Shadow Writing and Participant Observation: A Study of Criminal Justice Social Work Around Sentencing

Abstract

The study of decision-making by public officials in administrative settings has been a mainstay of law and society scholarship for decades. The methodological challenges posed by this research agenda are well understood: how can socio-legal researchers get inside the heads of legal decision-makers in order to understand the uses of official discretion? This article describes an ethnographic technique the authors developed to help them penetrate the decision-making practices of criminal justice social workers in writing pre-sentence reports for the courts. This technique, called `shadow writing', involved a particular form of participant observation whereby the researcher mimicked the process of report writing in parallel with the social workers. By comparing these `shadow reports' with the real reports in a training-like setting, the social workers revealed in detail the subtleties of their communicative strategies embedded in particular reports and their sensibilities about report writing more generally.

Street‐Level Bureaucracy, Interprofessional Relations, and Coping Mechanisms: A Study of Criminal Justice Social Workers in the Sentencing Process

“…In total, our fieldworker closely observed fifty‐three cases that had been allocated to a wide range of social work staff. In twenty‐nine of these cases, she additionally employed an innovative ethnographic technique developed during the project and described as “shadow writing,” discussed at length in Halliday et al. (2008).…”

“…We should stress at the outset that our data revealed features of routine social work that resonate well with some of the classic themes of Lipsky (1980) and with the newer stresses on the reproduction of cultural morality suggested by Maynard‐Moody and Musheno (2003). We have explored these findings elsewhere (Halliday et al. 2008; McNeill et al.…”

“…Social workers' abilities to influence the judicial decision about sentencing, however, were limited in that they generally could not openly recommend a sentencing disposal. Rather, social workers relied on the use of “narrative” (see Halliday et al. 2008; Tata et al.…”

“…5 5 Further examples of cases containing such narratives of redemption are given in Halliday et al. (2008) and Tata et al.…”

Performing Authority: Communicating Judicial Decisions in Lower Criminal Courts

“…Defence lawyers tend to prepare their clients for the likely news in a range of explicit/implicit ways, including during guilty plea discussions. There may be other cues about likely sentence, for example if the magistrate requests a pre-sentence report (Halliday et al 2008;Tata 2010).…”