Street-Level Bureaucracy, Interprofessional

Relations, and Coping Mechanisms: A Study of

Criminal Justice Social Workers in the
Sentencing Process
SIMON HALLIDAY, NICOLA BURNS, NEIL HUTTON,
FERGUS MCNEILL, and CYRUS TATA

This article builds on the work of Michael Lipsky and develops an argument
about the significance of interprofessional working for street-level bureaucracy.
It presents an ethnographic analysis of criminal justice social workers writing
presentence reports for the Scottish courts. Social workers’ report writing for
judges brought into relief issues of relative professional status. Social workers
were uncertain of their place within the legal domain and concerned about their
credibility as criminal justice professionals. Reports were written, in part at
least, as a way of seeking esteem and credibility in the eyes of judges—a moti-
vation that undermined the policy objectives of social enquiry in sentencing.
Applying the conceptual tools of Bourdieu to our findings, we argue that street-
level bureaucrats who have to work across bureaucratic “fields” may find, or
fear, that the cultural and symbolic “capital” they retained within their own
field is undervalued in the symbolic economy of new fields, putting them in a
position of relative inferiority. This issue of relative professional status, and
how officials respond to it, is significant for our understanding of street-level
bureaucracy.

I. INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW

The study of decision making by public officials in administrative settings has

been a mainstay of socio-legal scholarship for decades. The significance of

This article has improved significantly through the help of a number of colleagues. We are very
grateful for the careful editing of the Law & Policy editors and the suggestions of their anony-
mous reviewers. We also benefited greatly from the insightful input from a wonderful group of
socio-legal scholars based at Bristol University. Thanks to Dave Cowan, Alex Marsh, Bronwen
Morgan, and Richard Young. Thanks also to Simon MacKenzie who read and commented
helpfully on a late draft.
Address correspondence to Simon Halliday, The Law School, University of Strathclyde, 141
St. James’ Road, Glasgow, UK, G4 0LT. Telephone: +44 141 548 3878. E-mail: simon.halliday@
strath.ac.uk.

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official discretion to the operations of law in society is well understood,

particularly when examining the implementation of law and policy or com-
pliance with regulation. Michael Lipsky’s thesis about the dilemmas of the
individual in public services, captured in the notion of “street-level bureau-
cracy” (1980), has deservedly become a classic within a number of fields of
scholarship, including areas of law and society. Part of the enduring appeal
of Lipsky’s work is his sympathetic portrayal of front-line officials. He cap-
tures, without criticism, the very human dilemmas and senses of alienation
these officials encounter when implementing public policy.1 A notable aspect
of this theme is Lipsky’s description of coping mechanisms—general
responses officials develop to deal with the challenges brought about by
inadequate resources, few controls, indeterminate objectives, and discourag-
ing circumstances (ibid.: 82). Famously, the coping mechanisms suggested
by Lipsky are three-fold; first, street-level bureaucrats develop patterns of
practices—routines and stereotyping—to limit demands on their time and
resources; second, they modify the concept of their job to narrow the gap
between objectives and resources; third, they modify the concept of their
clients to render the inevitable gap between objectives and accomplishments
more palatable (ibid.: 82–83). Lipsky also stressed the durability of these
coping mechanisms.

People do not readily give up survival mechanisms. This is one of the reasons it
is easier to change articulated policy from the top than to change practice from
below. Policy articulated from the top is not rooted in defense mechanisms
developed to cope with the job, while the policy that emerges from practice is
rooted in survival. (Ibid.: 187)

A focus on coping mechanisms retains great significance for socio-legal

studies because of what it can tell us about the “how” and “why” of the
implementation of law and policy. Nevertheless, in the main, street-level
bureaucracy scholarship has explored implementation in relatively isolated
conditions. The traditional empirical focus is on public officials operating
predominantly within the parameters of their respective professional
fields—for example, social workers allocating direct care payments (Ellis
2007), or judges determining housing repossession cases (Cowan and
Hitchings 2007), or regulatory inspectors enforcing business regulation
(Nielson 2006), or cops policing the streets, teachers teaching school
children, and counsellors providing vocational rehabilitation support
(Maynard-Moody and Musheno 2003). What remains underexplored in
this vein of scholarship is the situation where public professionals must
engage with other professionals as part of the street-level bureaucratic
process. Yet interprofessional working is an aspect of street-level bureau-
cracy of increasing significance, given current emphasis on multiagency,
multidisciplinary, and joined-up governance (Williams 2002; Entwistle and
Martin 2005). By focusing on this aspect of street-level bureaucracy, we

