Punishment, Probation and Parole

In many countries, community-based penalties such as probation, electronic monitoring and parole are the most common sanctions used in the punishment of criminalized individuals. Despite the widespread use of community-based penalties, these forms of penalization or punishment remain a less studied feature of punishment research today.

Punishment, Probation and Parole maps this lacuna in knowledge and scholarship while charting a path to fill it. Bringing together a series of key conceptual papers by leading scholars, the chapters explore the various dimensions and forms of community-based penalties as they are constructed and experienced in different times and places, producing different socio-penal effects. Addressing pressing debates and emerging concepts, this much-needed collection serves to chart directions for future researchers to explore in the field of community-based penalties.

Building off McNeill's (2018) Pervasive Punishment, this new edited volume asks how we "make sense" of mass supervision across time and place. The volume brings together some of the most thoughtful scholars working on community sanctions in Europe, the U.S. and less-well studied countries including Chile and Australia, and elsewhere, asking what purposes sanctions like probation and parole serve in the name of justice and how such supervision is experienced by individuals, families and communities. Each chapter brings us a new location and focus, showing the complex and contradictory forces and experiences of community sanctions. And yet across all this diversity is a sense that community sanctions have strayed from their original purposes, growing more punitive and managerial. Taken together, the volume powerfully asks us to consider whether mass supervision itself can ever be rehabilitated away from punishment.

-- Michelle S. Phelps, Associate Professor and Martindale Endowed Chair, Department of Sociology, University of Minnesota, USA

It is increasingly recognized that punishment in the community is no longer the humanising and rehabilitative undertaking as was initially intended. Based on insights from nine different countries around the globe, this book identifies common trends of managerialism and massification. Starting from a deepening and critical understanding of McNeill’s concept of mass supervision and taking a decolonizing perspective into account, this book offers an excellent and thought-provoking contribution to the scholarship on community punishment.

-- Kristel Beyens, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium

Katharina Maier is Associate Professor in Criminal Justice at the University of Winnipeg, Canada.

Rosemary Ricciardelli is Professor and Research Chair in Safety, Security and Wellness at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada.

Fergus McNeill is Professor of Criminology and Social Work at the University of Glasgow, UK.

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