So welcome to the first of the for the return also Sanaz, it's my pleasure to introduce today's speaker, Professor. Thanks McNeill, who's come down all the way from Glasgow to talk to us about his new book, Pervasive Punishment. Ferguson is professor of criminology and social work at University of Glasgow, where he works at the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research and Sociology. He's well known for his work on systems found on non-custodial forms of punishment.
The main focus of his talk today is going to be on the lived experience of supervision as revealed through conventional ethnography and in his own recent work in which he uses creative methods to explore and represent what it is and what it feels like to see the last. Well, thank you very much for the invitation. When you said seminar, I imagined a dozen, maybe 15 people for a cosy chat, which would be very informal and it feels like a public lecture.
So no pressure. And you also reminded me when you read that part from the abstract that I've totally forgotten to include about contemporary ethnography of supervision. But I'll just one of the things. Okay. I'm going to talk to you about the book Pervasive Punishment Making Sense of Mass Supervision, which was published just in November. I'm not going to tell you what actually I am. And two PowerPoint slides.
I'm going to give you a synopsis of the whole argument, which commercially makes no sense, because then you'll have no need to buy the book but provide some context for flow homing. And specifically today on the lived experience as represented and revealed through some less conventional research methods,
particularly using creative approaches. And the use of those methods, as I will say towards the end, isn't just about discovery or inquiry or the generation of numerology it already has in mind the way that we're going to use the knowledge that we generate through those approaches. And I'll try to demonstrate at the end why. I think one of the strengths of creative, creative methods is that they offer us something in relation to public engagement around our topics of study.
And that's particularly important to me in this project because the central argument of the book and a central concern of my work for the last 20 odd years as that supervision isn't visible or isn't sufficiently visible, it's barely visible in the academy. So in among those of us who study punishment in society, I was Gwen Robinson. So this is very much the Cinderella of that field.
I neglected important feature of the penal system and one which really deserves and requires our scholarly attention but hasn't been getting it. And Gwen goes into this in some detail in her work. I'm not going to explain all of that today, but she kind of raises the question, how come Stan Cohen surfaced all of these issues in relation to the role of community and punishment and surveillance and visions of social control in the mid 1980s?
And then we lost it again. We lost sight of that as our central concern and punishment in society. And you'll have to read Gwen's article, too, to find our answer to that question. But it's linked to a second concern for me, which is that this is invisible in the public domain. The research that we have of public attitudes, public understanding of supervisory forms of punishment suggests either ignorance or apathy or cynicism or a combination of all three.
And the hopper reference. Here is a pilot study I was involved with a year or two ago where we looked at audience reception of media reporting of community based forms of punishment on phones. One of our central findings was that those forms of punishment failed to communicate moral censure. At least that was the view of the people who were absorbing or responding to that media. So there's something going on in relation to public failure to grasp what's involved in these forms of punishment.
And that failure to see has impacts, has social impacts and systemic impacts in relation to penal expansion, which I will demonstrate shortly. And it has personal impacts and that leads to a misunderstanding or a failure to even to care about very significant experiences of those subject to punishment, which I'm going to try to articulate and fundamentally linking to debates about public criminology.
If we can't imagine this form of punishment, literally can't imagine it, then how are we to debate its fairness or excuse equity? And I'll give you an example, an Oxford example, to kind of drive this point home. So this is Lavinia Whitworth, and this was a very significant case a year or two ago. In fact, just when I was writing the beginning of the book, Lavinia Whitworth had returned to court to be sentenced in relation to an assault.
I'm not exactly sure of the English legal terms, but she had stopped her boyfriend causing injury, significant injury, wounding, and she was initially sentenced, was deferred, though the case was continued and that enough that caused enough controversy. But then when she finally came back to be sentenced, she received a suspended sentence order. I should have asked at the beginning who you are and what you study, and what level of understanding or interest you have in communities like this.
Because I don't really know how much to explain about a suspended sentence order as a form of supervisory punishment. It's fascinating because the reporting of that case didn't tell us what the conditions of the suspension were. So we don't know really what happened to the venue, which broke all of the reporting that really in the Telegraph was a good example and say that she escaped punishment and that she walked free from court.
Neither of which is true. And I was thinking about that and this is an extract from the introduction and and sort of trying to kind of crystallise my thought about this problem of visibility. And it occurred to me that if I asked people in general, what do you think it means to live anywhere when you are to be on a suspended sentence order right now at 337 on a Tuesday afternoon in January? What do you imagine? What happens in your head? Close your eyes. Imagine it.
And I think the usual answer I get when I ask the question is nothing. Nothing comes to mind very much. Maybe a meeting in an anonymous office with somebody who looks fairly professional. Some people go a little bit further and think about whether there might be some treatment condition in relation to substance abuse or mental health. So there could be some aspect related to that, but it's very hard to summon up an imagining of what an so as or means to a person in a given moment.
