What Matters in Practice? Understanding ‘Quality’ in the Routine Supervision of Offenders in Scotland

Abstract

Little is known about the nature, character and construction of quality in the routine supervision of offenders in Scotland. Quality is an important yet contested concept with multiple facets and features, but its meanings for practitioners are under-researched. This article will present findings from a study using Appreciative Inquiry to reveal how Scottish criminal justice social workers attempt to conceptualise and construct meanings of quality in their daily practice with people who have offended. Our findings conclude that despite significant fluctuation in criminal justice policy and practice, practitioners' ideas of quality seem to suggest resilience to both managerialism and punitiveness. Practitioners ultimately located quality within relational processes underpinned by social work values, but also saw it as being underscored by (or undermined by the lack of) adequate resourcing, professional supervision, flexibility and training.

The quality of probation supervision: Comparing practitioner accounts in England and Scotland

“…After permission was granted from the Sheffield team, the study was subsequently adapted and applied on a smaller scale within a large local authority setting in Scotland (Grant and McNeill, 2014). The English study involved 116 participants drawn from three probation trusts; all levels of staff within each trust were given the opportunity to participate -ensuring a wide mix of perspectives.…”

“…We would like to thank Professor Joanna Shapland, Professor Steve Farrall, Dr Camilla Priede and Dr Gwen Robinson of the University of Sheffield, England, for their generosity in giving permission to partially replicate their study in Scotland (See Grant and McNeill, 2014); and especially for providing advice, guidance and access to materials used in their research.…”

“…Two recent studies of quality in the practice of offender supervision in Scotland and England begin to address this gap by exploring practitioners' understandings of quality in each jurisdiction (Grant and McNeill, 2014;Robinson et al, 2013aRobinson et al, , 2013bShapland et al, 2012). This article compares results from both studies, exploring convergence and divergence across key themes and offering a deeper understanding of what quality means in two distinct but connected jurisdictions.…”

Probation practice in the information age

“…Much of this work has made use of Bourdieu's concepts of habitus and field to explore the ways in which practitioners resist, succumb, eschew and internalize these broader changes in policy (Grant, 2015;Phillips, 2016). Moreover, this research has come to broadly similar conclusions -that the probation habitus has been relatively resilient to such changes and represents what Bourdieu would call a heterodox in probation practice: the field is structured in such a way for multiple forms of practice to coexist (Deering, 2011;Grant and McNeill, 2014;Robinson et al, 2013b).…”

Theorising the role of community practitioners supporting young men with mild to borderline intellectual functioning in re-entry

“…Studies of practitioners working as part of probation and parole indicate that, despite the challenges of resource pressures curtailing time spent with individual clients, they continue to voice a commitment to meaningful engagement with the client, needing time to form practitioner-client relationships based on trust and wanting time to be able to respond to the individual's changing needs (Grant and McNeill, 2015). Studies confirm the importance of the quality of the relationships between parolee-parole officer, client-therapist and clientpractitioner in mediating criminal justice outcomes (Blasko et al, 2015, Burnett andMcNeill, 2005).…”