Parole Work in Canada

Parole Work in Canada provides a nuanced understanding of the everyday risks and challenges that parole officers face by incorporating robust qualitative findings and relevant updated research. The authors dive into how parole officers literally embody their job through not only emotional labor, but also haptics (sense of touch), gendered appearance and manner, as well as how these transect with proxemics and use of space that can engender risk. The authors examine the intense allostatic load parole officers face, which is embedded in managerial practices and systems based on policies that are not always client- or employee-centered, creating deep dissonance. This book clearly demonstrates how the violence of incarceration is not relegated to those behind bars, but also permeates those at the front line of reintegrating individuals into society and their extended networks. The insights woven throughout the text would be of great value for those pursuing research on carceral systems, as well as policy makers and practitioners striving to vastly improve the lives of understudied, yet invaluable parole officers and others working towards a healthy and safe society. -- Nicole Kellett, University of Maine at Farmington
This book is well organized, well-written, and underpinned by sound research. Moreover, the authors are renowned experts in the field. The scholarship is exemplary. Parole and probation work is relatively marginalized in the field of criminology. However, this book makes a strong argument for why we—as penologists—should understand the work of POs in much greater depth, and this book includes lessons for both prison and probation policy/practice. I expect its main readership to be academics working in the field of probation, prisons, resettlement, desistance, and community sanctions. This book also has some important lessons for the wider field of social policy and speaks to similar concerns in social work, healthcare, mental healthcare, and more. I would also recommend PhD students who are researching probation/parole workers use it extensively in their work. I would certainly read and cite this book extensively in my own publications around probation officers' well-being, emotional labor, and burnout. -- Jake Phillips, Sheffield Hallam University; editor, Probation Quarterly; co-chair, European Society of Criminology's Working Group on Community Sanctions and Measures
While there has been a great deal of material published on imprisonment in recent decades and a lot written about ‘what works’ in correctional contexts, there is a surprising and problematic lack of serious scholarly attention on probation, parole, and supervisory forms of punishment more generally. The authors of Parole Work in Canada have already begun to address that—and they reference others, like Kelly Hannah Moffat, who have made important contributions, but it remains the case that we know much too little about (1) parole and probation work in Canada, and (2) about the experience of being on probation or on parole in Canada. This book addresses an important and hitherto neglected aspect of the penal system; one in which there is growing academic and public interest. -- Fergus McNeill, University of Glasgow; co-author of Offender Supervision in Europe
This subject of parole work occupational challenges is under-researched in the literature in general and not at all—prior to this—in Canada. Importantly, the population studied comprises French speakers, and both parole and probation officers have been interviewed. Another strength is the fact that Parole Work in Canada, in studying POs’ wellbeing, takes both psychological and institutional factors into consideration. Very comprehensive. -- Martine Evans, Reims University, France