Whereas if she'd gone to prison and I asked you the same question, she's in jail at 335 on a monday. What do you think happens in jail? What do you think she's experiencing? You'd probably, if you knew what she represents, think that she's not far away from getting her dinner because dinner served very early in prison. She might still be finishing a work detail or doing some specific duties of an education class, but that would be finishing soon so that she can return to the landing.
And all of those things have an architecture that feeds our imaginations so we can, rightly or wrongly, accurately or inaccurately, we know what we think. We know what we're talking about and what we're debating when we discuss imprisonment, but not in the case of supervision. I'll come back to the questions of imagining and the problems of imagining later. So what do I mean by mass supervision? Well, mass as a metaphor on a world with a range of potential metaphorical connotations.
And as with mass incarceration or mass imprisonment, we can't think of that simply in relation to scale or volume. And that's the kind of go to connection that we make when we hear the phrase. But it also speaks to questions of social distribution or concentration. So which public which populations are being considered problematic and managed in particular ways, and that can involve processes of aggregation.
There's lots that we could talk about here in relation to the new phenology, but the processing of groups who share certain characteristics or who are constructed as sharing certain characteristics through particular systemic practices. So they are the masses that are being processed in mass incarceration or mass supervision. We can also think about mass. We can spell it differently and think about the weight of people, burden of being supervised and crews work on deaths.
Weight and tightness in relation to imprisonment is something that I tried to use in the book a little bit and we can also think about the way in which supervision constructs subjects which links to this process of individualisation. So if you go to that concept, it's different from individualisation, which is about recognising people and they their human complexity.
The visualisations sorts people according to certain characteristics classically in relation to risk assessment in the criminal justice system, but there are other versions in other systems. Okay, here's the two slides where I gave you the whole story. So pervasive punishment and punishment pervades in two ways that we that we fail to notice or fail to see pervades socially in supervision and the community.
So it's out there all around us on a scale that we don't understand or recognise, and I'll give you the scale in a moment, but it's also pervasive in the lives of those subject to it in ways that we don't see or recognise. And if we look at this historically, the forms of supervision that are applied today are in many respects more intensive, more invasive, more intrusive than they were in earlier eras. And some of that will be revealed as I go through the lived experience.
The second chapter does a kind of conventional punishment and society sweep up of accounts of penalty and charity. To understand penal change, we need that theoretical or conceptual understanding to kind of figure out where mass supervision has come from and why it's emerged in the forms that it has. So that chapter reflects on the broad social changes that are often discussed by punishment and society scholars.
But it also delves down into reconfigurations of the penal state and contestation or struggle in the penal field.
So I think of that as the distal causes of penal change, the big, broad social currents that shift practices and systems and discourses of punishment, and then the sort of intermediate level of more proximate influences which are in the in the way that a state is configured and the particular constitutional dynamics in different places that have a bearing on how social pressures come to be interpreted and have their effects on different places.
But also crucially important to me is the local contestation of criminal justice. I'll come back to that point in a moment. But you have to study this process of penal change all the way down right to the coalface, as it were, of penal practice and of penal experience. So the lived experience also tells us something when we use it to look back up through the layers of accounting for how punishment changes.
So that's chapter two. Chapter three is all about the numbers. I'm not going to give you a lot of numbers today, but I'm going to give you a couple of slides with some graphs because I feel obliged to before I go, all flaky and creative. So you will get some numbers in a moment. And the takeaway message from that analysis, I focus on Scotland, obviously a jurisdiction I know well and the U.S. because there's very good work clear using quantitative methods.
I also look at the European level and I'll give you a little bit of data from each of those three contexts. In many Western jurisdictions, the ratio of people subject to supervision to people incarcerated is about 3 to 1. That's right in Scotland, it's about right in England and it's almost right in America. And it has been that way for a few decades now. In all three of those jurisdictions, there's been simultaneous growth of incarceration and supervision, which is a very important point.
However, the social distribution of supervision is not even it's concentrated in marginalised communities. On the receiving end of social inequalities. There are slight differences in the way in which it's concentrated. Supervision is slightly. The population supervised is slightly less marginalised than the population in prison, but it depends on the form of supervision. So the parole population is closer to the prison population obviously than the probation population.
I'm conscious that I'm not defining my terms as I go through. So if anybody needs clarification of the differences between probation and parole or anything else, just interrupt me, please. Chapter four. I'm trying to understand this process of penal change looks at the way in which supervision has been legitimated in different ways, in different places, at different stages in its evolution. And I like that two penal narratives around managed utilisation, punitive rehabilitation and reparation.
And I go back to the case study of Scotland to show that reductionism this is paradoxical penal reduction, reductionism, a commitment, a formal commitment to reducing the prison population and a commitment to try to retain a welfare test approach in the penal system, quite often celebrated in England when you look north. Actually, those who have been complicit in penal expansion in Scotland.
