Analysing Penal Innovation

• DOI: 10.1177/0306624X13478039
• Author: Mike Nellis
• Published date: 01 March 2013
• Date: 01 March 2013
• Subject Matter: Guest Editorial

International Journal of

Offender Therapy and

Comparative Criminology

57(3) 267 –268

© The Author(s) 2013

Reprints and permission:

sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav

DOI: 10.1177/0306624X13478039

ijo.sagepub.com

478039IJO57310.1177/0306624X13478039Internati

onal Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative CriminologyNellis

Corresponding Author:

Mike Nellis, University of Strathclyde, School of Law, 16 Richmond Street, Glasgow G1 1XQ,

Scotland, UK.

Email: mike.nellis@strath.ac.uk

Analysing Penal Innovation

We know too little about processes of penal innovation, especially those which begin

in the deeper reaches of civil society, outside the established policy networks which

link lobbying groups, statutory agencies, not-for-profit service providers and central

government departments. Yes, there are articles about how and why this or that initiative

started—often evaluations of pilot projects—but in the main origins are undertheorised

compared with outcomes. Ken Pease (1983) explored the actual concept of “penal

innovation,” treating it as an aspect of policy analysis, and applying it to the then new

development of “community service” in England and Wales. It was further refined by

Paul Rock (1995) from a symbolic interactionist perspective, in ways which allowed

for serendipity and the actions of key individuals, but it remained within an under-

theorised-though-interesting policy analysis perspective.

The origins of Circles of Support and Accountability (COSA) in the actions of a

Canadian Mennonite pastor and the speed with which the practice spread quickly

became something of a legend in the restorative justice world, and indeed outside it.

COSA seemed like such an obvious affirmation of courage and compassion toward an

otherwise despised subset of offenders in an increasingly punitive and managerial

criminal justice system—and indeed it was. Practical, partisan accounts of COSA—

and there are many—have confidently and reassuringly read its emergence as a sign

that, culturally, we are not after all as punitive as we may seem, but there have equally

been many influential theoretical accounts of “the culture of control” in which restor-

ative justice in general and COSA in particular are deemed too marginal to be of real

significance.

It is the great merit of Stacey Hannem’s article in this issue that it overcomes the

epistemological division in the literature on COSA, avoiding practical naivete on

one hand and theoretical and political dismissiveness on the other, while rightly

concluding that they have been a most worthwhile development. I doubt if the article

would have been quite as rich if Hannem had not personally been an active, long-

term member of two circles, as well as an analyst of them. The sense of what practice

involves, and of what can go wrong—and right—would probably not have been as

strong had Hannem simply been a researcher looking from the outside in. But what

Guest Editorial