Head of the Irish Probation Service Vivian Geiran spoke boldly in defence of silos at the recent Association for Criminal Justice Research and Development conference in Dublin. 

He told the 5 October conference in Dublin that the much-maligned “silo” can perform a valuable function when it is usefully taking care of a particular issue, in a particular organisation.

The whole emphasis in recent years has been on cross-departmental thinking and action, and rightly so, the Probation Services boss pointed out.

“But an organisation that devotes a lot of energy [to a particular issue] and works on it, on our behalf, and then feeds that back to us, performs a valuable role,” he said.

Unique and valuable roles

“In the wider criminal justice system there are a lot of agencies with unique and valuable roles,” he said.

“We shouldn’t be so caught up in the fact that they perform unique roles and describe them as silos.

“The big challenge is how to co-ordinate our work and join up the dots without diluting or lessening what those individual organisations do, whether police, probation or prisons,” he said.

Different skills

In terms of research and evaluation, Vivian Geiran said that many different skills need to be brought to bear in the criminal justice system.

We need the different but valuable contributions of economists, statisticians and criminologists in criminal justice, the Probation Service boss said.