About the Project
The scale, diversity and intensity of penal supervision (people subject to community sanctions and measures such as probation) has greatly increased in recent years, leading to suggestions that we have entered an era of ‘mass supervision’. Three times as many people are supervised in the community as are imprisoned, yet there have been few in-depth attempts to understand the nature of supervision and its growth. This comparative research project explores supervision across five nations: England, Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales.
There are three main areas of research:
- Profiling penal supervision across the five nations, looking at what official statistics can tell us
- Understanding experiences of supervision, from the perspective of people on probation and practitioners
- Exploring and comparing penal supervision policies
As of July 2026 we have completed the fieldwork and are currently analysing data and writing up our findings.
