24 hours: Warren Charteris

CLAIRE ALLISON

Warren Charteris, known to most as Chad, is a senior probation officer with the Community Probation Service. His main role is managing offenders on home detention.

I'm a morning person, so I get up at 6am. I leave home about 7am because I bike to work. I can be here in 20 to 25 minutes – it's 13 kilometres, so I do 26km a day.

I'm here by about 7.30am, and have a shower at work. I'll take my phone off the after-hours service, and check any after-hours stuff that I've got. Then I'll log on to the computer and check event reports from the electronic monitoring company.

I'm mostly looking for unapproved absences – when someone has left their home without our permission. I'll check that out, maybe it's defective equipment and the person is still there. We need to establish, did the person actually leave.

It's not really a common occurrence. The case load varies, but I've generally got between seven and 10 home-detention people.

I'll also get notified if a person leaves early for a scheduled absence or returns late. We're more likely to get that. I'll check the paperwork and absence notices to see if the person did have a legitimate outing.

I've got to case-note all of those things. Anything we do has to be followed up with an entry on the case notes. If a person left early, I'd make a note of that to raise it when they were due to come and see me next. The reason we case-note it is because we are looking for patterns of behaviour, an escalation of behaviour.

We're expected to impose some sanction; talk to them, maybe give a written warning, or depending on how far through their sentence they are, they might have a withdrawal of privileges.

If they've been sanctioned and there are further instances of non-compliance, we'd breach them, and they come up before the court.

By and large, most comply with their sentences, although we get the odd one who takes it for granted. But most people tend to appreciate the opportunity that they have been given.

If it's an unapproved absence, it can't be assumed that just because someone's left the house, that they left without a valid reason. They can leave home for emergencies, illness, fire, that sort of thing.

Our job is to try to establish why the person left. And one of the obvious ways is to ask the offender. Nine times out of 10, all is revealed after you've spoken to them.

When I get particularly involved is when I'm having difficulty establishing a reason for the person's absence. If I've arrived at work in the morning and they're still not there, there's clearly a problem, and I'll initiate a breach and seek a warrant (to arrest) in lieu of a summons.

People usually don't get second chances when they have stuffed up to that extent.

It's happened twice in the 11, 12 years since home detention was introduced, someone's ripped the anklet off and gone awol.

Once I've done all that, I'll then check my diary. I'll have people coming in on set days, and I do home visits. Home visits are once a week to start with, then every fortnight. And I've got a couple of people (on home detention) who are working, so I'll see them at work.

The first thing we are looking for is signs of escalating risk. We exist because we have got to try to protect the community as best we can, and reduce re-offending.

Most of those people we deal with have special conditions imposed by the court, that we have asked for, designed to address the underlying factors in their offending – anger issues, drug, alcohol or gambling addictions.

The sentences we deal with are about care and control, the compliance, making sure they report, live at approved addresses. Care is the intervention, or rehabilitation side of it, referring them to various agencies, like violence intervention, A and D, relationship services. And we liaise with those agencies to make sure that they attend, and get follow-up reports.

I like to get out of the office at lunchtime. Often I'll go for a walk with a colleague, down to the yacht club. Sailing is my passion, anything to do with yachts, classic boats. I'm quite involved with yacht racing, the secondary schools teams racing. They're hard out at the moment training for that, and I'm down at the yacht club three times a week, at lunch time and one early morning session; we've got a wee gym set up there, so I'm taking the kids for that. This morning I was up at 5am, picking up a car load of kids, down to the yacht club at 6.30am, and working out until 7.30am.

Afternoons, the day's pretty much taken up. The phone goes, we'll have someone on home detention who requires an absence, and they must give us at least 48 hours notice. They need an absence approval form, and then I've got to do a whole lot of computer entries – where they're going, when and who they're going with. That's why we don't have big caseloads, there's a lot of administration.

The other part of my job, hence the senior probation officer title, is supporting staff, doing a little bit of staff training. Every morning at 8.30am we have a full staff meeting. That's just to talk about who is on duty, how many hook-ups we have got to do; it's an opportunity for us to communicate who is doing what that day, and whether there are any issues or concerns in the office.

Hook-ups are when a person is sentenced to home detention. We advise the security firm and meet the local guy at the address. There has to be a probation officer on site. The Armourguard guy is there doing his thing, and my job is to go over the electronic monitoring induction checklist; explain the home-detention process, do all the paperwork.

It's a 40-hour week, 8 to 5, but the last two weeks, I worked 12-hour days in Oamaru. You do whatever you have to do when the work's there, and take TOIL (time off in lieu) as soon as possible. It's not always quite so busy, then it's catch-up, doing all those things we haven't got around to, and in my case, it's helping and supporting staff, in particular, new staff.

I'll bike home, or I'll go down to the yacht club and help out with the schools sailing.

We've got a lifestyle block. I built my own home, a mudbrick house, so there's always a bit of maintenance needed. I love my vege garden, and there's always those lawns to do. And I've got about 24 sheep, and chooks.

I'm on the Timaru Boys' High School board of trustees. That's monthly meetings, but I chair the disciplinary committee so any time during the month I can get a call from the school saying someone has been stood down, so I need to organise a hearing.

Up until not so long ago I was the junior rep for the Timaru Yacht and Power Boat Club, but I've since resigned from that. There's only so much you can do. But I will do the parent thing, and I organise regattas.

And I get a bit of time with my wife.

I'm not a late person. I like to be in bed by about 9.30pm, because I'm up early. I need a minimum of eight hours sleep, but I like to do a wee bit of reading – something to do with boats, classic-boat magazines. My dream before I die is to built a boat, although my wife's not keen, because it could cost a lot of money.

There are ups and downs with this job. When you feel someone has got some direction, there's something positive happening in his life, those are the moments you treasure. What we look for in everybody is that good side. It's there, but sometimes you have got to dig deep for it.

On the other hand, you can come across offenders who really just give you the runaround. Then our job is to get them through their sentence, but you're still looking for those right buttons to push. You never give up.

In the overall scheme of offending, we play a pretty important part in terms of managing community-based sentence. Sometimes you have times when you think, do we really achieve much? But if we didn't exist, I think it would be chaotic out there. We try to bring a bit of order, a bit of stability. If we achieve not much more than that, maybe we have achieved something.

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