Experiencing penal supervision: A literature review
| Date | 01 December 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0264550518790660 |
| Published date | 01 December 2018 |
| Author | David Hayes |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Experiencing penal
supervision:
A literature review
David Hayes
University of Sheffield, UK
Abstract
Penal supervision – by probation officers or by other state agents – has only com-
paratively recently begun to be considered by academics as an experience in its own
right, despite the relatively lengthy history of its use. This article provides an overview
of that scholarship. It considers the motivations that have led to the study of the
experience of penal supervision, and some of the groups whose experiences are
noteworthy. It then reviews a range of ‘pains’ and ‘gains’ of penal supervision, and
argues that, whilst these experiences are contingent on a range of external factors,
they raise substantial implications for policy and practice.
Keywords
desistance, experience, pains of probation, punishment, supervision, user voice
Introduction
Despite the long history of non-custodial supervision being used to dispose of
individuals convicted of criminal offences (see generally Mair and Burke, 2012),
the study of what it is like to experience penal supervision as a social phenomenon is
relatively new, and the subject of comparatively few studies (Durnescu et al., 2013).
This article provides an overview of this field, highlighting areas of particular rele-
vance to practitioners, students, and policy-makers, and identifying avenues for
further research. It considers three questions: why are experiences of penal super-
vision worth studying; whose experiences are relevant; and what does the literature
Corresponding Author:
David Hayes, School of Law, University of Sheffield, Bartolome
´House, Winter Street, Sheffield, South
Yorkshire S3 7ND, UK.
Email: d.j.hayes@sheffield.ac.uk
The Journal of Community and Criminal Justice
Probation Journal
2018, Vol. 65(4) 378–393
ªThe Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0264550518790660
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tell us about the experience of supervision (especially by supervised penal subjects)?
Exploring these questions enables a discussion of the implications of this literature
for policy and practice, as well as areas for further research.
Firstly, however, we should define our subject, ‘penal supervision’. Since this is
still a relatively young field, and one which overlaps substantially in its methods and
outlook with studies of the experience of other penalties, this review adopts a broad
definition – encompassing not just probationary supervision as a requirement of a
community order, suspended sentence order, or early release from prison, but also
the supervisory aspects of other non-custodial sanctions and measures, such as
electronic monitoring and unpaid work requirements. I call this supervision ‘penal’
to prevent confusion both with ‘supervision requirements’ (i.e. probation super-
vision) and with supervision in contexts other than criminal justice (e.g. in child
welfare cases). In short, this review considers studies covering multiple forms of non-
custodial supervision in a criminal justice context, keeping in mind that different
orders, requirements, and sentences will necessarily entail different experiences.
While the focus of this article will remain mostly on England and Wales, studies
involving other jurisdictions will be highlighted where they provide additional
insights, bearing in mind the challenges of making effective comparisons across
jurisdictional borders (see generally Nelken, 2010; McNeill and Beyens, 2013).
Why study experience?
Why use limited academic resources to study the experience of a criminal justice
intervention? Very briefly, there are two major reasons, humanitarian and penolo-
gical.Humanitarian concerns with the experience of penal supervision motivate
some of the earliest studies in this field, dating back to penal reformers such as
Cesare Beccaria (1764) and John Howard (1784). Early humanitarian concerns
were driven by the observer’s objective impressions of what prison (and other visibly
punitive forms of punishment, like capital and corporal punishment) seemed to be
like: the disgust and pity that the abject conditions of penal subjects caused to these
authors’ liberal, upper- and middle-class sensibilities during the early Enlight-
enment. However, over time, the penal subject was allowed a voice of their own.
Changing conceptions of research enabled greater focus on the subjective, and this
allowed a range of new research methods and analytical frameworks to come to the
foreground. The most important of these frameworks, for present purposes, is
Gresham Sykes’s (1958: 64) foundational study of the ‘pains of imprisonment’: the
major ‘deprivations and frustrations of prison life’. This approach to cataloguing
specific forms of penal deprivation has since been adapted to a range of different
forms of penal supervision (e.g. Payne and Gainey, 1998; Durnescu, 2011; Hayes,
2015; compare Nugent and Schinkel, 2016, on the ‘pains of desistance’ more
generally). Sykes’s pains of imprisonment were revolutionary because they pro-
vided a vocabulary that was subjective to individual experiences and based on an
inductive derivation of theory from data, not the other way around (Hayes, 2016).
The penal subject could speak for themselves, and tell us where, when, and how
Hayes 379
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