Prelims

Half Title Page

PERVASIVE PUNISHMENT

Title Page

PERVASIVE PUNISHMENT

Making Sense of Mass Supervision

BY

FERGUS McNEILL

University of Glasgow, UK

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

Copyright Page

Emerald Publishing Limited

Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK

First edition 2019

Copyright © Fergus McNeill Published under an exclusive licence

Cover image: Gabi Fröden

Cover Layout and Typography: Mike Hill

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-78756-466-4 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-78756-465-7 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-78756-467-1 (Epub)

Dedication

For Gordon and all the Paulines.

List of Figures

List of Tables

About the Author

Fergus McNeill is Professor of Criminology and Social Work at the University of Glasgow where he works in the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research and in Sociology. Prior to becoming an academic in 1998, he worked for 10 years in residential drug rehabilitation and as a criminal justice social worker.

His many research projects and publications have examined institutions, cultures and practices of punishment and rehabilitation – particularly in the community – and questions about their reform. Between 2012 and 2016, he chaired an EU-funded research network on ‘Offender Supervision in Europe’ which involved about 70 researchers from across 23 jurisdictions. This book reflects upon and consolidates learning from that network.

Fergus has co-written or co-edited several previous books including Offender Supervision: New Directions in Theory, Research and Practice, Offender Supervision in Europe, Reducing Reoffending: Social Work and Community Justice in Scotland, Understanding Penal Practice and Youth Offending and Youth Justice. His most recent books include Community Punishment: European Perspectives (co-edited with Gwen Robinson); Probation: 12 essential questions (co-edited with Ioan Durnescu and Rene Butter); Beyond the Risk Paradigm in Criminal Justice (co-edited with Chris Trotter and Gill McIvor); and Reimagining Rehabilitation: Beyond the Individual (co-written with Lol Burke and Steve Collett and published by Routledge in 2018). Pervasive Punishment is his first sole-authored monograph.

Currently, Fergus is leading ‘Distant Voices: Coming Home’, a major 3-year Economic and Social Research Council/Arts and Humanities Research Council project using creative practices to explore crime, punishment and reintegration. The project is a partnership between Vox Liminis (a third sector organization that Fergus helped establish), the University of Edinburgh, the University of Glasgow and the University of the West of Scotland.

Acknowledgements

This book has been a long time in the making, and I owe too many debts to acknowledge them all here … but I’m going to name a few.

Pervasive Punishment might never have been written but for the generosity of the British Academy in awarding me a Mid-Career Fellowship (Award No. MD160022). I’m especially grateful to David Garland for his support for my application. During session 2017–2018, the British Academy award paid for the wonderful Caitlin Gormley to cover much of my teaching (so well that I fear that colleagues and students won’t want me back!).

The Fellowship also allowed me to travel to meet with some remarkable and generous scholars and friends so that I could road-test some of the ideas in this book. I had the great pleasure of visiting Reuben Miller (University of Chicago), Josh Page and Michelle Phelps (University of Minnesota), Jon Jacobs (John Jay College, City University of New York), Kristel Beyens (Free University of Brussels) and Miranda Boone (University of Leiden). I am also very grateful to colleagues and students who took time to attend seminars, offered insightful comments and showed me wonderful hospitality. As well as my ‘official’ hosts, particular thanks are due to Jess Bird, Jay Borchert, David Green, Lila Kazemian and Jennifer Peirce.

British Academy Mid-Career Fellowships also provide some funds for public engagement. I used these resources to establish the Pervasive Punishment blog (www.pervasivepunishment.com) and to support book-related events organized by the Howard League Scotland in Edinburgh and the Howard League for Penal Reform in Oxford. I’m very grateful to both organisations for these opportunities to share the work in progress. These events also included performances of songs related to punishment, reintegration and supervision written in workshops organized and run by Vox Liminis, a Scottish charity that brings creative practice to criminal justice and its reform (www.voxliminis.co.uk). Louis Abbott (in Edinburgh) and Donna Maciocia (in Oxford) provided these beautiful performances. It is a pleasure and a privilege to work with Louis and Donna and everyone else associated with Vox. I owe you all – and especially Alison Urie (that other Wayward Puritan) – a very great deal for teaching me so much about so many things; not least the importance and potency of creativity.

On the subject of creativity, I also want to thank Martin Cathcart Froden and Phil Thomas for some early advice in relation to the short story that is woven through this book’s chapters, to Gabi Fröden for the cover art, and to Jo Collinson Scott for agreeing to write an EP of songs inspired by the story and the book. We say more about this process and about the relationships between the research, the story and the songs in the book’s post-script. The cover art and EP were also funded by the British Academy Fellowship. It is a genuine delight to have been able to assemble all these different ways of seeing, hearing and sensing supervision with help from so many talented friends.

