“The Struggle is Real”: Punitive assessment in community services
| Published date | 01 July 2022 |
| Author | Marianne Quirouette |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474521990436 |
| Date | 01 July 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
“The Struggle is Real”:
Punitive assessment in
community services
Marianne Quirouette
Universit
e de Montr
eal, Canada
Abstract
Assessment tools are pivotal for the work of frontline community services providers,
shaping client relationships, access to supports and producing evidence for agencies
that need to allocate resources, demonstrate outcomes and secure funding. These
tools are combined and used cumulatively, as marginalized individuals are cared for –
but also controlled and punished - within these systems (e.g. in shelters, street out-
reach, mental health or re entry supports). Punishmen t literature has clarified that risk
tools are impactful but also contested and resisted. Still, we know little about how the
process is experienced and negotiated by frontline by practitioners working with
people pushed through the ‘revolving doors’. Drawing from two years of ethnographic
fieldwork and 105 interviews with community practitioners, I examine tools and prac-
tices used to ‘assess’ criminalized and marginalized individuals. I show that practitioners
are producing evidence about problems occurring outside legal institutions while rely-
ing on criminal justice logics and engaging with criminal justice spaces and paces.
I highlight the challenges service providers face and negotiate, focusing on three
themes: the composition of tools, the process of using them, and the service context
in which they are used. I argue that despite discretionary efforts and adaptations,
community practitioners remain frustrated by assessment tools and practices, and
particularly by their inability to meet the needs they are assessing.
Keywords
assessment, coercion, community supports, criminal justice, discretion, front line
practice, punitive, risk tools, social work
Corresponding author:
Marianne Quirouette, School of Criminology, Universit
e de Montr
eal, 3150, rue Jean-Brillant, Pavillon Lionel-
Groulx, #C-4070 Montr
eal, Quebec H3T 1N8, Canada.
Email: marianne.quirouette@umontreal.ca
Punishment & Society
!The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1462474521990436
journals.sagepub.com/home/pun
2022, Vol. 24(3) 433–456
Community practitioners working outside criminal justice frequently assess crim-
inalized individuals and their circumstances. They use tools to guide intake, refer-
rals, case work and supports, via re-entry programs, outreach teams, and in
agencies focused on homelessness, mental health or substance use. Community-
based agencies are especially involved in risk management when working with
criminalized individuals described as high-risk or as having ‘complex-needs’,
1
like people stuck in the infamous ‘revolving doors’. Ideally, tools used for assess-
ment help workers match people to the right services, providing empirical justifi-
cation for triage and case plans and informing best-practice policy as well as
funding decisions. As I argue in this paper however, assessment tools and processes
are also experienced by service providers as impositions that pathologize without
generating effective response and support.
Studies show that surveillance and extra-legal governance practices have signif-
icant unintended consequences, spreading criminal justice and other information
between regulatory bodies and agencies that enforce, support and punish (see Jain,
2015; Stuart, 2016). Relatedly, Miller (2014) describes the collusion between social
welfare and criminal justice, showing the re-entry process is disproportionately
controlling racialized people and communities. Surveillance and control via under-
funded and high-barrier bureaucracies is known to cause exhaustion (Halushka,
2020) and to trigger ‘system avoidance’ and social retreat (Brayne, 2014). It also
impacts housing and other outcomes through records-based discrimination
(Thatcher, 2008). In numerous fields, risk assessment practices are criticized for
promoting racist, discriminatory practices and having perverse, punitive and exclu-
sionary effects across criminal justice and other systems.
Professional discretion is key to frontline decision making (Lipsky, 1980).
Indeed, penal governance practices and adaptations vary, and scholars demon-
strate that contradictory objectives such as care and control, rehabilitation and
punishment and other models mix, braid and merge (Goodman et al., 2017;
Maurutto and Hannah-Moffat, 2006; O’Malley, 1999). Others highlight how
‘non-justice’ practitioners can work with, for and against systems of penal control,
while generating important evidence and records about disadvantaged and crim-
inalized people (Quinn, 2020; Quirouette, 2018; Tomczak and Thompson, 2019).
While we know penal governance includes mixed logics and individual adaption,
we know little about how the process is experienced and negotiated by frontline
community practitioners,
2
a question I explore in this paper. Analysis of care and
control in the community is timely, with calls for punishment scholars to consider
penal trends beyond the prison (Lynch and Hannah-Moffat, 2018), and inequality
scholars underscoring the importance of ‘institutional and administrative linkages
between criminal justice and other systems, agencies and institutions’ (Turney and
Wakefield, 2019; 2).
Assessments are central for practitioners and for clients, who often comply with
the process imposed in exchange for services and supports. They inform case work,
supporting and extending the power and reach of professional judgements (Cohen,
1985) and disciplinary projects (Foucault, 1977). Individual assessments are
434 Punishment & Society 24(3)
To continue reading
Request your trial