To cut to the chase on that point because we haven't recognised that supervision as punishment and that it harms, we've been incredibly careless about its expansion and it hasn't diverted people from imprisonment. So what we've done is hugely proliferated the total population subject to penal control in Scotland. At the same time there's talking about reduction and welfare.
Then I'll come on to the experience of my supervision. I'll, I'll pass that quickly, because we're going to major on that in a moment. And again, the last two chapters are different. So I stop analysing and start problem solving. At the end of the book and the first of those two chapters, Chapter six, is about how to make this visible in a way which is constructive. What kinds of processes of dialogue and deliberation might criminologists in particular, have a role in enabling?
And how would we do that through through visual, sensory and public criminologists more often later? And then finally, I get normative and look at the potential futures of supervision in different ways that it could go and try to develop some principles that might guide us towards what I would regard as an appropriately constituted unrestrained future for supervision. There are three unusual features of the book. There's a short story.
Every chapter begins with an extract from a short story which unfolds. I'm going to read you the first chapter, which is very short at the moment to give you an illustration. And then I'll briefly tell you a bit about how the plot develops. And here the key characters are. There's a lot of pictures in the book that come from using visual methods to explore the lived experience, both of supervisors and of supervisors.
There's some music in the book where songwriting processes have been used to explore different aspects of the experience. So here's episode one. So what I'm feeling pretty close to me and you before you see this book we read like some of these books, so to speak. So as you can have this one definition and some just yeah, so the term supervision gets confusing when you talk to Americans.
So if you talk to Americans about populations under correctional supervision, they include everybody in prisons, parole, probation and jail. So they think of supervision as the total correctional. So the total correctional population in the European context, when we talk of mass supervision, we don't mean people incarcerated either in jails or prisons.
So we're talking about either front door community sanctions, which is where a court imposed measure or sanction is applied as and classically probation or community service or back door community sanctions, which includes early release arrangements that involve supervision like parole. So it's both probation and parole, but it also extends to what we would once have called community service and know it is also to electronic monitoring. So any form of penal.
Mosul imposed by a court or a quasi judicial body in relation to the release of somebody which involves community based supervision of that person. That's the best I can do. It's quite hard. That's one of the points that Gwen raises, is that compared with imprisonment, supervision is really hard to define and we are in ways that travel across jurisdictions and systems adequately, but that are different. Okay, so prepare your imaginations.
You've got to kind of switch motor from academic to something else. So to sit on the bench in the waiting room looking down, he noticed that the bench was straight to the floor, not even the furniture. It was free Perspex screens and locked doors separated head on the others waiting from those for whom they waited.
The veils between the untrustworthy and those to whom they were entrusted to absentmindedly read the graffiti carved into the bench, and testimonies of resistance that made the place feel even more desperate. He scanned the poster walls, searching their messages in pastel shades and bold print problems with drugs, problems with alcohol, problems with anger. Stay calm. Apparently help was at hand or at the end of a phone line.
But meanwhile, remember that abusive language and aggressive behaviour will not be tolerated in this room. So felt like an installation of abuse and aggression to it. Said You are pathetic, desperate or dangerous. You are not to be trusted. You must wait. He fidgeted and returned his eyes to the floor, downcast by the weight of the room's assault. Avoiding contact, avoiding hassle, staying as unknown as possible in this chair and put furtively out of place here, then to belong.
This was no place to make connections. Jo wondered what she would be like. Pauline. The unknown woman who now held the keys to his freedom or what had become his law. This was an order. After all, he was to be the real keeper. She the ruler. Cruel, capricious or kind. She might hold the leash lightly, or she might drag him to heel instinctively. He lifted his hand to his neck. But no one can loosen an invisible collar.
At least it was not a noose. Joe swallowed uncomfortably, noticing the dryness of his mouth and the churning in his gut. He was not condemned to hang. He was condemned to be left hanging. Joe wondered what Pauline would be like. See? So I'm not going to say very much about the writing of the fiction thing if I consider it sociological fiction. So it's a representation of research findings. I could reference materials that have generated the ideas that are represented fictionally.
But it's not describing any research participant's experiences directly. This is a picture which was part of what stimulated my imagination. This is a real probation waiting room. I'm not exactly sure where it's from, but it was part of the Picturing Probation Project, which I'll say a little bit more about later. Okay. So he wrote the numbers and brief. Michelle Phelps is the American scholar who's done most to try to understand what's going on over there in relation to mass probation,
which is our principal focus. So here you've got the number of probationers and she's indexed this growth by the crime rate. So this is the number of probationers in index crimes. It's a dotted line. And this is from 1980 to 2010. This is the number of prisoners. So that's the the mass incarceration line. And that's the ratio of probationers to prisoners, which moves at its high point quite early in the growth of both.
It's 4 to 1. And by by the end, for most of the sort of mid-nineties to 2010, it's around the 3 to 1 figure that I, I mentioned before. And this doesn't include parolees, which is another significant population in the American context kind of differently here. Scotland and this is not indexed. I was too lazy to index this by crime rates. I do know the numbers are low, I'll tell you those. But this is just it gives you the crime rate, which is that black dotted line.
