About the Project
Exploring penal supervision across five nations.
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 in situ across five nations: England, Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales.
The study will generate crucial knowledge about how supervision is experienced, practiced and governed, and the socio-political conditions that influence its forms and its development. The project team will employ diverse research methods - conducting qualitative interviews with practitioners, policy makers, and those experiencing supervision; as well as policy analysis, analysis of official statistics, and collecting experiential insights via digital ethnography.