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Room for reparation? : an ethnographic study into the implementation of the Community Payback Order in a Scottish Criminal Justice Social Work Office

With the introduction of the Criminal Justice and Licensing Act (Scotland) 2010, the Community Payback Order became the default non-custodial criminal justice sentence in Scotland as of February 1st 2011. The order’s focus upon reparation as a means to reintegrate offenders back into the community represented a shift away from retributive practices towards a relationally beneficent approach. The terms of the order, however, remain ambiguous. Lingering suspicions as to how this philosophical switch in policy manifests itself in practice remain. By ethnographically studying the working practices of Criminal Justice Social Workers’, this study presents CPO’s articulation of reparation as practiced. In addition the role of the social worker is interrogated using a performative lens to understand how the tensions between reparation and retribution, care and control, the courts and their clients, are made coherent in their practices. As a result the barriers to enacting a reparationally oriented criminal justice response are articulated so that the Habermasian intersubjectivity that reparation requires can be more wholly understood in the context of criminal justice workplaces for future practice innovations.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:630983
Date January 2014
CreatorsMcGuinness, Paul
PublisherUniversity of Glasgow
Source SetsEthos UK
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation
Sourcehttp://theses.gla.ac.uk/5561/

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