime, justice and rehabilitation or not, but intrigue has the better of you, welcome, you are amongst friends and like-minded analytics.

Seeing the subject suggestion "If this, then that", for Vocal's content creation series, got my mind maze fired up. It's been brilliant fun to tap back into a part of my own geeking obsession with crime drama and revisit that fascinating phenomenon - the human psyche. So herein lies my first Vocal article inauguration, whether I make the competition deadline or not, whether it fits the brief or not, I hope you enjoy it.

My focus for writing is usually pinned somewhere much more niche when it comes to content creation, but the nuts and bolts of everything we do and write about find their origin in how humanity orientates itself within the spheres we find ourselves in.

When thinking about crime and society in general though, some of us are naturally more woke to the societal assumptions about complex criminogenic needs. Failure to understand the intricacies of human experience and behaviour contributes significantly to discriminatory perceptions of crime. It is this bias and discrimination that bears a dark shadow over the criminal justice sector and ultimately impedes how justice is delivered.

To level this and be capable of assessing an individual who commits an offence that warrants criminal justice intervention, necessitates a quality of humanity that is persistently willing to look and explore far beyond what we are told to see and think. A humanity that is unyielding in its commitment to really see the reality that an individual, subject to this level of scrutiny and assessment, exists within.

This remains a core life value for me, to really seek to see, and it was something that I held to, above all else, when I worked the Probation circuit of the Criminal Justice System.

This level of insight and awareness can be a foundational pre-requisite for anyone training in criminal behaviour analysis but the reality of delivering authentic behavioural change services and intervention is a far cry from what we see presented on our screens.

The long proliferation of excellent crime drama shows that have frequented our screens since they first started airing back in 1951, with Dragnet, only feeds the general public with a notion that we are all capable of being criminal behavioural analysis experts. Demand has never really slowed down since the early viewings of Dragnet and the popularity of crime drama production continues.

If you haven't seen Dragnet and you have a notion for nostalgia you can explore the whole back catalogue on YouTube.

Very few and far between are crime dramas depicting reality. Non more frustrating for both viewer and active employee of said institutions, than the continuing attempts to document the diverse professionals and different agencies involved in everyday criminal justice delivery, that are popularised on the projection that the drama follows real-life crime events.

What's the appeal?

When you watch a good crime drama does it spark up a desire in you to start a career in the Criminal Justice Service? I'm going to suppose that this is unlikely? So what then is it about crime drama, that we are so hooked on? The subject, the profile or the profiler?

(Poster shared from The Movie Database)

For criminal justice employees, it's never really leaving work, when you've honed the mind towards behavioural analysis, the mind never stops, so it might as well be put to use and stretched by absorbing it in the latest crime drama. Once turned on, there's really no switching off. What's learned can never be unlearned and every moment spent in the system only develops the mind further, until skills development becomes a way of life, long after you leave the service. Watching crime drama then becomes a welcomed distraction from dwelling on the real-life caseload. After all, the level of intensity required to train is designed to hone your capacity to understand all presentations and motivations of the human modus operandi.

It is, in reality, an intense, all-encompassing and extensive journey to train for a role in the Criminal Justice System, with each aspect of the system warranting different training and no one professional path within the system following the same course. Police, courts, legal services, children's services, drug and alcohol agencies, mental health services, housing authorities, probation, prisons and victim services all forming a crucial part of the system, none of them commensurately paid.

All of these professions necessitate an authentic desire to actually work in them, these are not means to end jobs. The job spec' demands everything from you, so maintaining a healthy and robust sense of self, an ability to safeguard your own mental and physical wellbeing with bullet-proof self-care boundaries is a non-negotiable, particularly if you want to go the distance in any of these career pathways.

It is the diversity of approaches from all these services coming together that forms effective service delivery. That ol' adage "teamwork makes the dreamwork" is epitomised in the unilateral efforts of all agencies to connect, understand, communicate and engage skillfully and mindfully with all key agency stakeholders, whose agenda for working with the same subject, will most likely be different.

It is perhaps unsurprising then, that very little reference is made to this part of multi-agency service provision in a televised crime drama. It doesn't quite grab the viewers attention the same way that profiling a psychopathic, sexually motivated, serial murderer evading capture does. We relish these cliff hangers and champion the lone heroes making the arrest, whose life is often hanging on by a thread. We might empathise with alleged perpetrators of crime evading unjust capture, but whichever side you partner with, the reality rarely involves singular effort and is more often than not, the collaborative efforts of many agencies that make the delivery of justice and rehabilitation possible in real life.

What really pumps up the tv viewing ratings is scandal and injustice. More specifically, the compelling viewing to be had when crime drama zeros in on the failings of the system.

Did I say, if you work in the service then you will need to have a 'strong back, soft front' and robust self-care plan in place?

"We believe that it takes a strong back and a soft front to face the world." ~ Joan Halifax

"Developing our capacity for compassion makes it possible for us to help others in a more skillful and effective way." ~ Joan Halifax

If you haven't been party to multi-agency working in this particular arena, then perhaps you can appreciate that with all the diverse motivations and potential for bias from working in this profession, that the butting of heads can and does happen. With seemingly different service objectives, attempting to work collaboratively to create a common outcome, can be a minefield with potentially dangerous and damaging fallout if shared public protection, victim and client wellbeing outcomes aren't met. These are the failings that frequently hit front-page news and are the new turbo ingredient for compelling true life crime story expose.

We see some of these themes leaching into crime-drama too as plot twists, like the conclusion portrayed in the excellent BBC production of 'The Fall', when (spoiler alert) Jamie Dornan's character, Paul Spector, meets his end at the Psychiatric Approved Premises.

