ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a general context for the reimagining chapters in their forms – personal, legal/judicial, moral and social. Within this, our specific concern is to understand what social control may mean and how it may be experienced by both probation staff as well as those they supervise. Our approach draws on the conceptual insights offered by the late Stan Cohen in his seminal work Visions of Social Control. Although published in 1985 and before the ubiquitous application of digital technology to our personal and professional lives, it remains both relevant to our understanding of current realities and still capable of pointing us in the direction of a less coercive and more humanistic approach to the rehabilitative endeavour. We draw on Cohen’s insistence that both good and justice are values that should underpin a moral pragmatism to social interventions that go beyond achieving simply utilitarian ends. Indeed, he shows through the pursuit of utilitarian policies within criminal justice, a dystopian spread of both soft (community) and hard end (incarceration) social control emerging during latter part of the twentieth century. Indeed, we can now evidence its continuation across European and American criminal justice jurisdictions as both mass supervision and mass incarceration.
