Images of Probation and Criminal Justice Social Work

Dr Hannah Graham1
1Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research

This paper explores emerging findings from a content analysis of images of probation, community corrections and criminal justice social work in jurisdictions in the United Kingdom and Australia. With few exceptions, very limited visual analysis of probation work and community punishment has been done, with extant scholarship reflecting the hegemony of the prison, courts and policing in visual representations of criminal justice. Depictions of the gender, ethnicity and age of those in the images, as well as aspects such as settings, objects and materiality, activities and social interactions are discussed and theorised. Influenced by the work of visual criminology scholars such as Young and Carrabine, as well as probation scholars such as McNeill, Fitzgibbon, Carr and others, reflections are offered which extend beyond interpretations of what appears in the images, to critical and imaginative considerations of what is not there, why, and what could be.


Biography:

Dr Hannah Graham is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology in the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research (SCCJR), Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Stirling, UK. Hannah is an Editor of the European Journal of Probation (SAGE), together with Professors Ioan Durnescu, Fergus McNeill and Martine Herzog-Evans. She is the author of three books published internationally by Routledge: ‘Rehabilitation Work: Supporting Desistance and Recovery’ (Graham, 2016), ‘Innovative Justice’ (Graham and White, 2015) and ‘Working with Offenders’ (White and Graham, 2010). From 2011-2014, Hannah worked as an academic at the University of Tasmania, Australia.