Helping, Holding, Hurting: A Conversation about Supervision

Abstract

This article begins with an overview of some of the late Bill McWilliams's key contributions to probation research and scholarship, focusing in particular on how his work helps us think about how people experience supervision, and about how the practice of supervision should be conceived and constructed. In the sections that follow, three of the co‐authors respond to these ideas from their different perspectives as service user, as frontline probation officer, and as probation manager. In the conclusion, we summarise the discussion by focusing on the role of values, of relationships and of evidence in the reform and development of probation.

Co-constructing feminist research: Ensuring meaningful participation while researching the experiences of criminalised women

“…Some scholars and probation practitioners (Anderson, 2016; Cluley and Marston, 2018; McNeill et al, 2017) place the probation worker as therapeutic bystander who has the ability to ‘bear witness’ to the traumatic events that preceded punishment. However, this can neglect the trauma created during the criminalisation process and the probation workers sustained role in the individual’s oppression via criminalisation.…”

Experiencing penal supervision: A literature review

“…Not all studies on the experience of supervision use the framework of the pains of probation to explore the negative experiences of penal subjects. In particular, the recent work of Fergus McNeill and collaborators (Fitzgibbon et al, 2017; McNeill, 2018; McNeill et al, 2018) uses a more open-textured and almost poetic approach to exploring penal subjects’ lived experiences. Whereas most pain-based analyses explore fairly concrete physical, social, and psychological impacts of supervision, McNeill’s recent projects have emphasised emotional reactions and perspectives through a range of innovative methods including asking penal subjects to take photographs representing their supervision (Fitzgibbon et al, 2017) and the use of song-writing to explore complex and hyper-individual experiences of penal processes (McNeill, 2018).…”