The Penal Voluntary Sector: Thematic Panel A

Session Submission Type: Complete Thematic Panel

Abstract

The penal voluntary sector, and the relationships between crime, punishment and charity are more topical than ever before. Charities have a long history of involvement in criminal justice, but countries around the world have restructured social welfare services in recent decades, moving away from unified public services and towards quasi-markets. Voluntary organisations and private companies have been heavily implicated in this restructuring, being prominent in policy reforms in, e.g. Australia, England and the USA. These reforms have created important new models of service delivery (e.g. payment by results) and governance which are ill-understood. Surprisingly little is known about the penal voluntary sector, which remains a descriptive rather than theoretically rigorous concept.

This international panel has been organised by 'The Voluntary Sector in Criminal Justice' interdisciplinary research network, based at the University of Sheffield (UK) Centre for Criminological Research and enabled by generous funding from the British Academy and Leverhulme Trust.

Sub Unit

• Area VII. Criminal Justice Policy and Practice / 37. Prisoner Re-entry

Individual Presentations

• Outside In: Voluntary Sector Involvement within Prisons in England, California, and Uganda - Emma Hughes, California State University, Fresno

• A Matter of Carceral Citizenship - Reuben Miller, University of Chicago; Forrest Stuart, University of Chicago

• Expanding and Subverting the Carceral Net through the Voluntary Sector: The Case of US Youth Justice - Randolph R Myers, Old Dominion University; Kaitlyn J Selman, Old Dominion University; Tim Goddard, Florida International University

• Inclusionary control? Theorising the Effects of Penal Voluntary Organisations' Work - Philippa Tomczak, University of Sheffield, UK

Chair

• Tim Goddard, Florida International University

Discussant

• Deborah Jump, Manchester Metropolitan University