This is the prison population growth and this is the growth in the supervision numbers. And obviously, you can see that they both grew together at the 1980. We have just over about two and a half thousand people subject to supervision, about 35,000 in prison. So a population, total population of less than 8000 today, 30,000. If you put the two together, 8000 in prison, roughly 22,000 under supervision in the community.
If you want to index it by crime, there are ten times as many community disposals today in Scotland as there were in 1980. And our government is still promoting community disposals as a way to reduce the prison population to. This is Europe. There's far too much detail. You don't have to look at this and say that it's just different countries. The light colour is the present population. The dark colour is the population subject to supervision. Now these come with a big health warning.
It's very hard to do a European level statistical analysis of the sort because of all those problems of definition. But what you see is an uneven energy line here with different relationships. So some countries, Georgia is an outlier with a huge prison population and a huge probation population at the other end. Finland is very small on both. You get some examples like England high on both, certainly by Western European standards. Scotland would be about the same. No, not very different really.
Once you kind of take into account population size and all these are adjusted for that, I think. But then if you go through here, you get interesting differences. You get small prison populations with small supervision populations, you get big supervision populations with small prison populations. It's all over the place as the point and it's the best in America, in the U.S., Michelle's done fantastic work.
I'm not going to show you her data when she looks at state level variation across the 50 states of the USA. But I'll give you our conclusion, which is the really important one for people who are interested in punishment in society. Comparative research that's relying on imprisonment rates fundamentally misconstrues that variation in punishment. If you don't look at supervision, you're not understanding what's going on.
Rather than a monolithic expansion, states followed diverse trajectories, likely driven by local. It's a point I mean, the earlier socio political and economic conditions producing a multifaceted array of control strategies. So she talks about there are states that are high prison, high probation. She calls them the states that fall under an approach of punitive control. They have low probation, low of imprisonment, which is fair control.
You have high probation or low imprisonment, which is managerial control, and you have high imprisonment below probation, which is incompatible, out of control. So she has a kind of four way taxonomy on Klotz, the 50 states in that way to help us understand the differences. So if you want a thriller, kind of the cultural state, you need to understand each of the various mass punishments.
Okay, that's enough for the numbers. So I'm not going to switch hastily into the lived experience and I'm going to give you a two minute summary of the ethnography is that I forgot to prepare. So I've been very much influence that inspired by a whole bunch of mostly British and American ethnographers of supervision and rehabilitation.
And to some extent there are some nice overlaps here between a kind of technocracy of the prison or potentially ethnography of rehabilitative processes in prisons and progression processes.
So release a progression towards release and then people who are studying supervision in the community and what they what they tend to reveal, although it's complicated and different in different places in relation to different forms of supervision, but what they tend to reveal is the rehabilitation recast under the guise of risk produces some particularly particularly difficult
effects for the subjects of those practices been true in the context of imprisonment talks about the move towards soft power, which is where he develops those concepts of depth. And take this. So how deeply imprisoned you are is how far you are from life outside, how heavy as how how heavily the burdens of imprisonment bear down upon you and take. This is the extent to which you are constrained.
He I don't think he would use the word manipulated. I think I would buy those practices in order to perform a version of yourself which demonstrates that your risk is reducing and that it's safe to do issue. So there's a kind of psychological form of control that's being applied as people progress through risk based forms of rehabilitation towards release and then in the community on supervision, subject to recall or breach.
If it's a community sentence, the same or similar dynamics are in play so we can think of the depth of a community sentence or supervisory experience, not in terms of how far you are from being out in the community because you are in the community. But rather how far from normal life are you? How far from the ordinary freedoms of the citizen are you as a supervisor? And I'll give you an example in a moment of a supervisor who has a very long.
We from normal life, even although he's free, free in a physical sense. Secondly, how heavy are the burdens of supervision bearing down upon you? And thirdly, how tightly are you controlled by the associated practices? Okay. So the same can be applied and people like Alexandra Cox, she's looked at that in relation to young people's experiences of the correctional system in the North American state.
Leon Dicker looks at it in relation to the release and supervision of people convicted of sexual offences. Rubin Mueller has looked at it in relation to principally African-American men in North America in Chicago. Robert Worth looks at it in relation to parolees in California. So there's a succession of really good ethnographic work on this stuff. And so we didn't this is part of a European project that I led for four years between 2012 and 2016.
We wanted to try to examine supervision comparatively. And one of our working groups was concerned with the experience of supervision. And we were trying with hardly any money to figure out a way to begin to experiment with exploring the lived experience. And we split into two of many projects. One piloted the development of something called the Eurobarometer, which is a survey instrument, essentially, that we then used to examine people's experiences in eight different European countries.
