Mike Nellis

Bio: Mike Nellis is an academic researcher from University of Strathclyde. The author has contributed to research in topics: Criminal justice & Prison. The author has an hindex of 20, co-authored 85 publications receiving 1138 citations. Previous affiliations of Mike Nellis include University of Birmingham.

Moving probation forward : evidence, arguments and practice

Abstract: Probation: Theory, Practice and Research is a core text on probation, edited by well-respected academics in the field. It is comprehensive and user friendly, covering various key topics in probation.The book also provides practical help to students and an up to date account of issues in criminal justice policy in the UK, as well as providing information to training officers, managers and practitioners in the field of probation and criminal justice.

The Electronic Monitoring of Offenders in England and Wales: Recent Developments and Future Prospects

Abstract: England and Wales is the only European jurisdiction to have experimented with electronic monitoring of offenders, or tagging'. Three experimental schemes, ostensibly targeted on remand prisoners, were established late in 1989, intended to run for six months. On the available evidence they have not been a success. Yet the recent government White Paper Crime, Justice and Protecting the Public (Home Office 1990b) continues to promote the idea of tagging', suggesting that this work be undertaken by a private agency rather than the probation service which--unlike its equivalent in the USA--has dissociated itself from this new development. This paper aims only to map the contours of debate on electronic monitoring in England and Wales, in the context of moves to develop more coercive non-custodial measures generally, and to raise some examples of the moral and political issues to which tagging gives rise.

Electronically Monitored Punishment : International and Critical Perspectives

Abstract: Electronic monitoring (EM) is a way of supervising offenders in the community whilst they are on bail, serving a community sentence or after release from prison. Various technologies can be used, including voice verification, GPS satellite tracking and – most commonly - the use of radio frequency to monitor house arrest. It originated in the USA in the 1980s and has spread to over 30 countries since then. This book explores the development of EM in a number of countries to give some indication of the diverse ways it has been utilized and of the complex politics which surrounds its use. A techno-utopian impulse underpins the origins of EM and has remained latent in its subsequent development elsewhere in the world, despite recognition that is it less capable of effecting penal transformations than its champions have hoped. This book devotes substantive chapters to the issues of privatisation, evaluation, offender perspectives and ethics. Whilst normatively more committed to the Swedish model, the book acknowledges that this may not represent the future of EM, whose untrammelled, commercially-driven development could have very alarming consequences for criminal justice. Both utopian and dystopian hopes have been invested in EM, but research on its impact is ambivalent and fragmented, and EM remains undertheorised, empirically and ethically. This book seeks to redress this by providing academics, policy audiences and practitioners with the intellectual resources to understand and address the challenges which EM poses.

Probation Values for the 1990s

Abstract: The task of re-assessing probation values assumed a new urgency when even its own Chief Inspector (Chief Inspector of Probation 1994, p. 4) complained that the probation service (in 1993) was still ‘clinging to its welfare ethic and had not fully integrated the notion of punishment in the community into its repertoire’. But the way forward is not easy. Those who seek to re-affirm social work values, (to which welfare is supposed to be central), against the punitive inclinations of the Home Office, do so without regard to the limitations which the new managerial culture in the service - benevolent corporatism - imposes on the expression of personal care and concern. The ‘social work’ school have also, repeatedly and perversely, failed to draw on normative debates within criminology which have prim a facie relevance to the future of the probation service. It will be argued here that a more criminologically sophisticated value-base, built around the linked notions of anti-custodialism, restorative justice and community safety will serve the probation service better than a simple restatement of ‘the welfare ethic’, and, by developing its role as a community justice agency, provide it with a means of resisting a wholly punitive identity.

Surveillance and Confinement: Explaining and Understanding the Experience of Electronically Monitored Curfews

Abstract: Electronic monitoring (EM) is now widely used in Western Europe, but its precise nature as a distinct form of penal sanction remains unclear. Since its advent in the USA in the 1980s, it has been most commonly characterized as a form of confinement and seen as an analogue of imprisonment. The names it had been given - “home detention”, “community custody” and “curfew”, for example - reflect this view. The surveillant aspects of EM have been vaguely acknowledged, but have relied on dubious ocular metaphors, and remain undertheorised. This paper will argue that EM should be understood primarily as a particular form and experience of surveillance, because the precise regulatory regime which it imposes on offenders (including the element of confinement) is only made possible by remote sensing technology, and has collateral effects alongside confinement. The paper concludes by tentatively placing this new, surveillant conceptualization of EM within contemporary debates on the changing nature of penalty.

The culture of control: crime and social order in contemporary, society

Abstract: Nos últimos trinta trinta anos, houve profundas mudanças na forma como compreendemos o crime e a justiça criminal. O crime tornou-se um evento simbólico, um verdadeiro teste para a ordem social e para as políticas governamentais, um desafio para a sociedade civil, para a democracia e para os direitos humanos. Segundo David Garland, professor da Faculdade de Direito da New York University, um dos principais autores no campo da Sociologia da Punição e com artigo publicado na Revista de Sociologia e Política , número 13, na modernidade tardia houve uma verdadeira obsessão securitária, direcionando as políticas criminais para um maior rigor em relação às penas e maior intolerância com o criminoso. Há trinta anos, nos EUA e na Inglaterra essa tendência era insuspeita. O livro mostra que os dois países compartilham intrigantes similaridades em suas práticas criminais, a despeito da divisão racial, das desigualdades econômicas e da letalidade violenta que marcam fortemente o cenário americano. Segundo David Garland, encontram-se nos dois países os “mesmos tipos de riscos e inseguranças, a mesma percepção a respeito dos problemas de um controle social não-efetivo, as mesmas críticas da justiça criminal tradicional, e as mesmas ansiedades recorrentes sobre mudança e ordem sociais”1 (GARLAND, 2001, p. 2). O argumento principal da obra é o seguinte: a modernidade tardia, esse distintivo padrão de relações sociais, econômicas e culturais, trouxe consigo um conjunto de riscos, inseguranças e problemas de controle social que deram uma configuração específica às nossas respostas ao crime, ao garantir os altos custos das políticas criminais, o grau máximo de duração das penas e a excessivas taxas de encarceramento.

A desistance paradigm for offender management

Abstract: In an influential article published in the British Journal of Social Work in 1979, Anthony Bottoms and Bill McWilliams proposed the adoption of a ‘non-treatment paradigm’ for probation practice. Their argument rested on a careful and considered analysis not only of empirical evidence about the ineffectiveness of rehabilitative treatment but also of theoretical, moral and philosophical questions about such interventions. By 1994, emerging evidence about the potential effectiveness of some intervention programmes was sufficient to lead Peter Raynor and Maurice Vanstone to suggest significant revisions to the ‘non-treatment paradigm’. In this article, it is argued that a different but equally relevant form of empirical evidence—that derived from desistance studies—suggests a need to re-evaluate these earlier paradigms for probation practice. This reevaluation is also required by the way that such studies enable us to understand and theorize both desistance itself and the role that penal professionals might p...