What Counts? Community Sanctions and the Construction of Compliance

Abstract

A notable trend in the recent academic and policy literature on community penalties is a turn toward ‘compliance’ as a topic of interest. In the United Kingdom, this has been particularly true of England and Wales, where the probation service has come under increasing pressure to improve rates of offenders’ compliance with both community penalties and post-custodial licences,’ not least because of the significant contribution made by those deemed non-compliant to chronically high imprisonment rates, via so-called back-door sentencing (Ministry of Justice 2009a). To date, academic contributions to this topic have centred on developing theoretical explanations for compliance with community-based sanctions, and developing thinking about strategies for increasing offenders’ compliance with community sanctions (e.g. Bottoms 2001; Hucklesby 2009; McCulloch 2010; Robinson and McNeill 2008; Ugwudike 2010).

‖ social groups create deviance by making the rules whose infraction constitutes deviance, and by applying those rules to particular people and labelling them as outsiders […] Deviance is [therefore] not a quality that lies in behaviour itself, but in the interaction between the person who commits an act and those who respond to it.

(Becker 1963: 9, 14; emphasis in original)