And the other group was called Super Visible. And we developed this photo, a kind of photo ethnography, visual methods approach where in three countries in England, Germany and Scotland, we worked with about a dozen people in each country, subject to different forms of supervision, and we gave them a simple challenge, which was to take some photographs that represent or convey aspects of your experience of being supervised.
And then we'll get back together. We'll look at the pictures, pick the ones that you think are most evocative of what you've experienced, maybe caption them if you like, and then let's discuss them in a group. So it's a kind of mixture of focus group methodology and visual methods. And there's a lot of interesting dialogue in the focus groups where the photographer and the audience of the image debate its meaning.
And so the pictures are data and that's method. But the discussion of the pictures is also data. And we analysed that across the five countries and found surprisingly high degrees of similarity across three states with very different populations, from men released to halfway houses in Germany and women in a probation centre in England and people subject to community payback orders in Scotland. These were the five recurring themes. So the first and probably the most common theme was constraints.
There were lots of visual metaphors of constraint. This is a German picture by somebody who has an image of Vivaldi, and I don't know what it conveys to you, but four for him, he's trying to communicate the extent to which he feels and infantilized. He calls this lady justice, and he's the child who is being dragged along by the hand, not free to choose where it goes. This is from somebody whose pseudonym is Messiah ten in Scotland.
And it's a woman you can't see. It's so small, but it's a woman walking our dog. So you don't have in the in the end, the extract I'm talking about the invisible caller and will she hold the leash slightly straight from his account of what this image is about? Initially he says, Yeah, well, she's the supervisor and I'm the dog, and everybody in the group murmurs their agreement.
I find that a really shocking woman in fieldwork. But then he said, and she told me to be quiet lately, and the dog looks happy. So there was an interesting qualification of quote, form of constraint or power is being exercised here, something dehumanising, but also maybe paternalistic or at least not brutal in the sense that holding the lead differently might be. It's not the first time I've heard that metaphor.
It's also in Alexandra Cox's ethnography and again in a very different country with a very different population. So the images have constrained images of time lost or suspended, images of waste being treated like waste or processed as waste, and images of judgement and the positive one images of growth and development. Actually, I see the positive one, but almost all of these, with the exception of judgement, are kind of ambivalent or literally ambivalent.
They point in different directions. So sometimes constraint can be a welcome we all like to be. At times needs to be tamed. Suspended can also be time interrupted in a in a in a way which is welcome. Waste, he would think, is only negative. But some people talked about getting rid of their [INAUDIBLE] through processes of supervision. So, you know, dealing with stuff in their life that they want it to flush away. Growth is painful even if it's also recognised as desirable and welcome.
Judgement was the one which was universally negative in its connotation and I'm going to focus on that next. I think the next slide is the one I expect it to be and it is so not content with pictures. We took these we took a dozen of these images into songwriting workshops that we only had in Glasgow with a Scottish group of people subject to supervision, supervisors, academics and obviously musicians to support the songwriting process.
We have professional musicians co-writing with those who have some kind of lived experience. We had a radio producer there to make a podcast about it. I was there as a as a researcher, not as a participant, although my role changed. The workshop was oversubscribed, and I had to pretend to be a musician and co-write a song, which I'm not going to share the song with you musically, but I will show you the lyrics in a moment.
So the way these workshops run is that they start with a performance which is important and sets a tone of openness and vulnerability and also gives people a sense of what might be possible. That's the you know, that's what good musicians are able to convey in their performance. We use the pictures of stimuli. We go through the song a range of sort of songwriting exercises and activities. We write record and playback the songs. This takes place over the course of two days.
So I spend most of the two days with TG and TG and I write the song Blank Face Together, which you can hear not thankfully with me singing it, but rerecorded by one of the professional musicians for the purposes of public sharing. And these are these are the lyrics that the TG essentially generated with a little bit of help from me, but they were stimulated by four images. There's a reason why one is missing. So there's the clock at 0 hours.
There's the sliding doors of what he took to be a present, although it's actually a Dutch probation office. There's two shadows cast from a children's climbing frame, which looks about like a spider's web with two creatures or shadows within it. On the fourth image is a Dutch probation officer who's looking across a table, an off camera supervising with a very sort of blank face. And of those four images, he immediately conjures a narrative and says, Well, I recognise that face.
I've seen that a million times and I know what it gets back in return. Another black face. That relationship's never going to work. This guy is going to be recalled to custody. That's what happens in verse two. And we're going to go around the circle again and again. So the lyrics, if I just sort of guffawed, it's quite small, so I'll read you through. He says The clock spins zero where it begins. This is the end. The end again. Here's that's black face and she spends my tail.
I start listening and I know that I'll fail. And then the refrain took my check in line by line, thread by thread. No, you. We've made a web of shadows of silk, spun to a windowless room, windowless room, sliding doors open, and they will come in. This is the place. The place we pay for selling these four seasons, the reflecting glass trapped in a jar here where the time will not pass. And then the refrain. And then one day. And then a new day begins.
