Risks, Needs and Reality Checks: Community Work with Multiply Disadvantaged Justice Involved Individuals
Year: 2017
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This study examines community practitioners who work with multiply-disadvantaged, justice-involved individuals often referred to as ‘complex-need clients’. It has become increasingly popular to talk about the need to support people bouncing between jail, courts and other emergency services. This population does not neatly ‘fit’ the mandate of any single organization, and stakeholders (i.e., case managers, mental health, court support, shelter staff, probation) are required to respond holistically, working across organizational and disciplinary boundaries, thus, facilitating conversations about risk, unprecedented information sharing and the development of instruments, technologies, and management systems regulating people via service and supervision structures. Despite policy and academic recognition of the practical and humanitarian issues at hand, sociological research rarely considers how the ‘complex-need client ' is framed or how this leads to new organizational configurations and hybrid responses. My dissertation addresses conceptual and empirical voids, examining how complex legal, social and medical problems are framed and managed. This study uses 105 interviews and two years of fieldwork focusing on the governance of ‘complex-need’ clients who are criminalized and depend on services offered by practitioners in and out of the justice system. I show that the production, sharing and use of risk knowledges helps community practitioners address a variety of objectives and interests, including fulfilling mandates to recognize threats to safety; managing reputational risk and conforming to managerial logics; instituting ‘effective’ evidence based practices for interventions; and addressing issues of liability. I argue that knowledge produced to inform coordinated responses to complex-needs is simultaneously used to protect practitioners and to advocate for clients and push other stakeholders towards penal, judicial and social change. I argue that community practitioners contribute to penal surveillance and risk management – even serving as de facto sureties – while also generating resistance and illustrating the value of evidence from outside criminal justice fields.
Source: TSpace (University of Toronto)
Author: Marianne Quirouette
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3142641696