I’m a probation officer. It’s a frightening, upsetting, but also moving and hopeful world

As an inherently nosy person, probation was the perfect job for me. I love working with people, and the chance to untangle problems and sometimes even change lives was irresistible. What I didn’t expect was the privilege of being the only person an offender would trust with their deepest anxieties: why they did what they did, what drove them, and how they might begin to change.

Most people who offend don’t wake up wanting to be criminals. They are stuck in patterns they barely understand. Part of my job was to help them make sense of that, to hold them accountable and guide them towards something better.

Probation is one of the most misunderstood public services, quietly stripped back while remaining central to the justice system. From court reports to prison work, from supervising offenders in the community to assessing risk and advising on parole, there is a probation officer connected to almost every convicted person’s case, yet most people know little about it.

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A Murderer’s Guide to Cleaning offers insight into this hidden world: the strange intimacy of listening to offenders describe what they’ve done, the moral tightrope, and the daily reality of working with people that most would rather avoid.

I write about people like Steve, whom I first met in prison.

“I looked around the kitchen. There was blood and gravy everywhere. I don’t like mess, so I thought I’d clean it up before I called the police.”

He says this without emotion. I keep my face neutral and find myself asking: how?

He cleaned carefully around the body. Then he scrubbed – Ajax, Flash spray, vinegar and bicarb. He used Julie’s toothbrush for the grouting because, he points out, she wouldn’t be needing it anymore. It was, he says with quiet satisfaction, the best the kitchen had ever looked. There isn’t a flicker of remorse, only pride in the finish.

What do you say to a man who ardently describes the cleaning techniques he used after killing his wife with a frying pan?

Working with men like Steve teaches you to sit still while your mind races. Murderers rarely look like murderers. They make tea. They seem tidy and reasonable. Your job is to listen without flinching, assess risk and remain calm.

In his immaculate cell, he once told me he ferments Marmite and bread into alcohol. Others drink it; he uses it to clean his taps.

‘I’ve never felt clean since that day,’ he whispers. ‘Having a clean cell helps.’

Read more:

• Poet laureate Simon Armitage on his years as a probation officer – and the redemptive power of poetry
• More and more women are being released from prison into homelessness. It’s an ongoing cruelty
• Becoming a Community Payback supervisor changed my life – and helped countless others

Then there’s Chantelle back for Public Order offences. She thought she was having the greatest day of her life. She’s 45, feeling powerful. Stood in a school playground between two enormous, borrowed speakers, blasting out a song she’d recorded for her daughter.

Children crowded at classroom windows, laughing and singing along while teachers tried to pull them back to their seats. Chantelle is elated. The chorus is aimed squarely at the girl who has bullied her daughter for months. She’d complained, but nothing changed. Chantelle decided to make herself heard, expletives and all.

Even as the police lead her away, she can still hear the children singing. Job done. Now the school will have to listen.

But in custody, explaining herself to a blank-faced sergeant, the euphoria drains away. She’s done it again. Made everything worse. And now she’s back in my office, having disastrously tried to ‘fix’ things again.

Working with people like Chantelle is a different challenge. Nothing like Steve, she’s chaotic, impulsive, endlessly self-sabotaging. You spend hours trying to help someone wait between feeling and action, to think before they explode, to understand consequences that seem obvious to everyone else. To help them to behave in a way that society deems to be acceptable.

You switch from conversations about abuse, addiction and violence to cooking dinner, helping your kids with homework and hearing about your husband’s ‘difficult day’. All while carrying fragments of other people’s pain and shame in your head and trying not to let it distort your home life.

You learn to compartmentalise. And, crucially, to laugh.

But it’s never entirely separate. You compare your own life to the descriptions offenders tell you of theirs. You hear echoes of your cases every day.

I can’t clean the kitchen without thinking of Steve.

A Murderer’s Guide to Cleaning is about this, sometimes frightening or upsetting but also moving and hopeful world. The people you meet, the dark humour that keeps you going, and the constant balancing act between professional detachment and human response. It’s about what it’s really like to work with criminals and then go home and be ‘normal’.

A Murderer’s Guide to Cleaning: And Other Stories From my Life as a Probation Officer by Elizabeth Baxter is out now (Oneworld, £18.99). 

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