The impact of supervision on the pains of community penalties in England and Wales: An exploratory study

Abstract

This article explores the pains experienced by nine offenders subjected to (supervised) community and suspended sentence orders in an English Probation Trust between July 2013 and January 2014, arguing their importance for both deontological and consequentialist penal objectives. It identifies six major groups of pains and explores the extent to which their incidence and experienced intensity were affected by the supervisory relationship, which intensified or reduced some pains but left others materially unaffected. Despite the limitations of this exploratory study, implications can still be drawn for penal policy, both in England and Wales and across Europe.

Mass supervision, misrecognition and the ‘Malopticon’

“…The threat in question in Durnescu's (2011) study was that of breach or revocation and with it further punishment. Hayes (2015) careful recent study of the pains of probation supervision in England, drawing on interviews with a small number of supervisees and supervisors, similarly reveals six sets of related pains: pains of rehabilitation, of liberty deprivation, of welfare issues and of external agency interventions, as well as process pains and pains associated with stigma. Some of these pains were intensified, some reduced and some unaffected by the supervisory relationship.…”

Experiencing penal supervision: A literature review

“…Emphasising the punitive role of probation-based penalties raises the question of what makes these interventions punitive, and whether they are punishing enough. The pains of punishment provide a means of rejecting the claim that penal supervision constitutes 'a soft option', and gaining a more rounded understanding of its penal value (Hayes, 2015(Hayes, , 2016(Hayes, , 2018.…”

“…Generally, the studies of pains of penal supervision can be divided between those that deal exclusively or primarily with probation supervision -that is, with mandatory one-to-one social work-style meetings with a probation officer, which may be supplemented by groupwork, psychiatric interventions, educational classes, and other such rehabilitationoriented activities (Durnescu, 2011;Hayes, 2015;and compare Nugent and Schinkel, 2016;and Durnescu et al, 2018, both of which offer similar insights but relating to wider subject-matter) -and those that focus exclusively or primarily upon electronically monitored curfews as a more directly liberty-depriving form of noncustodial punishment (Payne and Gainey, 1998;Gainey and Payne, 2000;Vanhaelemeesch, 2015). perceived procedural unfairness, the pain of being a 'usual suspect' known to police, and the challenges inherent in the prosecution and conviction processes themselves (see also Feeley, 1979); and (f) stigmatisation effects, from family members, friends, and strangers (particularly potential employers).…”

“…This does not mean that penal supervision can never be ethically defensibly -only that we must be very sure of what it does to its subjects when we use it. Partly, this means is taking penal supervision seriously as a punishment -as something that does not need 'toughening up' to work as a punishment for offences of intermediate severity (Hayes, 2015), and as something that we might use too much of in any event (Fitzgibbon et al, 2017;McNeill, 2018).…”

Probation

“…Th e fi rst pain-the deprivation of autonomy-was divided into two main deprivations: pain of reorganizing the daily routine around the sanction and the deprivation of private family life. More recently, Hayes ( 2015 ) interviewed nine off enders subject to community and suspended-sentence orders in England. Based on these interviews he identifi ed six major groups of pains: pains of rehabilitation (the more requirements the more painful the experience is), pains of liberty deprivation (punishment through breach), penal welfare issues (the more vulnerability one has the more painful the supervision is), pains of external agency interventions (the more agencies are involved the more diffi cult the supervision process is perceived), process pains ('the process is the punishment': see ) and stigma.…”