Imperfect: The Life of a Probation Officer

Jonathan Hussey opens Imperfect with the letter accepting him onto probation training, received days after he sat in a police cell. A former nightclub doorman who by his own admission could barely navigate his own life is handed the job of helping others navigate theirs. That irony runs through everything that follows. This is not a memoir by someone who had it figured out. It is a memoir by someone who did the work anyway and learned it on the people in front of him.

Those people are the reason to read it. Sam, who interrupts a supervision session to offer him stolen steak, two for a tenner. The man who says almost nothing until Hussey stops asking about his offences and asks about the drawing he gave up as a child. Hussey writes them without sentimentality and without ever flattening them into case numbers. You come away from each chapter understanding a little more about why people cause harm, and how slowly anyone moves away from it.

Then comes the chapter where he breaks. His account of his own depression, sitting at a kitchen table asking himself whether he is depressed, is the bravest thing in the book and one of the most useful. Anyone doing this work, or about to, should read it.

What you are left with is not a manual, though there is real craft here on the therapeutic relationship, desistance, supervision and the boundaries that keep you standing. What you are left with is a truer picture of the job than most training will ever give you. Imperfect, and all the better for it.

Review by Kira Day

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