Pervasive punishment

Hidden in plain sight: Architectures of community corrections as public secret

“…Perhaps more importantly, the invisibility of these buildings also makes it difficult for the public to envision what these systems are and do (see also Robinson, 2016). As Fitzgibbon et al (2017: 306) argue, ‘our difficulty in imagining these sanctions creates an important deficit in penal-political and democratic deliberation about them’. Openness, particularly if such openness comes with greater transparency, would thus make it difficult for the public to remain purposefully ignorant: if the systems are visible and open, the general public can no longer say they do not know what not to know and would, ideally, find it easier to engage in conversations about the very purpose and effectiveness of community sanctions.…”

Different ways of seeing: Exploring audience reactions to images of probation supervision

“…‘Mass supervision’ has until recently escaped the attention of scholars, policymakers and the general public (but see Fitzgibbon et al., 2017; Fitzgibbon and Stengel, 2018; Robinson and McNeill, 2015). This is despite the fact that those on community sanctions far outnumber those imprisoned; of the near seven million people sentenced to correctional supervision in 2015 in the USA, 4,564,900 were supervised in the community (Kaeble and Glaze, 2016).…”

“…The use of supervisory requirements before trial or sentence also increased in many jurisdictions and more intense supervision requirements were introduced including unpaid work, mandatory drug/alcohol testing, and electronic monitoring. As noted by Fitzgibbon et al. (2017: 306),This is not to say that these sanctions are necessarily illegitimate or disproportionate; rather, our point is that our difficulty in imagining these sanctions creates an important deficit in penal-political and democratic deliberation about them.The key problem is the lack of visibility and knowledge regarding the experiences of those on supervision (for a review of existing research, see McNeill and Beyens, 2013).…”

“…There is an absence of iconic images of, or reflections upon, the visceral and dynamic nature of sentences served within the community. Their absence makes it difficult to imagine what it feels like to be under supervision (Fitzgibbon et al., 2017). Contrast this with the plethora of visual images that are in the public gaze concerning imprisonment; for example, guards, gates, walls, towers and cells (see Brown, 2009).…”

Fergus McNeill, Pervasive Punishment: Making Sense of Mass Supervision

“…The Supervisible project works with probationers to create photographic accounts of their experience of supervision (its sister project, Picturing Probation , uses the same method with probation officers). 1 Through an analysis of the photographs and focus groups where participants discuss their works, McNeill and colleagues identify key elements of the supervisory experience: positive development or growth; time and waiting; constraint; waste; and direction or discipline (see also Fitzgibbon et al., 2017). These categories can be subtle and at times contradictory, making them all the more interesting as artifacts of the experience of supervision.…”