Tech says [INAUDIBLE] do it again and again and again. You see what you want. But I know it's not real. Anyone out there who can feel what I feel. Fatigue is a life licence supervisor. So he has served the custodial part of a life sentence is completed. The punishment part is being released by the parole board and he's been out for about 15 years. And over the course of those 15 years he's had several social workers and remains subject to post-release licence A0 for life.
So he's in a very extreme form of supervision which has a life long as life licence in place. Oh, we're going to do so in a paper published in Punishment in Society. But this time last year, I analysed TJ's experiences as refracted through the song and. Pictures because he was also part of the photography project and and took amazing photographs. And I just played around with the idea of the panopticon and I know this is this is Oxford.
So somebody is going to say something about the mile optic on being an unconscionable splice of Greek and Latin films. And the reason I've done that is that if you go old Greek, it's the character code. And the character code in Scotland sounds extremely rude and so on. Malloc the concepts a bit more like Panopticon. So it's a playful idea in one respect and a deadly serious one and another.
And what I'm trying to get at with this concept is it's not with supervision, it's not about an architecture, a disciplinary architecture, which leads to an internalisation of of social control. Rather, it's a series of mechanisms and practices that generate a certain form of degradation. What's being dispersed, I think, is discipline is not discipline so much as degradation.
That's both, of course. So in the model optical and you're not hyper visible or super visible, you are invisible, at least as you recognise yourself. You're seen badly by the system that's linked to the idea of the visualisation that I started with and you created as a certain kind of object. So you're objectified in a certain way rather than engaged with as a human subject. That's what the blank face does. It doesn't see you. It sees something else. That judgement that it makes is loaded.
It sees you as bad so you're most recognised, objectified and degraded and that's a kind of moral and civic degradation. And then that projects your badness, realising that that negative degraded status and projecting it socially with real material and symbolic effects or exclusions bans limitations on your rights and freedoms, what kind of jobs you can do, what kind of places you can go with the kind of people you can see.
There's lots of different possibilities that are configured differently for different people under different sorts of supervision. And of course, a few struggle against this in that way that TG writes about in the course, the spider's web. He said, as we were writing that he said The thing about criminal justice, Ferguson, is that the more you struggle, the more tightly contained you become. And that's that's what happens in a spider's web.
You know, the fly that's caught in the trap struggles and finds itself more in a similar fashion here. If you struggle against the systems construction of you, that's evidence that it's seeing you rightly as a problem. And so the process is kind of amplified. No parole holder in a very depressing paper which was published in Punishment in Society. And then I wrote the book and I came back to the chapter where I was planning to go through that again.
And I remembered at that stage and this is an honest confession of a poor researcher that I'd written two songs, and that workshop on the second one had been written very hastily with another person subject to post-release supervision called John. So I thought, why haven't I paid attention to that? So in my thinking of these processes and part of the answer is I don't like the song that much, I'm just being honest about what sometimes happens here.
But here's the song. Oh, sorry. That's what I've just said to you. Experience suggests a dispersal of control as much as or more than discipline, distortion, degradation, and then ultimately, crucially, disqualification. Come back to that later. But here's John. So John's sentence was 12 years and he was released at six as the earliest possible release point in the Scottish system. And he's about four years through the six, maybe four and a half now.
And John's been involved with the charity through which we run these workshops for a while, and I knew him quite well and he was late to the workshop and came in and we kind of had to through something really quick and this is what happened. So he looks at the pictures and I think from memory he took that picture, that Vivaldi provided of the women with the child. And so it completely differently from what Vivaldi meant and from I think it was interpreted and said, well, there's a helping hand.
There's somebody looking after a child keeping the child safe. And he thought about that and. She said his own experience of being supervised and he lets the structure of the song. Jones A kind of country music fan. That's the way the music sounds. But it also has a kind of slightly cheesy quality, if you know what I mean by that. That's a very technical music term. So there's a past, present, future. I mean, there's a kind of message. So I was going down a rocky road.
No one to help me on my way. I wish I'd had you by my side. Stop these feelings deep inside. So he's saying I wish I'd been supervised earlier. And then the chorus hold my hand and let me go. The things I know I can't unknow. Let me go. Please hold my hand. It's time to fly. I know I can't. So ambivalence is he wants to be free. He doesn't want to require supervision, but he wants the reassurance and security that supervision can provide.
And he wishes that he had had it when he was younger and he maybe wouldn't have been in the position that he finds himself. The current verse No, I have you by my side. I am making sure I do no wrong. I'm glad that you are in my life though. It's only for so long. Cross important. And then the future. Time to move on in my life. I'll take the next steps on my own. I'll take you with me in my heart. But we'll never be alone. So it's pretty cheesy, but it conveys something really important.
And if I think about that in relation to the Mail Optical and just tells us something about how supervision might not always be on necessarily the male optical. So for him, being supervised is legitimate. He recognises that he deserves to be supervised. It's part of his 12 year punishment, which he thinks is a fair sentence for a serious offence or crime that he committed. So he's bought into this as part of earning a second chance.
