Community sanctions as pervasive punishment: A review essay

Abstract

Community sanctions involving supervision are a neglected field in criminological research and are widely viewed in political, media and public discourse as 'not prison' and a 'let-off'. An important new book, Pervasive Punishment by Fergus McNeill (2019), redresses this neglect by attempting to 'make sense of mass supervision' as a lived experience. Utilising a short story and allied projects with supervisees involving photographs and songs, he constructs a 'counter-visual' criminology that elucidates the ways supervision constitutes 'pervasive punishment'. This article reviews McNeill's argument and assesses its applicability in the Australian context.