All but one of the photographs that illustrate this book were taken by supervisees and supervisors in the ‘Supervisible’ and ‘Picturing Probation’ projects (discussed in chapter 5). These projects were part of the COST Action IS1106 on Offender Supervision in Europe which I chaired between 2012 and 2016. Wendy Fitzgibbon inspired and led the Supervisible project, and Picturing Probation was led by Nicola Carr, Gwen Robinson and Anne Worrall. I am grateful for their permission to use some of these projects’ photographs in the book, but my debt extends to all 70-odd active members of the Action. This book is, in large part, an attempt to consolidate what I learned from and with all of them. I want to pay special tribute to the Action’s core leadership group – Miranda Boone, Niamh Maguire, Martine Herzog-Evans, Christine Morgenstern, Elena Larrauri, Ioan Durnescu, Christian Grafl, Gwen Robinson, Kerstin Svensson, Martin Lulei, Ineke Pruin and Sandra Scicluna and to pay special tribute to Kristel Beyens who, as Vice-Chair, offered me invaluable and unfailing support for those four years.

In places in this book, I have leant on and re-developed or re-purposed previous publications, some involving co-authors. Working with these scholars has been crucial to my development and, in some cases, I have to admit that I don’t really know where their ideas end and my ideas begin. In particular, I’ve been co-writing with Gwen Robinson since we agonized over 23 drafts of our first co-authored conference paper in 2002–2003. Chapter 2 of this book draws on a more recent book chapter that we co-wrote (McNeill & Robinson, 2016); the section on Foucault leans very heavily on Gwen’s contribution to that chapter. Chapter 4 redevelops elements of two earlier collaborations (Robinson & McNeill, 2015; Robinson, McNeill, & Maruna, 2013). It is typically generous of Gwen to let me use our previous work in this way, and I am also grateful to the editors at Palgrave, Sage and Routledge for giving their permission for me to use these earlier works here. Chapters 5 and 6 draw on my recent paper in Punishment and Society (McNeill, 2018); I am grateful to Kelly Hannah-Moffat and Sage for permission to do so. Thanks are also due to Wendy Fitzgibbon and Christine Graebsch for their permission to recycle the title of our co-authored chapter about the Supervisible project (Fitzgibbon, Graebsch, & McNeill, 2017) as the title of this book. Jo Collinson Scott and Oliver Escobar kindly allowed me to lean on their musicological (Jo) and political science (Oliver) expertise in writing Chapter 6, drawing on their contributions to our ongoing ESRC/AHRC funded Distant Voices project (www.distantvoices.org.uk).

While I have benefitted enormously from an extensive network of colleagues and friends, not just in the COST Action, but also in the American, British and European Societies of Criminology, I also owe a huge debt to all of my colleagues here at home – in the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research. Since 2006, SCCJR has provided me not just with a great place to work among talented, critical scholars and students, but also with time and space and support. In particular, I want to thank the Centre’s founding Directors – Michele Burman, Gill McIvor and Richard Sparks – and the current Director, Sarah Armstrong. Michele has been a hugely supportive, encouraging and effective supporter not just of me but much more importantly of the development of Scottish criminology. More than anyone else, I think, she has laid the foundations for and built the infrastructure to support a whole new generation of scholars who are doing remarkable and important work. My thinking has been continually challenged and enormously enriched by working with the constellation of stellar doctoral researchers clustered around the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research. For example, I owe a debt to Maureen McBride for advice in relation to the brief discussion of sectarianism of sectarianism in Chapter 3, and to Javier Velasquez Valenzuela for comments on Chapters 5 and 7.

Several other people have also provided invaluable comments on drafts of parts of this book. Peter Conlong and Alan Fleming provided very useful feedback on my use of Scottish Government data in Chapter 3. Jo Collinson Scott sharpened up Chapters 5 and 6, and David Hayes did likewise for Chapters 6 and 7. However, I am most especially indebted to the two wise friends who, over the course of the last year, have provided me with critical but encouraging feedback chapter by chapter: Michelle Phelps and Gwen Robinson. Whatever its limitations, this book is much the better for your advice.

Looking much further back, my career began not in academia but with a decade in practice; first in drug rehabilitation and then in criminal justice social work. That experience still informs what I do even though I realise that it has lost its currency. Being a practitioner in both settings left me with respect and admiration for ‘those who do’; especially those who persevere in pursuing justice and providing help despite the obstacles oftentimes placed in their way by society, by government, and by policies and systems. That’s why this book is dedicated to Gordon McKean (a good friend and former colleague) and to ‘all the Paulines’ (if you read the short story, that dedication will start to make sense).

Finishing a book is often the hardest part. I want to thank Heather Irving lending me her lovely house in the beautiful Fife town of Anstruther in early June 2018 for the few days that I needed to piece together the fragments. Here’s to the next Tall Ship Session.

Special thanks to my editor Jules Willan and to everyone at Emerald for supporting this project, for being interested in mass supervision and for accommodating my eccentricities. It’s great to be part of something new and exciting. I hope this is the first book of many that Emerald will publish on this topic.

Finally, thank you Morag, Caitie and Calum. You keep my feet on the ground but let my head stay in the clouds – at least some of the time.