Community Punishment

‘"Community punishments" are characteristic of criminal justice systems everywhere, but as this new volume vividly illustrates, the nature of these measures varies markedly from place to place and from time to time. Drawing on specially-commissioned expert accounts of community penalties in eleven European nations, Robinson and McNeill provide a fascinating, indispensable guide to the problems, trends and controversies that affect community-based punishment in Europe today. The result is a deepened theoretical understanding of the important issues at stake.’ - David Garland, Professor, School of Law and the Department of Sociology, New York University, USA

‘Notwithstanding new interest in comparative criminology, and descriptions of what is available in Europe, we know relatively little about how community punishments and interventions are conceived, so this is a hugely welcome book. The editors and contributors have put together a scholarly collection of European case studies which not only locate different forms of community punishments in different contexts, but reveal adaptations over time, and in particular the interplay of managerial, punitive, rehabilitative, reparative and technological pushes and pulls. This is an insightful and rich text which addresses how community punishments have evolved and survived in late modern social and penal conditions; it is a wholly interesting and original book of real importance.’ - Loraine Gelsthorpe, Professor of Criminology & Criminal Justice, University of Cambridge and President of the British Society of Criminology, UK

"Community Punishment: European Perspectives, edited by Fergus McNeill and Gwen Robinson, goes beyond simply charting patterns of community punishment across Europe to also explore how they are underpinned by social, political, historical and cultural factors. It considers how and why community punishment has been legitimized and evolved across Europe in response to differing local context and offers an engaging account of the contributions and limitations (methodological and theoretical) of comparative criminological research. For all of these achievements, it forms a very welcome addition to the study of both community supervision and comparative criminology… Such rich and theoretically informed accounts of penal variation and change are essential if we are to understand, and ultimately reimagine, community punishment." - Katrina Morrison,University of Napier, Edinburgh, UK, Criminology and Criminal Justice