Practitioner Emotions in Penal Voluntary Sectors: Experiences from England and Canada

Abstract

Abstract Mixed economies of welfare have seen increasing numbers of service users funnelled into voluntary, rather than statutory sector services. Many service users with (complex) human needs now fall within the remit of ill-researched voluntary organisations that are rarely social work led. Voluntary sector practitioners comprise a large and rising proportion of the social services workforce, but their experiences have received minimal analysis. Despite the importance of emotions across the helping professions, voluntary sector practitioners’ emotional experiences are largely unknown. We address this gap, using an innovative bricolage of original qualitative data from England and Canada to highlight how ‘emotions matter for penal voluntary sector (PVS) practitioners across diverse organisational roles, organisational contexts, and national jurisdictions’. We examine the emotions of paid and volunteer PVS practitioners relating to their (i) organisational contexts and (ii) relationships with criminalised service users. Problematising positive, evocative framings of ‘citizen participation’, we argue that continuing to overlook voluntary sector practitioners’ emotions facilitates the downloading of double neo-liberal burdens—‘helping’ marginalised populations and generating the funds to do so—onto individual practitioners, who are too often ill-equipped to manage them.