The Criminal Justice Voluntary Sector: Concepts and an Agenda for an Emerging Field
| Published date | 01 September 2019 |
| Author | PHILIPPA TOMCZAK,GILLIAN BUCK |
| Date | 01 September 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/hojo.12326 |
The Howard Journal Vol58 No 3. September 2019 DOI: 10.1111/hojo.12326
ISSN 2059-1098, pp. 276–297
The Criminal Justice Voluntary
Sector: Concepts and an Agenda
for an Emerging Field
PHILIPPA TOMCZAK and GILLIAN BUCK
Philippa Tomczak is Senior Research Fellow, School of Sociology and Social
Policy, University of Nottingham; Gillian Buck is Senior Lecturer in Social
Work, University of Chester
Abstract: Volunteers and voluntary organisations play significant rolespervading crim-
inal justice. They are key actors, with unrecognised potential to shore up criminal justice
and/or collaboratively reshape social justice. Unlike public and for-profit agents, crim-
inal justice volunteers and voluntary organisations (CJVVOs) have been neglected by
scholars. We call for analyses of diverse CJVVOs, in national and comparative con-
texts. We provide threecategories to highlight distinctive organising auspices, which hold
across criminal justice: statutory volunteers, quasi-statutory volunteers, and voluntary
organisations. The unknown implications of these different forms of non-State, non-
profit justice involvement deserve far greater attention from academics, policymakers and
practitioners.
Keywords: court; criminal justice; policing; punishment; voluntary sector;
volunteers
Criminal justice volunteering ‘is a way of making a difference to . . . some of the
most marginalised people in this country, as well as making communities safer . ..
Thousands of volunteers play a crucial role every day in helping to turn lives around,
whether by mentoring young offenders, supporting victims and witnesses at court,
or sitting as magistrates’. (Prison Reform Trust 2013, p.5, italics added)
The voluntary sector working in criminal justice [has] a workforce larger than that
of the prison and probation services combined. (Mullen 2018)
Volunteers1andvoluntary organisations2have long been involved in crim-
inal justice (Gill and Mawby 1990) but governments around the world
are restructuring State-dominated criminal justice, towards models where
responsibility and funding are shared by State, private, and voluntary
organisations (Ransley and Mazerolle 2017). Volunteers and voluntary or-
ganisations (with varying proportions of volunteer and paid staff) have
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2019 The Howard League and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK
The Howard Journal Vol58 No 3. September 2019
ISSN 2059-1098, pp. 276–297
been heavily implicated in criminal justice restructuring in, for example,
England and Wales, the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, France,
and the Nordic countries (Tomczak 2017). Restructuring has created com-
plex, ill-understood governance formations and partnership working3
(Goddard and Myers 2018; Kaufman 2015), overlaid upon long-standing,
similarly ill-understood criminal justice volunteers and voluntary organi-
sation (CJVVO) activity. For-profit justice involvement has attracted wide-
ranging interest, for example in: policing (White 2015); court inter-
preters (Aliverti and Seoighe 2017); court escort (Whitehead 2015); prison
(Burkhardt 2019); community supervision (Deering and Feilzer 2015); and
electronic monitoring (Hucklesby 2018). Yet, CJVVOs have not received at-
tention commensurate with their importance anywhere in the world.
We map the scale and scope of CJVVO activity, illustrating that their
scholarly neglect is problematic. Because diverse State/voluntary sector
partnerships have ‘largely escaped close scrutiny and serious public and
policy attention’ (Salamon 2015, p.2149),4an array of justice work and
its effects are not understood and potential to shape criminal and social
justice is unrecognised. Self-perpetuating reasons for this neglect include
varying nomenclature5(within and across jurisdictions); tendencies to de-
fine these actors by what they are not, rather than what they are (Robinson
2016); and the sheer size and variety of their formations and roles. ‘Lay’
criminal justice involvement (see, for example, Crawford (2004) regarding
restorative justice) includes an unpacked array of diverse formations and
(non-)mandatory roles. The varying organising auspices of non-State, non-
profit criminal justice involvement, and their (in)significance, have not yet
been explored.
We identify three categories which hold across criminal justice: (i) statu-
tory volunteers, directly recruited and organised by State agencies; (ii)
quasi-statutory volunteers, organised at arm’s length from statutory agen-
cies; and (iii) voluntary organisations, not directly organised by the State
but sometimes receiving State funding. These different forms of non-State,
non-profit justice involvement and their (in)significance deserve greater at-
tention from academics, policymakers and practitioners. By mapping these
forms, this article offers a springboard for essential future scholarship. It
is misleading for the Prison Reform Trust to state that every CJVVO is
unproblematically turning lives around and making communities safer
and evolving debates consider CJVVOs’ multifaceted effects (Tomczak and
Buck 2019; Tomczak and Thompson 2019). Yet, given the sheer scale of
CJVVOs, they (could) represent key criminal justice actors with unrecog-
nised potential to shore up social exclusion and/or reshape democracy and
social justice.
CJVVOs raise important questions (see, for example, Donoghue 2014;
Tomczak and Thompson 2019; Zedner 2004). What should the State pro-
vide? Do CJVVOs represent a shift away from State power, a change in its
nature and/or a change in its shape? Are CJVVOs enhancing oversight and
accountability, bridging the democratic deficit and gap between commu-
nities and criminal justice? Are CJVVOs agents of alienation, marginalisa-
tion and/or inclusion? CJVVOs can do more than extend control, but they
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2019 The Howard League and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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