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may discover more about the plight of street-level bureaucrats and about
their responses to it.
In this article we present ethnographic data from a research project about
Scottish social workers who write presentence reports, called social enquiry
reports, for the assistance of judges about to pass sentence. In routine sen-
tencing work, social enquiry reports are the primary vehicle to condition
judicial opinion and influence judicial action (Morgan 2003; Tata et al.
2008). Social enquiry reports, then, constitute a revealing point of exchange
between two professional groups working within the criminal justice
system—judges and social workers. Our argument is that interprofessional
relations influence the character of street-level behavior. Our analysis
reveals a “discouraging circumstance” (Lipsky 1980: 82) of street-level
bureaucracy and a coping mechanism not explored by Lipsky. We found
that social workers’ engagement with the judiciary brought into relief issues
of relative professional status. Social workers felt undervalued and experi-
enced a certain status anxiety when encountering the legal domain, a nega-
tive feature of their work. Their consequent search for greater value and
credibility—an attempt to attain a positive experience—is important to our
understanding of their routine work. Social workers’ construction of reports
was, in part at least, an attempt to gain esteem in the eyes of the judges—a
motivation that undermines the policy objectives of social enquiry in sen-
tencing. Such behavior, however, was a rational response from a group of
professionals who felt on the margins of and uncertain of their place within
the legal domain—an attempt to cope with the challenges of being a crimi-
nal justice social worker.
We use the theoretical work of Pierre Bourdieu to deepen this analysis
and to set the findings within a wider analytical frame. In other words,
we draw on Bourdieu to help explain and inductively theorize our
empirical findings. This permits us to advance the suggestion that we may
expect to find issues of relative professional status influencing the character
of street-level work in other administrative settings. The conceptual tools
and analytical resources of Bourdieu are particularly apt for these pur-
poses. His notion of “field” and various species of “capital” at stake
within fields sheds light on the plight of certain street-level bureaucrats who
find themselves working across bureaucratic fields or at the intersections of
such fields. The “capital”—the cultural and symbolic resources—they bring
from their home professional domain can be undervalued in other fields.
This, we argue, is a discouraging feature of street-level work, and the quest
for greater capital within the new field—or where fields overlap—can be
understood as a coping mechanism that influences the implementation of
policy.
These theoretical arguments are developed fully in due course once we
have described our empirical findings. In order to do this, however, we first
must say something about social enquiry (presentence) report-writing within
the Scottish criminal justice system.

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II. BACKGROUND: SOCIAL ENQUIRY WITHIN SCOTTISH

CRIMINAL SENTENCING

A. PRESENTENCE REPORTS IN SCOTLAND

There are three separate legal systems operating within the United Kingdom.
The criminal justice systems of Scotland, Northern Ireland, and England &
Wales have certain commonalities but also distinct differences. Specific focus
on the Scottish system is important for our analysis here. The Scottish courts
can consider social enquiry reports in any criminal case and must call for
these presentence reports in certain circumstances, including where custody is
being considered in relation to an offender who is under twenty-one years of
age or has not been sentenced to custody before. Reports are also required
before the imposition of community sentences like probation, community
service, or drug treatment and testing orders. So, where either a custodial or
a community sentence seems likely, this will typically prompt judges to
request social enquiry reports.2 The social workers who write the reports are
generally not present in court. Nor do judges, as a general rule, provide direct
feedback on the reports. The communication between judges and social
workers, then, takes place at a distance.
The government’s National Objectives and Standards for criminal justice
social work in Scotland (more commonly known as the National Standards)
are clear that the role of social enquiry reports is to be advisory, that is, more
than the mere gathering of facts. Reports are intended to assist and advise the
judges.

