The Stories Not Told in the Penal Voluntary Sector

• In Event: Open Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 19: Nonprofits and Civil Society

Abstract

Around the world, nonprofit staff and volunteers engage in a wide range of activities intended to support criminalized people, delivering prison-based and community programs as well as engaging in advocacy and policy work. Collectively, these organizations comprise the penal voluntary sector (hereafter PVS). Much of the scholarship on this sector has focused on what PVS organizations do, rather than on how its practitioners experience, interpret, and navigate this work. In this paper, we address that gap by foregrounding practitioners’ emotions and the narratives through which they make sense of their roles. More specifically, we examine what remained unsaid in the focus groups we conducted with 32 PVS practitioners in England and Scotland. Following narrative criminology’s recent interest in silence and absence as features of discourse, we explore why some stories were told and others remained untold in our focus groups. We illustrate how the unsaid took shape in practitioners’ use of abstract and euphemistic language that could mute the structural harms and inequalities surrounding criminalisation; in the complexities of PVS practice that were too often unacknowledged; and in practitioners’ hesitation to grapple with the possibility that their efforts to ‘help’ could simultaneously contribute to harm. Rather than treating these silences and omissions as gaps in our data, this paper considers how they could function as strategic choices; expressions of sectoral norms; indications of the emotional weight of PVS work; or practices through which certain forms of harm were minimised, redirected or otherwise kept out of view.

Authors

• Katie Quinn, Syracuse University

• Gillian Buck, Chester University

• Philippa Tomczak, University of Nottingham