Our friend John Shember, who has died aged 68 of leukaemia, joined the probation service in 1969 in Birmingham, where the three of us met. This was a time when alternatives to custody were being actively developed, and belief in welfare and rehabilitation approaches was strong. Birmingham was undergoing profound structural and cultural changes that gradually extended to its deprived inner-city areas, where our challenging patches were.
John championed the approach to offending that saw lawbreakers as human beings capable of change, given suitable challenge, help and encouragement. He disagreed with the primacy of the prison works ideology or one size fits all programmes. John, a free thinker, was strongly committed to research and improving the quality of information available to the service. He went on to work in teams in Scotland and Cambridgeshire, then West Yorkshire, and finally in Warwickshire, where he was appointed as the senior probation officer for Rugby in 1982.
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