Social enquiry reports are intended to assist sentencing. They provide informa-
tion about offenders and their circumstances of general relevance to the courts.
On the basis of a risk and needs assessment, they also advise the courts on the
suitability of offenders for those community based disposals. (Scottish Executive
2004: 1.2, emphases added)

The National Standards also set out the kind of social enquiry that should
inform these reports. Reports should address issues of offending behavior,
the offender’s finances, family relationships, education, training, employ-
ment, accommodation, lifestyle, physical and mental health, risk of self-
harm, and substance misuse.
In a number of Western jurisdictions, including England & Wales and
Scotland, “public protection” as an official purpose of probation or criminal
justice social work services is given headline billing. However, in Scotland,
unlike in England & Wales, criminal justice social work’s purposes are also
associated with a commitment to a reduction in the use of custody (Nellis
1995; Robinson and McNeill 2004). Moreover, in contrast to the policy
position in England & Wales, in Scotland rehabilitation is cast as the means
of progressing two compatible and interdependent goals: reducing reoffend-
ing and increasing social inclusion (Robinson and McNeill 2004). Since social

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enquiry is both the key entry point to criminal justice social work services, for
example, community penalties, and the prime opportunity to encourage
consideration of the use of these services, it is easy to see why it attracts
considerable investment and policy attention. Social enquiry reports are
expected to do a selling job. The logic implicit in the policy is that the courts
will more often use community disposals instead of custody if the courts are
better informed and such disposals are regarded as more credible by the
courts. In other words, social enquiry reports are expected to encourage
judges to realize the benefits of non-custodial disposals over custody.

The provision of community based disposals of sufficient quality and quantity

will enable sentencers to use them in cases where otherwise they might have
imposed a custodial sentence. The overall aim is to create a situation in which it
is practicable to use prisons as sparingly as possible through providing
community-based disposals which contain and reduce offending behaviour,
assist social integration, have the confidence of the courts and the wider public,
and make efficient and effective use of available resources. (Scottish Executive
2004: para. 5, emphasis added)

In common with other countries, Scotland has witnessed a significant

escalation in the number of reports requested by the courts and submitted to
them. Between the years 2001 and 2006, a total of 194,703 reports were
completed (Scottish Executive 2007),3 representing an increase of 80 percent
during 1991–1996 (Social Work Inspectorate 1996). This dramatic rise is in
spite of the fact that over this period the number of cases coming before the
courts in Scotland has been broadly stable (McNeill and Whyte 2007; Tata
2007). The concomitant level of financial investment reflects policymakers’
recognition of the pivotal role that social enquiry reports play in pursuit of
governmental objectives for community justice services to the criminal justice
system.

B. SOCIAL WORK, WELFARISM, AND THE HISTORY OF SOCIAL ENQUIRY

IN SCOTLAND

The business of probation or corrections staff providing reports to assist

judges is part of the sentencing process in many jurisdictions. However, in the
U.S. federal system and in many U.S. states a combination of juridified
plea-bargaining and determinate sentencing reforms makes for a very differ-
ent context for providing such assistance. Furthermore, report writers tend to
be directly employed by the courts, which has led some American scholars
to argue that the Presentence Investigation Report (PSIR) continues to exist
only as a marginalized discourse and an institutionalized form of the “myth
of individualized justice” (Hagan, Hewit, and Alwin 1979; Walsh 1985;
Rosencrance 1988). More recently, Kingsnorth et al. (1999) have argued that
PSIRs are no longer needed to conceal punitive agendas and thus to uphold
the myth of individualized justice because punitive values are now openly

