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This chapter argues that the concept of ‘mass supervision’, and indeed the concept of ‘mass incarceration’ from which it derives, is both quantitatively and qualitatively indeterminate when applied outside of the context of the US. However, the qualitative indeterminacy of mass supervision only holds so long as one treats the word ‘mass’ as being an analogy to mass consumption. This chapter therefore considers an alternative construction of ‘mass’ punishment in terms of mass production. Comparing the philosophies of production associated with Henry Ford and William Morris with the scholarship of Michel Foucault and Fergus McNeill reveals that mass supervision can authentically claim to be qualitatively ‘massive’, given the bespoke and one-on-one nature of traditional supervision. It is thus possible to speak coherently of ‘mass supervision’ in an international context, although this negative conception of a problem invites questions about the best solution that it generally leaves open.

This book brings together an international group of scholars whose chapters, analytically and/or empirically, engage with, challenge, and further advance our understanding of ‘mass supervision’ across jurisdictions. In this introductory chapter, we describe the impetus for and purpose of this book and briefly outline each chapter’s contribution. Together, contributors to this book provide contextualised insight into what ‘mass supervision’ is, how it works, and what effects it has on individuals and communities. The chapters span macro-examinations of the socio-political origins and developments of probation and community-based supervision across jurisdictions and micro-examinations of how people perceive and experience punishment in the community both as its practitioners and as its subjects.

In this closing chapter, we review the contributions of this collection, reflecting on how each advances our understanding of ‘mass supervision’. We return to McNeill’s conceptualisation of ‘mass supervision’ as a starting point to showing how contributors illuminate ‘mass supervision’ as a contextually and locally specific phenomenon with implications for families, communities and the larger penal system. Contributors critically examine the legal and policy developments and implications of ‘mass supervision’.

Various mass shooters have explained their violent actions as a response to failing at dominant forms of masculinity, including rejection from women and negative social comparisons to other men. The affect control theory of self (ACT-Self) posits that interactions that violate one's sense of self cause inauthenticity. This disequilibrium motivates behaviors that restore self-meanings, which may partially explain the link between challenges to the self and compensatory violence.

In Study 1, we use ACT-Self to examine the relationship between inauthenticity, violent fantasies, and physical aggression in the autobiography of one mass shooter. We quantify self-sentiments and inauthenticity using ACT-Self measures and methods, and perform a thematic analysis of the shooter's interpretations of and responses to disconfirming events. In Study 2, we examine the relationship between these same concepts in a survey of 18-to-32-year-old men (N = 847).

Study 1 shows that the shooter's inability to achieve popularity, wealth, sex, and relationships with beautiful women (compared to other men) produced inauthenticity that he resolved through violent fantasies, increasingly aggressive behavior, and ultimately, mass violence. Study 2 finds that inauthenticity arising from reflected appraisals from women predicts self-reported violent fantasies and physical aggression in a convenience sample of men in emerging adulthood.

This work leverages a formal social psychological theory to examine the link between self-processes and violence. Our findings suggest that men's inauthenticity, particularly produced by reflected appraisals from women, is positively associated with violent fantasies and acts. Further work is needed to assess whether this relationship is causal and for whom.

Following the ‘Sarkozy’ era (2007–2012), France has engaged in ‘zero-tolerance’ policies, which have brought an increasing number of people into the criminal justice system (CJS). In an already extremely impoverished CJS, these policies have led to serious financial problems and have made an already existing prison overcrowding problem worse. Consequently, the CJS has gradually opted for a McDonald (Ritzer, 2019; Robinson, 2019) type of offender processing, whether in prosecutor-led procedures (representing roughly half of all penal procedures: Ministry of Justice, 2019) or in the sentencing phase (Danet, 2013). A similar trend has been found in probation and in prisoner release (in French: ‘sentences’ management).

The prison and probation services, which merged in 1999, have since then been in a position to benefit from the 1958 French Republic Constitution, which places the executive in a dominant position and notably allows it to draft the bills presented to a rather passive legislative power (Rousseau, 2007) and even to enjoy its own set of normative powers (‘autonomous decrees’ – Hamon & Troper, 2019). By way of law reforming (2009, 2014, and 2019 laws), the prison and probation services have thus embraced the McDonaldisation ethos. Their main obsession has been to early release as many prisoners as possible in order to free space and to accommodate more sentenced people. To do so, the prison services have created a series of so-called ‘simplified’ early release procedures, where prisoners are neither prepared for nor supported through release, where they are deprived of agency and where due process and attorney advice are removed. Behind a pretend rehabilitative discourse, the executive is only interested in efficiently flushing people out of prison; not about re-entry efficacy. As Ritzer (2019) points out, McDonaldisation often leads to counter-productive or absurd consequences. In the case of early release, the stubborn reality is that one cannot bypass actually doing the rehabilitative and re-entry work. I shall additionally argue that not everything truly qualifies as an early release measure (Ostermann, 2013). Only measures which respect prisoners’ agency prepare them for their release, which support them once they are in the community, which address their socio-psychological and criminogenic needs, and which are pronounced in the context of due process and defence rights truly qualify as such. As it is, French ‘simplified’ release procedures amount to McRe-entry and mass nothingness.

In the current chapter, we discuss the shape and contours of the field of probation in Romania as they appear in scientific literature and mass media, focusing on the concerns academics and professionals have voiced about Romanian probation. We analyse the timeframe from 2014 to 2021, after the introduction of the country’s New Penal Code (NPC). We structure our argument as follows. The chapter begins with a short incursion into the historiography of probation as a field in Romania. The focus, however, is on the adoption of a NPC in 2014, as this was a significant moment that led to changes for both probation workers and probationers. While we present the first 25 years since probation was instituted in Romania in 1997 as a period of experiments, trials and errors, we aim to highlight the development and consolidation that occurred in the period after 2014 (see Durnescu 2008, 2015; Preda, 2015a, 2017; Sandu, 2016). The NPC was intended to bring forward a reconfiguration of the probation system in Romania (Preda, 2015b). Beyond the promise of the NPC, the 2014–2021 period is one where probation edges into the public sphere via extensive media coverage, including the considerable number of probationers or a string of protests by probation counsellors who felt overworked and overwhelmed. We continue the chapter by analysing the composition and the dynamics of the probation population, always looking beyond the mere numbers to other analytic markers (i.e. numbers of obligations and lengths of the probation period). We conclude the chapter by arguing that our discussion of the ‘weight’ of supervision adds to the current understanding of mass supervision by looking at the aggregated impact that different social, political, penal and cultural factors have on probation practice. In other words, large caseloads, limited human resources, precarious material conditions and negative organisational cultures are likely to generate supervision experiences that can be better interpreted by looking and thinking beyond numbers.

In this chapter, I analyse the implementation of the reform to the regimen of alternatives to prison in Chile which occurred in 2013 and how the reform affected how punishment is conceived and translated into practice by professionals supervising probation and community services. The findings suggest the reform that led to the new ‘substitutive sanctions’ also introduced a new risk-oriented-managerial culture that has permeated how punishment is currently enforced and envisaged by supervision professionals; a situation that has been deepening over the years, not only through practice, but also via on-going training that has helped to generate the emergence of ‘cultural’ capital that distinguishes supervision professionals from the larger organisation. This has been combined with a rapid expansion in the use of substitutive sanctions, especially probation and ‘partial reclusion’ that can aptly be analysed under the ‘mass supervision’ premise.