Search results

Prisonersare at disproportionate risk of suffering substance-related harms. The administration of naloxone is essential to reversing opioid overdose and minimizing substance-related harms in prison and the community. The purpose of this study is to examine how naloxone administration is practiced and perceived in prison settings.

The authors conducted surveys with correctional workers in Manitoba, Canada (n = 257) to examine how they understand and feel about the need for and practice of administering naloxone in their everyday work with criminalized populations.

Respondents reported feeling a great need to administer naloxone, but most did not feel adequately trained to administer naloxone, creating the perception that criminalized populations remain at enhanced risk.

Findings provide emerging evidence of the need for training and accompanying policies and procedures for correctional workers on how to access and administer naloxone.

Public safety (communicators; e.g. 9-1-1, police, fire and ambulance call-takers and dispatchers), like many other public safety personnel (e.g. police, paramedics), (re)suffer operational stress injuries (OSIs) that are too often hidden and at a prevalence higher than the general population. Unfortunately, there are very little data for OSI rates in Canadian communicators. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the only pan-Canadian study focusing on organizational culture, and its potential influence on OSIs, within the communicator context.

The authors conducted a 179-item online survey of Canadian communicators comprising 17 validated screenings for occupational stress injuries and symptoms and four open-ended questions relating to their agency's organizational culture. The authors thematically analysed participants' open-ended responses and their screening scores.

A semi-grounded thematic approach revealed that managers and supervisors were significant contributors to negative perceptions (n = 165) of organizational culture, potentially resulting in or worsening existing OSIs. Specifically, leadership was viewed as ineffective, inconsistent, unsupportive, abusive and toxic, with limited understanding of communicator roles. Communicators described feeling devalued, particularly when leaders fail to recognize communicator OSIs, which can perpetuate stigma. Conversely, positive leaders (n = 24) were described as supportive, communicative and encouraging.

The findings suggest that while leadership behaviours are a key factor in employee well-being, it varies considerably across agencies, impacting treatment-seeking behaviours. The authors’ new understandings of leaders' roles in OSIs may help reduce the frequency and severity of communicator OSIs, helping ensure that emergency services are delivered to Canadians.

The purpose of this article is to examine the expectations, challenges and tensions officers describe while engaged with public schools to demonstrate that officers engage with students in public schools in a conscious, goal-oriented process to establish and maintain useful relationships.

Data collection involved 104 semi-structured interviews (including follow up interviews) and 31 focus groups, conducted between 2014 and 2018 with police officers working in rural areas of a province in Atlantic Canada.

Utilizing the concept of social capital, we analyze practices of investments alongside the understanding of rurality as socially interconnected and the rural school as a particular site of interconnectedness for police officers. We demonstrate how, while accumulating social capital, officers face role tension and fundamental barriers when trying to integrate into rural school communities.

By demonstrating the specificities of building social capital in schools and community environments in a rural setting, we contribute to understandings regarding the unique opportunities and challenges faced by police in rural schools in integrating effectively into schools and responding to youth-specific problems.

Digital evidence is now infused in many (or arguably most) cases of sexual assault, which has refigured investigative tools, policing strategies and sources of cynicism for those working in sex crime units. Although cynicism, both its sources and affects, is widely studied among scholars of work and policing, little is known about how police working in sex crime units experience, mitigate and express cynicism. The purpose of this paper is to fill this gap in understanding and explore the role of cynicism amongst investigators working in sex crime units.

To address this research gap, the authors conducted 70 semi-structured in-depth interviews and two focus groups with members of police services organizations across Canada working in sex crime units.

Examining sources of cynicism and emotional experiences, the authors reveal that officers in these units normalize and neutralize organizational and intra-organizational sources of cynicism, and cope with the potentially traumatizing and emotionally draining realities of undertaking this form of “dirty work.” The authors show that officer cynicism extends beyond offenders into organizational and operational aspects of their occupations and their lived experiences outside of work, which has implications for literature on police work, cynicism and digital policing.

The authors contribute to the literature on cyber policing by, first, examining sex crimes unit member’s sources of cynicism in relation to sex crimes and the digital world and, second, by exploring sources of cynicism in police organizations and other branches in the criminal justice system. The authors examine how such cynicism seeps into relationships outside of the occupation. The authors’ contribution is in showing that cynicism related to police dirty work is experienced in relation to “front” and “back” regions (Dick, 2005) but also in multiple organizational and social spheres. The authors contribute to the extant literature on dirty work insofar as it addresses the underexplored dirty work associated with policing cyber environments and the morally tainted elements of such policing tasks.

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 the current chapter, we examine the nature, distribution and experiences of probation in Canada. More specifically, drawing upon in-depth interviews with probationer loved ones, we examine the experiences of what we refer to as secondary supervision. The concept captures how individuals with a loved one (i.e. family member or partner) on probation understand, make sense of and feel affected by their loved one’s probation order. Complementing existing literature on the collateral consequences of incarceration or ‘secondary prisonization’, we show how secondary supervision burdens probationer loved ones mentally and emotionally as they must navigate the uncertainties of their loved one’s legally precarious status. We highlight the necessity of expanding probation research and of our thinking about ‘mass supervision’ to consider the collateral and unintended consequences of community-based supervision.

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’.

Drawing from interviews with individuals on parole, this chapter explores experiences of and responses to penal misrecognition. It documents that participants feel fundamentally misrecognised by the parole agency and penal state. They believe that the penal state views them as dangerous, defective and incapable of virtuous self-governance. Yet this is not how they perceive themselves. This leads to a delicate balancing act where participants refuse certain aspects of the penal state while accommodating others. On the one hand, individuals refuse parole’s misrecognition of them and reject the state’s authority to define who they are. On the other hand, they largely acquiesce to parole’s authority to supervise and regulate conduct. Turning to the concept of refusal highlights that individuals do not just attempt to resist penal power; rather, they flatly reject the state’s epistemic constructions. They do this by turning away from parole and by turning towards other forms of sociality beyond the penal state. This creates material and affective distance from parole and opens up space for self-recognition and for receiving positive recognition from others. In this way, individuals seek to minimise, move away from and/or bypass a penal intervention that is ostensibly designed to assist and support them.