I work in probation. What meeting a homeless man on the street taught me about second chances

I found him where he usually sheltered, sitting in a doorway in the city centre with everything he owned packed into bags around him.

I was dressed for the office – shirt, tie, polished shoes. He was on the ground, surrounded by the entire contents of his life. I sat down beside him anyway.

The man was on probation and had been on my caseload for some time. He’d experienced long-term homelessness and Class A drug use. As someone subject to notification requirements, his homelessness made compliance challenging. Without a stable address, he repeatedly failed to meet those requirements, leading to further convictions. He was trapped in a cycle that his circumstances had made almost inevitable.

That day, he hadn’t attended his appointment. Rather than wait, I went looking for him.

When I found him, we talked about the work going on behind the scenes – conversations with housing providers, efforts to get him into drug treatment, and the calls being made on his behalf. He listened. Then he told me he would rather be in prison than carry on living the way he was. He said he wouldn’t attend his appointments.

I told him I wouldn’t put him back before the court because of his circumstances. I told him I could see he was somebody who needed help to move forward.

He once told me that the hardest part of sleeping rough wasn’t the cold or the hunger. It was feeling completely invisible. Like the world had decided you didn’t exist anymore.

What struck me almost as much as that conversation was the reaction of people walking past. Most ignored us entirely. Those who did look at me, a man in a shirt and tie sitting in a doorway, did so first with contempt and then, in some cases, confusion. It gave me a real insight into the stigma people experiencing homelessness face every day.

When I stood up to leave, he thanked me for coming to find him.

The following morning, he came into the office.

Over the months that followed, I kept working with him and on his behalf. Partners across housing and drug treatment played their part. Slowly, things began to shift. Eventually, he moved into supported accommodation. With a roof over his head, other things became possible. He could engage more consistently with support and begin to think about a future.

Several months later, after I had moved to a different team, a receptionist emailed me to say someone had come looking for me. It was him. He wanted to say thank you. The receptionist’s message has stayed with me ever since: “He wanted you to know that he is three months clean and giving clean tests all the time. He also has been offered a job which he can start soon. He says it’s time to change his life for the better and says that you were brilliant towards him. He seemed happy and looking forward to a better life.”

Last I heard, he had taken the job. I don’t know every detail of what came next, but I know he was moving forward. Sometimes, that’s enough. That message is why I do this job.

Before working in probation I was a white van man, delivering car parts and barrels of motor oil to garages across the south of England. The work was physically demanding, but I wanted a career where I could make a difference.

Read more:

• Prison crisis: Early release scheme could see hundreds of prisoners released into homelessness
• I’m a probation officer. It’s a frightening, upsetting, but also moving and hopeful world
• Our prisons are so broken that we can’t carry on – we must seize the opportunity to fix them

I joined the Probation Service in 2002 as an administrator. After two years, I became a probation service officer, a role I held until 2013. I then qualified as a probation officer and worked in that role before moving into management. Today, I work as a health and justice partnerships coordinator across Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, helping local authorities, health services and probation work together to reduce inequalities experienced by people under probation supervision.

This work isn’t easy. There are people you can’t reach and cases that don’t end the way you hoped. Those experiences make the successes matter even more.

Working in that doorway taught me something that no policy document ever could: the system only works when every part of it is joined up. That’s what drives me in my current role, helping organisations work together so that fewer people fall through the gaps.

After more than two decades, I still believe people can change. I’ve seen too many examples not to.

But rehabilitation works best when we address the reasons people offend in the first place. For many, that means tackling addiction or poor mental health. Very often, it means having somewhere safe to live. Stable housing gives people a foundation to engage with support and start rebuilding their lives.

A front door matters. Without one, almost everything else becomes harder.

The man I found in that doorway didn’t need to be punished into becoming a different person. He needed support, persistence and a way out of the cycle his circumstances had helped create.

Behind every label is a human being.

Sometimes, the most important thing a probation officer can do is go looking for someone and sit down beside them.

Paul Edwards is a health and justice partnerships coordinator for the Probation Service in Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. He joined the service in 2002 and has worked across a range of operational and partnership roles for almost 24 years.

The recruitment window for new trainee probation officers opens in July. To find out more, visit the probation jobs website.

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