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acknowledged. This broader penological shift in the United States produces

a “dramatic role transformation” for the probation officer—“from being an
‘agent of individualisation’ to being an ‘agent of the state’—fully committed
to contemporary norms of punishment and incapacitation and recognized as
such by all court room participants” (Kingsnorth et al. 1999: 271).
In Scotland the position is more complex. Although Scotland’s first pro-
bation officers were drawn from the police force, the Probation of Offenders
(Scotland) Act 1931 revolutionized the service by locating it within local
government authorities and expressly prohibiting the appointment of former
or current serving police officers as probation staff. Since then probation has
always been institutionally separate from court administration. Indeed, Scot-
tish probation work was rendered more distinct in international terms by the
reforms of the Social Work (Scotland) Act 1968 which followed the Kilbran-
don Report (1964). Kilbrandon’s legacy is perhaps most readily associated
with juvenile justice through the creation of the Scottish Children’s Hearings
system. However, the “Kilbrandon philosophy,” which established the pre-
eminence of a welfare-based approach predicated on social education prin-
ciples, also affected the ideology and organization of adult criminal justice in
Scotland (Moore and Whyte 1998). Most significantly in this context, the
Kilbrandon Report led to the integration of probation and aftercare services
in generic social work departments. The duty of these local government social
work departments to “promote social welfare” (Social Work [Scotland] Act
1968: § 12) existed irrespective of the type of client in question, placing
offenders, both juvenile and adult, on a par with, for example, neglected and
abused children, disabled adults, and frail older people. Though this was
in part a triumph for welfarist principles, it was also the result of much
more pragmatic considerations around workloads, staff skills, and training
(McNeill and Whyte 2007). That said, the welfarist approach has proved
unusually durable in Scotland. Even in relation to adult offender services,
there is little evidence of any significant revision of that philosophy until the
1990s. While there is certainly evidence of the emergence of public protection
as a “metanarrative” of criminal justice social work (Robinson and McNeill
2004), it is fair to say that, at least at the level of policy, Scotland has suffered
much less of a loss of faith in the rehabilitative ideal than in other parts of the
world (McAra 1999, 2005). It is still the case that those who write social
enquiry reports, supervise offenders on community sanctions, and resettle
released prisoners are registered social workers who have undertaken degree-
level or postgraduate generic social work courses and who work in local
government social work services.
Social work, then, has a long history as a parallel and partner profession in
Scotland’s criminal justice system. Although it has always been clear that
judges are the ultimate sentencing decision makers, the history of welfarism in
Scottish criminal justice requires the judges to seek and take note of social
work expertise in many cases. The social enquiry report is the formal medium
through which this expertise and knowledge is fed into the sentencing process.

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III. RESEARCH METHODS

Before we present an analysis of our empirical data and develop our argu-
ment about the significance of interprofessional relations for street-level
work, we first describe the research methods on which the analysis is based.
This article focuses primarily on the activities of social workers in writing
reports for the courts and considers its implications for our understanding of
street-level bureaucracy. However, the research project4 as a whole had wider
ambitions, looking also at how reports were interpreted and used by judges
in criminal sentencing (see Tata et al. 2008). The project, accordingly, used
multiple methods and proceeded in phases.
The routine report writing of social workers was researched predominantly
through the technique of observation. Observational fieldwork lasted for just
under one year. Observation was structured around the following of cases,
with the intention of recording their histories from their entry into the social
work environment to the submission of the report back to the court. In total,
our fieldworker closely observed fifty-three cases that had been allocated to a
wide range of social work staff. In twenty-nine of these cases, she additionally
employed an innovative ethnographic technique developed during the
project and described as “shadow writing,” discussed at length in Halliday
et al. (2008). At the beginning of fieldwork, an initial two-month period of
pure observation took place whereby relations of trust were built between
our fieldworker and the social workers and during which she developed
knowledge of the practice of report writing. Thereafter, however, she began
to write shadow social enquiry reports herself in light of the observed inter-
views with offenders and her reading of the case papers. In this sense she
mimicked the process of report writing. Shadow writing had a dual benefit.
First, it offered some participant-like insight into the process of report
writing. More significantly, however, by comparing the shadow report with
the real report in discussion with the writers concerned, shadow writing
provided a very fruitful means of eliciting deeper and more specific explana-
tions about the content of particular reports. It produced invaluable insights
into social workers’ aims in social enquiry and their techniques of com-
munication with judges.
These core observational data were triangulated in a number of ways.
First, fieldwork comprised two case studies and so was split between two
separate sites, “Southpark” and “Westwood,” chosen to reflect different sizes
of courts for which reports were written. Second, after observational work
was completed and preliminary analysis of the data had taken place,
follow-up interviews were conducted with all the criminal justice social work
staff in each site. These interviews allowed us to test the themes that were
emerging from the observational data. Third, preliminary analyses of the
observational and interview data were presented to the social work teams
who took part in the project, and the social workers were invited to comment
on our findings. Full details of the research methods used to investigate the