The whole cog functionality of the Criminal Justice system is a delicate balancing act, unless you have worked within in it, or been subject to it, explaining this either bores, alarms, or astounds people. Needless to say, there is a lot at stake when considering the reputation and influence of such a diverse system. Something that crime drama has the power to influence.

With the Netflix true-crime drama series on the rise, in addition to fantasy crime drama that we have already touched on, we have everything covered from the Gabriel Fernandez trial, Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, Ted Bundy, the Unabomber, the unlicensed internet detectives in 'Don't F**k with Cats'. This list of true crime viewing barely scratches the surface. The hunger for public insight sparks an equally impassioned yearning for the criminal justice worker to provide rebuttals to inaccuracies whilst juggling and enduring public scrutiny and sometimes scapegoating and wearing the weight from the exposure of lessons learned too late.

It is absolutely appropriate and necessary that the general public campaigns and holds accountable the actions of service that quite literally hold the keys to someone's liberty, but the full force of failed service measures often falls on individuals rather than on the system.

There is no peace of mind for those working with the minds of true crime. If the delivery of justice is not acheived and upheld then the individual person perceived to be responsible for administering that justice is often hung out to dry, even if responbility extends far beyond the individual to the leadership of a failed system.

In my experience, it is often the practitioners responsible for understanding the inner landscape of some of the most traumatised and traumatising members of society that are held on trial. The frequency by which this takes place is far more often than the news feed conveys. Media coverage also rarely reports on the measures and steps that individual practitioners might have already taken to predict and speak up about potential safeguards that need to be in place because there is a non-disclosure culture that wraps around all the inner workings of the agency as a whole, making public accountability a mouldable message, rather than one that celebrates and upholds integrity.

With the whole service tied up in non-disclosure law, it is no mystery then that themes of failure to protect the public remain probable, especially when more than one service shares responsibility for the protection of the public. Historically responsibility for failings have become a batting contest as to where the buckstop lands. Thankfully though, in more recent years there has been a greater shift towards shared interagency learning through practitioner-led in-house training. The multi-agency failings and oversights of the past have commonly been a feature of new-recruit training, in order to empower the skill and voice of the practitioner to speak out and anticipate problematic practice.

It is against these potential failings where criminal justice practitioners are most vulnerable. It is in the speaking up and out and trying to have a voice in steering the systems and policies towards change, or highlighting when the system may likely fail an individual or a specific case, that the voice with the most experienced in the room is easily lost in legality and systemic hierarchy. In an overstretched system, it is to these minds and voices of the practitioner that the public bystander will pin misinformed observations and judgements about whether the Criminal Justice service is honest and deserving of public trust or instead should yield to its demise. So the value of these professional individual minds and voices are frequently lost in a system that can not and does not support them in the face of misplaced errors despite ordaining them to deliver the message in the first place.

In the televised drama world, these individuals are often heralded as loveable mavericks or rogue loose canons who win the respect of the service and climb the ranks for unconventional and unorthodox crime-fighting victories. Whilst this might win public appeal and rack up viewing ratings in crime drama, it is far from reality and can be career suicide for the real criminal justice practitioners.

Speaking from experience as a former Probation Officer with 14 years of service experience, the early days of entry into the system can be an uncanny meeting of intuition, inquisition, extensive cognitive behavioural training, specialisms training, empathic resilience and realised and unrealised personal motivations held together by ideals and biases that have to be identified, constantly scrutinised and more often than not, dismantled, in order to be an effective practitioner. It is a willingness to hold your own shortcomings and insight up towards a lense before you can assess, work with and make life-changing decisions about the person that finds themself subject to the Criminal Justice System. Who then in this position, carrying this level of responsibility, wouldn't watch with interest all the different stereotypes and portrayals of the criminal minds professional going about their daily business for some sweet relief?

Perhaps the term "sweet", wouldn't be your first forethought when streaming the latest crime drama, but for an employee (former or present) of the Criminal Justice System in the UK, there is something familiar, intriguing, comforting even, about languishing late into the night with the echo chamber of a really great crime drama fiction, even if it's an overly-dramatised or misaligned perspective of it.

I'm pretty honest about my penchant for a whodunit, crime-psycho-thriller drama. With a large portion of my social audience being friends and former colleagues, many of who remain in active service, I know that many of them share the same taste when it comes to home viewing choices. It's like sharing a good old case analysis session, slightly macabre perhaps but no less fascinating than externally processing a live case within supervision or amongst co-workers.

Solidarity and community form a fundamental part of surviving active service in the Criminal Justice Service. With the exposure to some of the worst things that humas are capable of imposing on each other, it requires above all else compassion and humour (albeit slightly darker than the general population would consider palatable).

Altough I have extensive practice experience in a couple of the agencies responsible for public protection and safeguarding, Probation will always be my home-call and in my opinion, it is unrivalled in it's capacity to deliver a rewarding career with variation, constant opportunity for learning, developing and making a positive impact on society. If you ever want to join the crew, I highly endorse this as a career pathway, I know it's not a pretty picture I've painted, it is far from easy and stress-free but if you have the mind for it, it will stretch your way of thinking, your perception of the world and the people you surround yourself with. It will make you confront your thoughts about your past and your future but it will also rightly position you in the present, in reality (not crime fiction or true crimes solved), and often through the person sitting in front of you.

If all of that sounds like a bit too much, then keep on enjoying those crime dramas my friend, I know I will, but also consider the real empoyees of the service and the leaps they take to keep serving the communities that we live in.

I bid you adieu for now, but not before sharing this brilliant Top-20 Crime Drama List from Jacob Robinson as a reward for making it through to the end, go check out his other recommends too if you've exhausted your current watch lists.

Thanks for reading. Feel free to share your experiences, thoughts and recommendations with me.

Tanto Amor, Sj