Review: 'Poor discipline: parole and the social control of the underclass 1890–1990' by Jonathan Simon and 'Supervising offenders in the community: a history of probation theory and practice' by Maurice Vanstone

No abstract available

Beyond what works : how and why do people stop offending?

The author explores a comparative analysis of social work models for engendering change in criminal behaviors among offenders in Scotland

Offender management in Scotland: the first hundred years

Set within the contexts of probation's upcoming centenary in Scotland (in 2005) and the current debate about the future of criminal justice social work in Scotland, this article provides a very brief account of the history of probation in Scotland, focusing on the rarely discussed period between 1905 and 1968. As a defence against the narrowing of our visions in the future, the article pieces together abd seeks to understand significant changes in Scottish probation's core identity and purpose from providing supervision as an alternative to punishment, through providing 'treatment' and then 'welfare' services as a means of reforming offenders, to managing offenders so as to protect the public. The article concludes that the current debate in Scotland should shift from 'second order' questions around organisational arrangements to ''first order' questions around which aspects of these various purposes and identitirs should endure in the 21st century

Architects? We Don\u27t Need No Stinkin\u27 Architects

The author chronicles the participation of the Library staff in the renovation of Pace Law Library

Probation, rehabilitation and reparation

This paper is a version of the 2nd Annual Martin Tansey Memorial Lecture, organised by the Association for Crime and Justice Research and delivered on 7th May 2009 at the headquarters of the Probation Service of Ireland in Dublin. The author would like to thank the ACJRD for the invitation to give the lecture and the probation service for their hospitality in hosting it

Punishment as rehabilitation

No abstract available

Mass supervision, misrecognition and the ‘Malopticon’

This paper aims to contribute to debates about ‘mass supervision’ by exploring its penal character as a lived experience. It begins with a review of recent studies that have used ethnographic methods to explore how supervision is experienced before describing the two projects (‘Supervisible’ and ‘Mass Supervision: Seen and Heard’) on which the paper draws, explaining these as an attempt to generate a ‘counter-visual criminology’ of mass supervision. I then describe two encounters with ‘Teejay’; encounters in which we explored his experiences of supervision firstly through photography and then through song-writing. Both media are presented alongside Teejay’s commentary on what he sought to convey, inviting the reader to engage with and interpret the pictures and song. In the concluding discussion, I offer my own analysis, arguing that Teejay’s representations suggest a need to recognize mass supervision as ‘Maloptical’ as much as ‘Panoptical’. Through the ‘Malopticon’, the penal subject is seen badly, is seen as bad and is projected and represented as bad. Experiences of misrecognition and misrepresentation constitute significant yet poorly understood pains of supervisory punishment. The paper concludes by suggesting several ways in which a counter-visual criminology might follow Teejay’s lead in exposing and challenging of mass supervision

Helping, holding, hurting: recalling and reforming punishment

The Criminal Justice and Licensing (Scotland) Bill currently before the Scottish Parliament represents one of the most significant planned reforms of punishment in Scotland for generations. But, as we plan and debate a new penal future, to what extent have we learned the lessons of Scotland's penal history? In this year's Apex Scotland Annual Lecture, Professor Fergus McNeill presented findings from a British Academy funded research study of oral histories of Scottish probation in the 1960s - the forgotten but significant period immediately before the introduction of the Children's Hearings system and the generic social work departments. In offering an analysis of the sometimes powerful and moving stories of people who were subject to probation at that time, he aimed to challenge our preconceptions about how criminal sanctions can help, hold and hurt those who are subject to them, in so doing providing an important and fresh perspective on key aspects of the current reform programme

A new paradigm for social work with offenders?

In an influential article published in 1979, Bottoms and McWilliams proposed the adoption of a 'non-treatment paradigm' for social work practice with offenders. Their argument rested on a careful analysis not only of empirical evidence about the ineffectiveness of rehabilitative treatment but also of theoretical, moral and philosophical questions about such interventions. By 1994, emerging evidence about the potential effectiveness of some intervention programmes was sufficient to lead Raynor and Vanstone to suggest significant revisions to the 'non treatment paradigm'. In this article, it is argued that a different but equally relevant form of empirical evidence - that derived from desistance studies - suggests a need to reevaluate these earlier paradigms for criminal justice social work practice