Contesting Parole: Notes on the Politics of Conditional Prison Release

This is an event hosted by the Centre for Justice and Society Seminars and the Social Work Seminar Series.

This seminar will speak to a current writing project, which examines how the purposes of the parole system, and especially the Parole Board, has been interpreted and contested in the public sphere in England and Wales over the past two decades: what visions of parole are pressed, with what underlying assumptions? It will sketch the emerging argument that symbolically, the parole system has functioned as a cultural shock absorber for competing, dissonant and often oppositional demands that have been placed on penal systems in many Anglophone nations.

About the Speaker
Harry Annison is Professor of Criminal Justice at Southampton Law School, University of Southampton. He is a social scientist with particular interest in penal politics, probation and parole. He was co-lead on the ESRC project “Rehabilitating Probation” and he co-edited the recent “Parole Futures” edited collection.