It's helpful. His supervisor and him have a decent relationship. They don't always agree. He does find supervision intrusive, particularly in the way that it messes with his ah, the way that he would choose to manage his family life. And his supervisor engages with that in certain ways, which he finds tiresome. But more generally, he finds the supervisor helpful, even as his need for supervision fades over the course of time. And this is crucial for him. It's temporary.
This is a finite time, limited experience, which is connected to the promise of freedom. And so for Jordan, freedom's coming. But for T.J., it's not okay. So we're nearly there. I'm doing okay for time, for once in my life. So at the end of the book, there are two endings and the of the short story. So in the short story, Joe meets Pauline. Pauline's an old fashioned, sort of world weary probation officer who has disgruntled the manager utilisation of her work personified by Norm,
who is her super supervisor. Here's a kind of young, grasping manager idealist aiming for a career and as a privatised probation system. And so there's a struggle between them over what Joe's supervision is or should be about. And indeed, a more general struggle about what the supervision is. Joe Pauline eventually connects Joe with a group called the Conviction Collective. That's a dark came in-joke for the sociologist in the room. But hey, no sociologist in the room.
The Conviction Collective is a collective of people who have convictions, criminal convictions and political and moral convictions, and they are mobilising collectively to support one another and to campaign for change in the penal system. And Joe is a middle class man. He's a former accountant. He's had a bit of a mid-life crisis. So he brings his professional skills to bear in the development of that group and and the happy ending.
Joe Pauline Norm has been reformed and rehabilitated in this process, and Petra is the rock on which the Conviction Collective is founded, are going off to the Parliament to give evidence to the Justice Committee about a new pilot initiative that they've been pursuing, which is remaking supervision in a different form. So that's the happy ending, the terrifying dystopian ending. Pauline has been sacked and replaced by technology.
Joe's wearing a tag enormous, supervising 400 people on a screen continuously and not much. Joe has to report to the office whenever his tag tells him to. So it's a kind of this triggers an alert that tells him to come to the office. When he gets there, he goes in a booth, which is part virtual reality gaming centre, part coffin, part confessional. And he has greeted by a virtual probation officer who counsels them. And then he's also counselled by himself.
So an avatar of his future self love abiding Joe comes in at the end and says a few words to motivate him and encourage him. And yeah, it's pretty bleak. However, it's not as bleak as a genuine proposal published in a recent criminology journal, which it's making. And it's put me on to a paper by Bhagat Singh colleagues, which advocates as a solution to mass incarceration, technological incarceration, in which the tag has multiple functions.
As well as wearing the tag. You have to wear a body harness at all times, which has two cameras. One looks at your face and monitors your emotional states, and one looks out to see what's happening to the people that you're affecting. And the data from these devices is going off to a big data centre where it's being processed through forever algorithms.
And if it if it all lines up in such a way as to suggest that you're doing something you shouldn't be doing, the tag administers a taser shock and you are disabled until the police arrive to get you up and deal with it. I'm not saying we're going to get 80% of people out of American jails. That's a serious proposal in a peer reviewed journal. And I couldn't believe from might. That to me just after the book was published, that somebody had proposed something worse than my worst imaginings.
So it just shows that I wasn't pessimistic enough. So they also kind of adds weight to the importance of how do we as criminologists, contribute to a public dialogue about choosing between these futures? And I think that creativity and imagination has a big part to play here. Carmen and her work on imaginary carnality is mostly talking about how we create fictions that provide sort of fig leaf over the embarrassment that is our penal system.
Rehabilitation is one that she often likes to focus on. She regards rehabilitation as a fig leaf that conceals the complete failure of the penal system to promote reintegration and a kind of modern, neoliberal society. And she argues that those kind of imaginative, restrained or disabled critique can limit our capacity to imagine something better.
But she also says that the same analogies that are incorporated into those imaginaries have resources that might help us to to give birth to new ideas for democratic and socially enhancing responses to crime and security threats. So the the imaginary that the book has has in mind as the imaginary of probation has been a diversion, when, in fact, I'm arguing on the basis of the evidence that it's a it's principally about net widening in the jurisdictions that I examined.
So we have to kind of break from this assumption that more probation has a good thing. That's that's a kind of central and simple message of the book. That's the imaginary we have to disrupt. And then how there's some work in relation to controversial criminology at the moment, which is a shift.
Michelle Brown in the Caribbean that there have grown and kind of edited the Routledge International Handbook of Visual Criminology, in which chains are shaped and others have chapters which engage with this idea. Essentially, it's about unseeing or seeing through common misrepresentations of crime and punishment, and I think super visible. We didn't know it at the time because we hadn't read those sources.
