So we had a slightly futile probation officer-client relationship. I’d try to talk to her, and she’d answer some of my questions as briefly as possible, looking at the floor on the far side of the room, in a tiny voice that involved almost no breath and no movement of her mouth. She had to repeat most things she said, because I never caught it the first time, but though that annoyed her she never spoke any louder.To keep things even, she didn’t listen to anything I said, either.

No, it’s okay. I don’t care what you were saying.

We went through the motions. I’d set her up with job interviews, and she’d turn up late to those interviews, sullen and uncooperative, and not get hired.

I’d give her brochures for job training, and she’d take them when I put them directly into her hand.

And she’d lose them.

I’d tell myself that this was her right, and that all she had to do, legally, was turn up once a week. I was – still am – fairly obsessive about keeping the coercive power of the state severely limited, so although I had some levers I could have used to make her take probation more seriously, I didn’t use them. You might think that a civil libertarian working as a probation officer is in the wrong job. Well, it was the right job, but it did make me almost permanently uncomfortable. 

Anyway, the shadow boxing between us had to end because I got a call from the local police station. At the time I didn’t realise just how deeply the local police despised me. But I was on the wrong side in all of my cases, and I didn’t like the cops enough to drink with them after the case, like the defence lawyers always did.

Even so, the desk sergeant sounded quite sympathetic, this one time. My client, Tiana Vainu’upo La’asaga, had been arrested. She was in one of their holding cells. If I wanted to come and get her, they’d release her into my custody. 

To be continued 

But a week later I was pulled into the Director’s office. He told me I was good at doing these reports, but they thought they’d broaden my skills by giving me long-term supervision cases of my own. So I picked up some files. I had a case-load of a dozen, which was very light. And one of them was Ana.

I’m trying to work, here…

So two days later she was back with me in the interview room. She was wearing tiny white shorts and a torn tee shirt. She looked like she was going to climb a tree and steal apples. She looked like she wanted to be the hottest woman on the dance floor. She flickered from one to the other, within the same second. 

I coughed again. She must have heard men clearing their throats before they spoke to her.

I said, “Hey. Ana. Nice to see you again. Er, Jaime. I mean, I’m Jaime. It turns out I’m your probation officer.” 

She had brown eyes. I realised she’d wondered why I’d said “again”? She didn’t remember me, specifically or personally. I was just some pig. Part of the Ana-crushing machine. She said, “hello.” 

In spite of the power she had over me, I didn’t think she was using her beauty in a knowing way. I suspected that she didn’t really believe she was beautiful, or know the effect she could have on men. And she didnt see me as a man. Not that she liked men much, I thought. She liked boys.

I wasn’t much older than her, but I wouldn’t quite have been a boy even if she’d thought of me as human at all. I didn’t wear uniform, as a probation officer, but I might as well have. I was part of the horrible thing that had happened to her – cops, courts, geek with clipboard – simply because she was young, pretty and Samoan.

So I held on to my clipboard, coughed till my voice sounded solid again, and started asking her questions about her family, who she lived with, who she hung with, and what plans she had for jobs, education and so on. 

I didn’t put my reservations about the police charges into my report to the judge. It would have been pointless because she’d pled guilty, even though she shouldn’t have. She didn’t want to get involved in the fuss that would begin if she changed her plea at this stage. I’d tried to talk her into getting a new lawyer and going for a re-trial because she hadn’t been properly represented, but she didn’t want to do it.

And if she wasn’t going to change her plea, it would have just caused her trouble if I commented on the police conduct. The judge who was going to sentence her really hated lawyers, let alone junior probation officers, who accused the police of misconduct. He didn’t want to hear it, and he let it be known that it would backfire on their clients.

This girl – her name was Tiana, though she called herself Ana – was very vulnerable to a bit of judicial shittiness. Technically, she could only stay out of jail if she showed contrition. So if I argued on her behalf that she should never have been arrested and that the charges should have been dropped, that wouldn’t be contrition.

I’d be putting her in jail.

So I wrote a report calculated to keep her out of there. I claimed that she’d fallen into bad company but that there were positive influences in her family. She was taing active steps to find employment. This is the sort of stuff judges love. I argued for community supervision rather than a fine. She was broke, and unemployed. She couldn’t pay a fine.

The judge accepted my recommendation. I’d got paid less and done her much more good than her defence lawyer. I expected she’d go on the client list of a wiley old Quaker called Ethan who had an office down the corridor from mine. Ethan did a good line in gentle-but-scary father-figuring, that kept most of his clients from getting themselves into further trouble. 

To be continued.

She, my new probation client, had been arrested and charged with “obscene language”, “obstruction”, and “resisting arrest”.

The thing about those offences are that they are created by arrogant, stupid and not quite legal policing. They mean that a cop came up and harassed her, because she was young, pretty, and Samoan. She was eventually provoked into telling him to fuck off, and when he grabbed her she shook him off. Her defence lawyer should have threatened the cops with an improper conduct complaint.

The complaint would have led to an internal investigation, and that would be enough to make the desk sergeant drop the charges. Worse, it would have uncovered some awkward truths about some of the local cops. The cops would have dropped the case at the first hint of a threat. But her lawyer had been court-appointed, underpaid, overworked and burned out.

So there my client was, a young, harmless, non-criminal, girl, with three new convictions on her record.

She was in my interview room. She wore skin-tight jeans, faded from blue to almost white, and there were rips and worn patches that showed me patches of golden brown skin at her knees, her left inner thigh, and a larger patch just under her left buttock where she crossed her legs. I was supposed to be a professional, and she’d reduced me to the kind of tongue-tied awareness of beauty that doomed most of my attempts to talk to girls when I was 15.

To be continued.