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

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

Post-script: Guide, guard and glue – Electronic monitoring and penal supervision

No abstract available

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

What matters in practice? Understanding 'quality' in the routine supervision of offenders in Scotland

Little is known about the nature, character and construction of quality in the routine supervision of offenders in Scotland. Quality is an important yet contested concept with multiple facets and features, but its meanings for practitioners are under-researched. This article will present findings from a study using Appreciative Inquiry to reveal how Scottish criminal justice social workers attempt to conceptualise and construct meanings of quality in their daily practice with people who have offended. Our findings conclude that, despite significant fluctuation in criminal justice policy and practice, practitioners' ideas of quality seem to suggest resilience to both managerialism and punitiveness. Practitioners ultimately located quality within relational processes underpinned by social work values, but also saw it as being underscored by (or undermined by the lack of) adequate resourcing, professional supervision, flexibility and training

What works and what's just?

This paper is based on a presentation entitled 'What Works in Probation', delivered to an Invitational Conference for Directors of Probation Services in Europe organised by the Council of Europe, the Conference Permanente Européenne de la Probation and the French Ministry of Justice at the Palais de l'Europe in Strasbourg (26th-28th November, 2008). Drawing on a much more extensive and separately published report about the effectiveness of offender supervision (McNeill, 2009), I try to argue here that, despite the apparently technical nature of questions of effectiveness, in fact any considered and critical analysis of the empirical evidence about desistance, rehabilitation and' what works?' compel us to consider the moral character and context of criminal justice interventions

Desistance: Envisioning Futures

This chapter provides an overview of desistance scholarship, surveying some of the major theoretical and empirical explanations of how and why people stop offending, and exploring the implications of this body of work for criminal justice. Traditionally, criminology has been focused on the study of crime and in particular on the causes of crime, as well as criminal justice responses to it. By comparison, examining how and why people stop and refrain from offending, and considering which criminal justice responses might support or frustrate such processes has a much shorter history. We would argue that it is also an area of study which, despite being in some senses bound by its focus on crime and offending, nonetheless transcends more orthodox criminological concerns and ultimately compels those who study it to engage with more fundamental questions of political philosophy (as well as with other disciplinary perspectives). We want to argue therefore that desistance research is (or at least can be) a form of ‘alternative criminology’ both in the way it frames its objects of inquiry and in the ways it pushes it towards disciplinary borders and intersections

Social solidarity, penal evolution and probation

Compared to the sociology of the prison, the 'sociology of probation' has been much neglected. In Europe and the USA, that neglect is beginning to be addressed by a number of scholars, both empirically and conceptually. Where these scholars have looked to the founding figures in the sociology of punishment, they have tended to examine probation through a Foucauldian or Marxist lens. This paper takes a different direction, reexamining Durkheim’s ideas about social solidarity and penal evolution to try to offer some analytical resources for making sense of probation's historical development and contemporary struggles. In so doing, we hope to illustrate both the continuing value of Durkheimian analyses of penality and the need to extend Durkheimian analyses beyond the prison. More broadly, we aim to briefly illustrate and to stimulate new cultural analyses of probation’s historical emergence and contemporary adaptations