Review: 'Poor discipline: parole and the social control of the underclass 1890–1990' by Jonathan Simon and 'Supervising offenders in the community: a history of probation theory and practice' by Maurice Vanstone

No abstract available

Beyond what works : how and why do people stop offending?

The author explores a comparative analysis of social work models for engendering change in criminal behaviors among offenders in Scotland

Helping, holding, hurting: recalling and reforming punishment

The Criminal Justice and Licensing (Scotland) Bill currently before the Scottish Parliament represents one of the most significant planned reforms of punishment in Scotland for generations. But, as we plan and debate a new penal future, to what extent have we learned the lessons of Scotland's penal history? In this year's Apex Scotland Annual Lecture, Professor Fergus McNeill presented findings from a British Academy funded research study of oral histories of Scottish probation in the 1960s - the forgotten but significant period immediately before the introduction of the Children's Hearings system and the generic social work departments. In offering an analysis of the sometimes powerful and moving stories of people who were subject to probation at that time, he aimed to challenge our preconceptions about how criminal sanctions can help, hold and hurt those who are subject to them, in so doing providing an important and fresh perspective on key aspects of the current reform programme

Probation, rehabilitation and reparation

This paper is a version of the 2nd Annual Martin Tansey Memorial Lecture, organised by the Association for Crime and Justice Research and delivered on 7th May 2009 at the headquarters of the Probation Service of Ireland in Dublin. The author would like to thank the ACJRD for the invitation to give the lecture and the probation service for their hospitality in hosting it

Mass supervision, misrecognition and the ‘Malopticon’

This paper aims to contribute to debates about ‘mass supervision’ by exploring its penal character as a lived experience. It begins with a review of recent studies that have used ethnographic methods to explore how supervision is experienced before describing the two projects (‘Supervisible’ and ‘Mass Supervision: Seen and Heard’) on which the paper draws, explaining these as an attempt to generate a ‘counter-visual criminology’ of mass supervision. I then describe two encounters with ‘Teejay’; encounters in which we explored his experiences of supervision firstly through photography and then through song-writing. Both media are presented alongside Teejay’s commentary on what he sought to convey, inviting the reader to engage with and interpret the pictures and song. In the concluding discussion, I offer my own analysis, arguing that Teejay’s representations suggest a need to recognize mass supervision as ‘Maloptical’ as much as ‘Panoptical’. Through the ‘Malopticon’, the penal subject is seen badly, is seen as bad and is projected and represented as bad. Experiences of misrecognition and misrepresentation constitute significant yet poorly understood pains of supervisory punishment. The paper concludes by suggesting several ways in which a counter-visual criminology might follow Teejay’s lead in exposing and challenging of mass supervision

Punishment as rehabilitation

No abstract available

2D shape classification and retrieval

We present a novel correspondence-based technique for efficient shape classification and retrieval. Shape boundaries are described by a set of (ad hoc) equally spaced points – avoiding the need to extract “landmark points”. By formulating the correspondence problem in terms of a simple generative model, we are able to efficiently compute matches that incorporate scale, translation, rotation and reflection invariance. A hierarchical scheme with likelihood cut-off provides additional speed-up. In contrast to many shape descriptors, the concept of a mean (prototype) shape follows naturally in this setting. This enables model based classification, greatly reducing the cost of the testing phase. Equal spacing of points can be defined in terms of either perimeter distance or radial angle. It is shown that combining the two leads to improved classification/retrieval performance