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judicial use and interpretation of the reports are provided elsewhere (Tata
et al. 2008).
One of the benefits of the intensive and ethnographic approach we adopted
in our study is that it produced a particularly rich and complex picture of the
social workers’ routine work. However, this article is more narrowly focused
on the significance of interprofessional relations for this work—a focus that
makes a positive contribution to street-level bureaucracy scholarship. There
is a risk of simplifying an overall dataset when focusing on particular aspects
of the data for analytical and theory-building purposes. We should stress at
the outset that our data revealed features of routine social work that resonate
well with some of the classic themes of Lipsky (1980) and with the newer
stresses on the reproduction of cultural morality suggested by Maynard-
Moody and Musheno (2003). We have explored these findings elsewhere
(Halliday et al. 2008; McNeill et al. forthcoming). Our emphasis here on the
importance of relative professional status should, therefore, be interpreted
carefully. We do not suggest that this was the only influence on report writing
nor that it was uniformly evident in relation to all the social workers we
observed. Our suggestion is more modest. The importance of relative profes-
sional status was sufficiently grounded in our data and evident in our study
across both sites that we may with integrity describe it as a finding. And, as
noted above, through inductive theorizing, we suggest that interprofessional
relations will have significance for street-level work in settings beyond
Scottish criminal justice social work.

IV. CASE STUDY ANALYSIS

A. THE SOCIAL WORKERS

The criminal justice social work teams observed in this research served their
respective local courts. Southpark is a provincial town where a relatively
small-medium criminal justice social work office wrote reports for a smaller
court than the team in “Westwood,” an inner-city neighborhood where
workers served a much larger and more anonymous city court. The social
work teams in both sites included both recently qualified and more experi-
enced social workers, a small number of whom were involved in the training
of social work students or were involved in other professional development
activities. In terms of gender, it has long been recognized that social work is
overrepresented by women, at least at all grades below managerial level
(Perry and Cree 2003). This was certainly reflected in the Westwood site
where there was a preponderance of women social workers, though in the
Southpark site gender was evenly balanced.
Much has also been written about the difficulties of practicing social
work in the United Kingdom and the stresses associated with it (e.g., Jones
2001; Stanley, Manthorpe, and White 2007). This is particularly so for the

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“statutory” (Balloch et al. 1998) or “state” (Jones 2001) social work being
practiced in local government offices. A number of scholars have revealed the
negative effects of managerialism on social work practice and morale (e.g.,
McDonald, Postle, and Dawson 2008). The public image of social work has
also been damaged by a number of well-publicized child protection failures.
Indeed, social workers’ perceptions of their poor public image seem to be an
additional source of stress in itself (Collings and Murray 1996). Further,
applications for university training have been in decline, with some specula-
tion that social work’s negative public image is, in part, to blame (Perry and
Cree, 2003).
Despite this generally gloomy portrayal of public sector social work, cap-
tured in Jones’s description of it as a “grim place” (2001: 551), the social
workers in our study, much like the typical street-level bureaucrat envisioned
by Lipsky (1980: xii), retained a commitment to public service and a sense of
their potential as socially useful professionals. In both sites, social workers
certainly felt heavily burdened by the increasing demand for reports. Further,
some of them betrayed a certain world-weariness and were frustrated at what
they perceived to be a lack of senior management support. However, they
could not be construed by any means as an unusually disengaged or disaf-
fected workforce. On the basis of our broader experience of this field, we have
no reason to consider them atypical of criminal justice social workers in
Scotland.

