Developing an effective mechanism for encouraging compliance with community penalties.

The aim of this study was to explore compliance with community penalties in order to develop the most effective strategies for encouraging compliance. The study examined compliance within the substantive contexts of probation supervision and the deterrent enforcement framework incorporated in probation enforcement policy. The study is therefore theoretically located within two broad areas of research namely, short term compliance with legal authorities and the deterrence doctrine. As it was conducted in the context of probation supervision, it was possible to explore the patterns and correlates of short term compliance with legal authorities. The research site also provided a suitable forum for examining how criminal deterrence may operate given the enhanced certainty, severity and celerity of punishment for non- compliance. The criminological literature has tended to focus on explorations of: the aetiology of crime and deviance; or on the correlates of longer term desistance from crime. Whilst these provide valuable insights into the nature of crime and criminality, the correlates of conformity have not received similar attention. Departing from the trend, and drawing on a conceptual framework for understanding compliance devised by Bottoms (2001), this study examined short term conformity with legal directives from a criminological point of view. Underpinned by an interactionist philosophical position, the study utilised Grounded Theory methodology. Sixty four interviews were conducted with probation officers and probationers. The study found that compliance cannot be decontexualised from the activities of the officers in reacting to rule violations. Compliance is essentially the product of the symbolic definitions that emerge during interactions. An examination of the processes and conditions linked to compliance yielded insights into the effective mechanisms for encouraging compliance and highlighted several policy implications

Share with care: negotiating children’s health and safety in sharenting practices.

Sharenting – a new term emerged over the past 10 years – refers to the practice of sharing textual and audiovisual contents concerning children online by their parents or guardians, potentially impacting the construction of children’s digital identity before they can reach the age of consent. Based on a passive virtual ethnography carried out comparatively in Italian-speaking and English-speaking virtual communities focusing on children’s wellbeing and health, this paper offers an empirical contribution to the study of sharenting. While contributing to the wider debates on the practices and discourses about sharing in digital media, this paper provides an analysis of how online and offline parenting cultures affect sharenting practices; how the consequences of sharenting are addressed in online communities; and how the privacy vs openness tension about sharing contents is negotiated by parents with regards to their own and children needs even in terms of digital security

Evaluating Research and Scholarly Impact in Criminology and Criminal Justice in the United Kingdom and Italy: A Comparative Perspective

What scholarly impact is, and how it is evaluated, vary across different countries. In the United Kingdom, for instance, scholarly impact is mainly assessed through the Research Excellence Framework (REF) in the context of providing—among other things—accountability for public investment in research, demonstrating the public benefits of research, and informing the selective allocation of research funding. In the REF system, impact needs to show a demonstrable effect on change, or evidence of benefits outside academia, and is formally assessed through case studies. In Italy, there is a comparable system for evaluating research, known as Evaluation of Research Quality, but in this latter case, the focus is on the quality of selected research outputs as indicators of research performance. Impact is here considered with reference to the so-called third mission (which includes activities aimed at the valorization of research, and activities that have positive spillovers into society at large) and is evaluated separately. Our contribution aims at critically analyzing the commonalities and differences of these two systems when it comes to evaluating research in Criminology and Criminal Justice, considering some of the benefits and potential pitfalls of research evaluation in both regions, and discussing how these disciplines are framed and delimited differently in the two countries considered

Compliance during community-based penal supervision

This chapter brings together the limited literature on service-user compliance with community-based orders in England and Wales. It presents an overview of key theoretical developments in the field and studies that provide empirical insights into the nature of compliance. The studies have generally found that practitioners’ actions construct compliance rather than the active participation of service users. Drawing on the theoretical and empirical studies of compliance (both formal and substantive), the chapter explores the bases and implications of limited service user participation in the production of compliance and argue that a co-productive approach is more likely long-term compliance which goes beyond the life of a court order

Understanding Compliance Dynamics in Community Justice Settings

This article seeks to expand the existing literature on compliance in community justice settings by highlighting the importance of service user participation in efforts to achieve compliance. The article’s central argument is that although co-productive strategies can enhance service user participation, the degree to which co-production is achievable in penal supervision is perhaps uncertain, and has received insufficient theoretical or empirical attention. To address the gap in knowledge, the article draws on the data generated from a study of compliance in Wales, United Kingdom, and employs the Bourdieusian concepts of habitus, field, and capital to argue that the convergence of two key factors undermines the viability of co-productive strategies in penal settings. One factor is the service users’ habitus of powerlessness which may breed passivity rather than active participation. The second also relates to the power dynamics that characterize penal supervision contexts. Within these contexts, practitioners are statutorily empowered to implement and enforce the requirements of community orders. In the current target-focused policy climate in England and Wales, practitioners may prioritize measurable compliance over forms of compliance that stem from service user participation and engagement perhaps because these are not readily quantifiable

Towards AI Standards Whitepaper: Thought-leadership in AI legal, ethical and safety specifications through experimentation

With the rapid adoption of algorithms in business and society there is a growing concern to safeguard the public interest. Researchers, policy-makers and industry sharing this view convened to collectively identify future areas of focus in order to advance AI standards - in particular the acute need to ensure standard suggestions are practical and empirically informed. This discussion occurred in the context of the creation of a lab at UCL with these concerns in mind (currently dubbed as UCL The Algorithms Standards and Technology Lab). Via a series of panels, with the main stakeholders, three themes emerged, namely (i) Building public trust, (ii) Accountability and Operationalisation, and (iii) Experimentation. In order to forward the themes, lab activities will fall under three streams - experimentation, community building and communication. The Lab’s mission is to provide thought-leadership in AI standards through experimentation

Probation Enforcement Practice with Sex Offenders

This chapter explored the impact of risk-focused policies and stereotypical notions about the attributes of sex offenders on probation enforcement practice. The chapter drew on a study that examined how probation officers and offenders interact to secure compliance

Evaluating Supervision Practice

This paper provides an overview of the participatory evaluations the Swansea Service Evaluation Team (SSET) is conducting in partnership with the Youth Justice Board and several Youth Offending Teams in Wales. The paper assesses the benefits and limitations of the participatory evaluation method, and concludes with an analysis of key dimensions of the evaluations the team have conducted so far.Dr Pamela Ugwudik