Abstract
Community sanctions involving supervision are a neglected field in criminological research and are widely viewed in political, media and public discourse as ‘not prison’ and a ‘let-off’. An important new book, Pervasive Punishment by Fergus McNeill (2019), redresses this neglect by attempting to ‘make sense of mass supervision’ as a lived experience. Utilising a short story and allied projects with supervisees involving photographs and songs, he constructs a ‘counter-visual’ criminology that elucidates the ways supervision constitutes ‘pervasive punishment’. This article reviews McNeill’s argument and assesses its applicability in the Australian context.
Highlights
Community sanctions are enacted in the shadow of the prison, a looming presence that shapes and frames conceptions of community sanctions
While penal struggles are profoundly influenced by structural, cultural and political change, we need to understand how ‘the internal stresses that these forces create are manipulated and managed by the differently situated and resourced penal actors who struggle to construct and reconstruct criminal justice in law, policy and practice’ (McNeill 2019: 39) Such accounts, arguably aligned with some Australian analyses pay greater attention to national, regional and jurisdictional differences, and local context and influences including the effect of iconic cases and ‘happenstance’
Pervasive Punishment is a tightly argued and accessible work that draws muchneeded attention to the neglected field of community sanctions. It does this in a critical way and perhaps most significantly, by arguing that the process of ‘making sense’ of mass supervision as a lived experience is enabled by a ‘counter-visual’ criminology
Summary
Community sanctions are enacted in the shadow of the prison, a looming presence that shapes and frames conceptions of community sanctions. There is a paradox: that consideration of the numerically far more common criminal justice sentencing sanctions— fines, probation, community service orders, intensive corrections orders, parole and other forms of supervisory orders—takes a distant second place to consideration of the prison They are conceived and diminished as ‘not prison’, and bear the historical stamp of ‘leniency’, ‘mercy’, the ‘let-off’ or the ‘alternative to’ imprisonment. This is not to deny the existence of sentences acknowledged on appeal to be unduly lenient, but to argue that the ‘let-off’ characterisation in relation to a community correction order lacks an understanding of the very real and ‘painful’ restrictions in the form of additional conditions that might be imposed These can include, to take the Victorian legislation as an example, unpaid work, treatment, supervision, non-association, residence restriction, place exclusion, curfew, alcohol abstinence, a bond condition or a judicial monitoring condition (Sentencing Act 1991 (Vic) ss 48C– 48K). Such lack of understanding is reflected in public opinion surveys that show that people tend to: ‘know little about sentencing alternatives and focus instead on imprisonment’; and ‘underestimate the severity of sentencing practices for specific offences.’ (Gelb 2006: 24)
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