We didn't know controversial criminology existed, but I think we were doing it by trying to find other ways to represent these experiences, not just visually actually, but also auditory forms through the songs. And I have argued in the book that it's not just about the visual, but actually about a sensory criminology that helps us to feel and be affected by the issues of distant voices is another kind of project of mine with many colleagues,
I think. Multi institutional multi project, which is using similar methods to explore reintegration after punishment. And again, I think we can think of it as trying to develop a kind of of criminology and rather than talk about it, I want to give you a very quick example of how this is a little film.
This is a world premiere, in fact. And this is not this is the the I got the final air of an article and I didn't have the heart to try and get it onto this system because it's complicated enough to deal with all this technology. So this is almost exactly as a as when it will be released next week. And it's it's a very short film, a five minute film about the launch event for the book. And I'll be I'll be honest about it.
It's partly a promotional film, but it's also I asked the filmmaker, who's an amazingly talented guy, as you'll see in a moment, to try and capture the atmosphere and a little bit of audience reaction so that we could use this as a sort of illustration of our public criminology, which is engaging creatively with the senses and with affect as well as intellect might sometimes look like. But it won't work for everybody, and it wouldn't be the right way to do this in every context.
That's just one example. So I'm going to try and make it clear, no, that's not going to work, I think to go forward, back, back. Right. Very hard to control this motion. So tonight through the medium of storytelling. And so we're going to try to render an invisible part of the the prison system, the penal system, I should say, more imaginable. That's the person who signs. You.
Say. Although there are too many people in prison in Scotland and in lots of places around the world, the numbers of people that are subject to supervision dwarfs the numbers in prisons. So there are less than 80,000 people in prison in Scotland today and more than 20,000 are being supervised in the community in England.
Hundreds of thousands of people are supervised in the community in Europe, millions in America, millions and nothing about the growth in supervision orders and sending out a positive I.D. idea that someone is holding them back to become the crazy body or something very, very new to me. I hadn't considered it at all. That's the idea of a life. That's not something. That's stuff that leads to the whole thing. Maybe I was taking it for granted. So they're whole. Just when the seas are plummeting.
Instinctively, he lifted his plan to his neck. But no one can loosen the invisible collar. At least is not a noose. Josh hollered uncomfortably, noticing the dryness of his mouth and the churning in his gut. He was not condemned to have. He was condemned to be left hanging. Joel wondered what poling would be like. Stop fighting.
Sure it's fine. You know, for people involved in big organisations so much is you frame everything in terms of organisational objectives, targets, budgets, workloads and what came across so powerful. This evening was the voice of the impact on the individual individuals, their lives. And we're going to prevent that from planning policies and developing practices.
The sounds of death, weight, tightness and suspension, which are ways in which we can think about how being supervisor, being in prison affects us, and this idea of questioning things about yourself all the time and going somewhere regularly to question things about yourself and what that might do to you. That was absolutely really I was pretty moved, actually, and I didn't go to many academic events and seen movies.
So that was a bit of a dark side of it. It's here my I is actually and I saw that, you know, it was so well done. It was hugely memorable. And then. She has a very different vision because I don't think we know how to debate that issue.
I don't think we know how to discuss and have a meaningful conversation about supervisory forms of punishment, precisely because I don't think we know what they entail or what they are as as I lived, experience the sense of a new energy around academic work and particularly around the work to justice, wherever that takes people. And that there are a few forms emerging at this moment in time at the University of Toronto and in Scotland, which have real potential to.
Make something. And in ways that are generally revolutionary. So. Thank you. I'll tell you something from God is as well. You're very happy. So the final part of the book, the last chapter, as I said at the beginning, it becomes more of the principles that we might think of. I suggest that in many respects, similarly to the way that we we we do have thought about punishment more broadly. We have to be parsimonious in relation to scaling down mass supervision and with it mass control.
We need to think much harder about proportionality in this context of clarifying and circumscribing the legitimate purposes and intrusions of supervision and, and then productiveness. If we get those to somewhere, right, somewhere right, then we can start thinking about how we can figure out of the practices in ways which are legitimate, helpful and constructive rather than optical. I wrote all that. And then of course, as soon as bit goes off to the publisher, you have other thoughts.
And I went to Jesus Butler's Gifford lectures at Glasgow University, and then I read The Sands the World to Punish. And then I taught a class based on the book to my undergraduate sociology students. And so there's another book chapter coming out in a collection by Carl Levin, which in which I argue with myself over whether I was sufficiently radical and whether actually liberal principles are sufficient to the challenge of containing or restraining mass supervision.
And they are just by saying the book's out and the the EP of songs that was show that you saw performing with our friends. Their EP system hold is coming out in March on the four songs that she said Ben Cruz very excited about that so we take this on suspension which is the one that I've that's in relation to supervision specifically that would be then although if you're if you're diligent enough to read the book, there's a key that unlocks the EP. No. So as a test, I can tell you how that is.
I just you have to read the whole thing. And if you if you get to the end, you'll find the key. So thank you very much for listening.