B. WELFARISM IN REPORT WRITING

The commitment of the social workers in our study to supporting social

welfare was evident in a basic tension they experienced when thinking about
their role within the criminal justice system, a tension that has a significant
history expressed in long-standing debates in Scotland concerning how, in
social work terms, to define “the client” of the report writer. Is it the court or
the offender or both (Moore and Wood, 1981)? Recent policy has formally
settled this question in favor of the court, but social workers on the ground
still experienced much more ambivalence concerning potential conflicts
between the needs of the judge as sentencer and of the offender as a subject
of social work support. Despite the recent direction of policy, offenders are
still situated in the role of social work clients in a number of ways. They are
the ones with whom the social worker interacts, discussing their life histories,
and attempting to seek ways forward to address their offending behavior, in
some cases through the development of an action plan for probation. Often
offenders face multiple and complex problems in their lives: drug and alcohol
use; physical, emotional, and sexual abuse; health problems; poverty; and
unemployment. Those who present to the criminal justice social work teams,
then, are not only offenders, but are people with needs who evoke responses
preoccupied as much with care as with justice. For example, in the Southpark
site, perceived management attitudes toward the position of the criminal

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justice team in relation to the local court invited wider discussion around the
role of social work, recorded in the following fieldwork diary extract.

Joey has only been with the team a short time, 6 months . . . Prior to this job he
worked in childcare for 16 years. The past two years he has worked in a project
for young people with sexually problematic behaviour and adult sex offenders.
He describes himself as being ‘poached’ by Barry the senior. He decided to
move into the team because he enjoyed the criminal justice aspect of his work.
It is more structured . . . Joey pauses and tells me that the only thing he doesn’t
like about the team is its focus on the courts. He feels at times it is here to service
the court. Hannah [another social worker] begins nodding while saying “yeah.”
Hannah tells me that there is too much emphasis on doing things for the court,
and that it should be more balanced. Joey says that they are working for the
court. Hannah shakes her head: “no it’s for both.” Joey: “no it’s for the court.”
Hannah concedes but says that it should be more about both. (Southpark
Fieldwork Diary)

The social workers we observed were often attentive to the welfare needs of
the offenders. In interviewing them for the purposes of drafting the social
enquiry reports, social workers frequently took on the role of supporting and
valuing the process of change within offenders, recognizing that efforts to
address drug or alcohol use were often very difficult. In other words, in
serving the court as client, they were at the same time practicing social work
with and for offenders.
Such welfarist ambitions were evident in the writing of the reports. Social
workers’ abilities to influence the judicial decision about sentencing,
however, were limited in that they generally could not openly recommend a
sentencing disposal. Rather, social workers relied on the use of “narrative”
(see Halliday et al. 2008; Tata et al. 2008) in their attempts to influence
judicial decision making. By this we mean that they developed images of
offenders in their report, told stories, as it were, about what kind of person
the offender was and why he/she had been offending. Often, though not
always, this amounted to a welfarist narrative of “redeemability” where the
social worker tried to present the offender to the court in the best light, to
sympathetically account for his/her offending behavior, and to demonstrate
the possibility of his/her ability to become a nonoffending citizen, usually
with social work support. Stories, of course, require endings, and the narra-
tives of social enquiry reports were no different. Social workers tried to
construct their reports to display what one called a “logical argument”
(Interview: Westwood, senior social worker 1) that led to an implied sentenc-
ing conclusion. Such implied conclusions were generally contained in the
final section of the reports which discussed the sentencing options open to
the court. This was the culmination of the report’s narrative. As one social
worker put it, “it’s a clear argument throughout and all roads are kind of
leading the same way” (Interview: Westwood, social worker 2).
An example5 of these common welfarist ambitions in constructing social
enquiry reports can be found in the case of SP14. The offender, “Gareth

