Pervasive Punishment: Making Sense of Mass Supervision F. McNeill. Bingley: Emerald (2019) 264pp. £24.99pb ISBN 978‐178756‐466‐4
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/hojo.12356 |
| Published date | 01 March 2020 |
| Date | 01 March 2020 |
| Author | C. MORGENSTERN |
The Howard Journal Vol59 No 1. March 2020 DOI: 10.1111/hojo.12356
ISSN 2059-1098, pp. 105–113
Book Reviews
PervasivePunishment: Making Sense of Mass Supervision F. McNeill. Bingley: Emerald (2019)
264pp. £24.99pb ISBN 978-178756-466-4
Punishment imposes suffering; we must acknowledge this and ‘should be profoundly
uneasy about state-administered punishment in general and should therefore approach
it with caution and restraint’ (p.169). This book is about punishment that entails super-
vision of offenders in the community,probation, parole, or community service being the
best-known examples.
In Chapter 1 the author explains what it means when punishment pervades, namely
– what some of our criminological ancestors have foreseen – that community sanctions
are becoming expansive and penetrating forms of deviance control, even if initially
perceived as constructive, beneficial, and avoiding the harms of imprisonment. The
analysis is located mainly in the Anglophone jurisdictions with a particular focus on
Scotland, informed by comparative work that the author has done in a pan-European
research network on offender supervision. McNeill interestingly indicates very early
where the following chapters are heading for – the conclusion that offender supervision
needs to be restrained, ‘urging parsimony in its use, proportionality in its demands and
productiveness in its design’ (p.14).
Before he arrives there, the book offers a wealth of insights on penal change more
generally, seen through the lens of offender supervision instead of imprisonment, or
‘mass supervision’ (p.46) instead of mass imprisonment. Chapters 2 and 3 take into
account the important reference works on the sociology of punishment as well as the
necessary data and empirical resources available to prove the scale and social distribu-
tion of offender supervision in Europe and the USA. Chapter 4 is about ‘legitimating
supervision’, starting from philosophical and normative justifications, but going beyond
them and looking at legitimacy,acceptance, and support by those actually involved. After
this sensible analysis, McNeill turns to what is, arguably,at least as important to him and
for the subject matter: in Chapter 5 he explores the experience of supervision and the
pain inflicted, suggesting that ‘the penal state’s processes and agents hurt penal subjects
in significant ways but also that these pains can be moderated by helpful and legitimate
supervision’ (pp.130–1). Chapter 6 takes a step back and questions how we – scholars,
practitioners, and the public – come to our understandings, how we are seeing and not
seeing mass supervision (p.141), and how persistent our perceptions are unless we chal-
lenge them. In the last chapter ‘Supervision: unleashed or restrained’, the author offers
two possible futures for supervision. By elaborating on the ‘three P’s: parsimony, pro-
portionality and productiveness’ (p.169) mentioned above, he shows that a reductionist
approach is crucial and penal moderation, making god use of offender supervision, is
possible.
All this would make PervasivePunishment a good book already, but it has much more to
offer as it takes up the challenge mentioned and leaves the conventional ways of academic
writing by adding four more layers to it. The first one is part of the analysis, but de-
serves to be emphasised: in a comparative approach, McNeill not only takes into account
facts and figures from other countries but embraces insights from different traditions
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