Conceptualizing the Personal Touch: Experiential Knowledge and Gendered Strategies in Community Supervision Work. (June 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Welsh, Megan
• Is Part Of: Journal of contemporary ethnography. Volume 48:Number 3(2019:Jun.)
• Page Start: 311
• Page End: 338
• Publication Date: 2019-06
• Subjects: parole and probation -- gender -- discretion -- working alliance; Sociology, Urban -- Periodicals; Urban anthropology -- Periodicals; 305.8
• DOI: 10.1177/0891241618777304
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0891-2416

Abstract

Tasked with a fractured institutional mandate of ensuring public safety while facilitating the rehabilitation of their criminalized clients, community supervision workers exercise a considerable amount of discretion in how to achieve these goals. Yet much remains unknown about these workers' strategies for doing so, which are informed by experiential knowledge and social identities—what I call the "personal touch." Drawing on in-depth interviews conducted with California state parole agents and county probation officers as part of a larger ethnographic inquiry of prisoner reentry, I apply a feminist lens to analyze how workers leverage personal aspects of themselves that they value to manage the impossibilities of their work. My findings show how workers employ a personal touch to connect with clients in meaningful ways, but also how these approaches are built on normative assumptions about gender.