TY - JOUR
T1 - Constructing the Durable Penal Agent
T2 - Tracing the Development of Habitus Within English Probation Officers and Scottish Criminal Justice Social Workers
AU - Grant, Scott
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© The Author 2015.
Copyright:
Copyright 2016 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2016/7/1
Y1 - 2016/7/1
N2 - In contrast to prison personnel, practice cultures of penal agents charged with delivering 'community punishment' are surprisingly under-researched. Recent evidence from Scotland and England suggests that community-based penal agents demonstrate strong capacities for resistance against state-level punitive discourse. This indicates that despite several turns in penal policy, successive UK Governments have failed to produce tougher systems of community punishment as intended. By deploying Bourdieu's conceptual tools of habitus and field, and referring to evidence from empirical studies, this article will attempt to show that penal agents possess durable and deeply embedded dispositions that not only protect them from punitive field conditions, but also guide and underpin their everyday practice with offenders. By doing so, this article offers a conceptual starting point for an emerging sociology of community punishment.
AB - In contrast to prison personnel, practice cultures of penal agents charged with delivering 'community punishment' are surprisingly under-researched. Recent evidence from Scotland and England suggests that community-based penal agents demonstrate strong capacities for resistance against state-level punitive discourse. This indicates that despite several turns in penal policy, successive UK Governments have failed to produce tougher systems of community punishment as intended. By deploying Bourdieu's conceptual tools of habitus and field, and referring to evidence from empirical studies, this article will attempt to show that penal agents possess durable and deeply embedded dispositions that not only protect them from punitive field conditions, but also guide and underpin their everyday practice with offenders. By doing so, this article offers a conceptual starting point for an emerging sociology of community punishment.
KW - Bourdieu
KW - Community punishment
KW - Criminal justice social work
KW - Habitus
KW - Probation
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84982933509&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1093/bjc/azv075
DO - 10.1093/bjc/azv075
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84982933509
VL - 56
SP - 750
EP - 768
JO - British Journal of Criminology
JF - British Journal of Criminology
SN - 0007-0955
IS - 4
ER -