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Harker,” had been convicted of driving while under the influence of alcohol.
He had one previous conviction for drunk driving some years before. For
that offense he had been fined and had had his driver’s license suspended for
eighteen months. In relation to the current offense, Harker had been twice
over the legal limit for alcohol consumption and had collided with another
car. He was forty-nine years old and married with a child. The child was
autistic, had special needs, and required considerable support and supervi-
sion. Harker was interviewed by one of Southpark’s social workers,
“Fergal,” in preparation for the writing of the social enquiry report. Our
fieldworker, who had read the case papers and observed the interview, dis-
cussed the case with Fergal. Fergal suspected that Harker drank excessively
in order to cope with the stresses of looking after his son. Before beginning
his draft of the report, he told our fieldworker that he was going to pitch for
a deferred sentence with a requirement that Harker attend Alcohol Services
for counseling regarding his drinking. The following extracts from the field-
work diary reveal Fergal’s approach to the offender and his ambitions in
writing the social enquiry report:

Fergal decided to mention the violence within Harker’s parents’ relationship.

His reason for doing so was in order to “ask a question—is history repeating
itself?” He doesn’t think it is but nonetheless it is an important factor in his
upbringing. Is Harker perhaps understating the [difficulties of his] situation?
This, Fergal thinks, would be something that could be explored through
counselling . . . We discuss Harker’s routine of going to the pub6 after work.
Fergal poses the question “is he unwinding from his work day or psyching
himself up for returning home?” He continues that Harker had said that his
local pub was only five minutes from home, so why not pop home and then
go to the pub? . . . Fergal is also indicating in a very roundabout way that
Harker may be minimising his alcohol use—by discussing units of alcohol
consumed [weekly] Fergal was implying that Harker was [routinely] drinking
more than he should have been . . . I observe that [in discussing probation as
a possible sentencing option] Fergal is again making an issue of the stresses
and strains Harker is placed under. He acknowledges this and says that he is
really telling the judge that Harker needs counselling. (Southpark Fieldwork
Diary)

C. WELFARISM CURTAILED BY STATUS ANXIETY

The case of Gareth Harker nicely illustrates the caring ethic being practiced
by social workers in writing social enquiry reports and their common wel-
farist ambitions in terms of sentencing outcomes. However, such ambitions
in drafting reports were often curtailed by concerns social workers had
about how they were perceived within the criminal justice system, particu-
larly in relation to more serious offenses or offenders with a longer criminal
record who thereby had a greater chance of receiving custody. Social
workers worried about coming across as too lenient, especially in the eyes
of the judges who would read their reports. They were anxious about their

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credibility as criminal justice professionals and suffered from a basic pro-

fessional status anxiety in having to engage as social workers in the legal
domain. The following examples from the fieldwork diaries illustrate the
professional insecurity and frustration which social workers felt in relation
to the legal professionals within the criminal justice system, judges in
particular.

Hannah doesn’t understand why social workers have access to witness and
police statements in England but not in Scotland. She adds that if individuals
were under the influence of drugs or alcohol at the time this could mean that
they don’t have a clear recollection of what happened. As a result, she could
suggest a range of options which might be inappropriate and the “judge could
be sitting laughing” at her because he knows “all the facts” of the case. No one
wants to be laughed at, she tells me. (Southpark Fieldwork Diary)

I ask Geena if she knows of any of the judges in the Westwood area. She knows
of [Judge X]. He “doesn’t like social workers.” “How do you know that?” I ask.
Geena shrugs her shoulders and tells me that he sees social workers as “namby
pamby” and “sandal wearing.” She shakes her head. She then tilts her head as
she describes how she perceives judges to be akin to “[general doctors]—no,
more consultants.” She says that they have power, asking “who would go
against them?” I ask her to explain her analogy. She tells me that consultants
have little accountability. She corrects this and notes that sometimes they do,
but not very often. But she maintains that judges are not accountable to
anyone. I ask her how she sees social workers in relation to judges: “sub-
servient.” She then jumps to a female judge, [Judge Y], whom she perceives
as having a more “welfare outlook.” “She is fairer in a lot of respects”
. . . Geena then moves to the defence lawyers noting that they use the social
enquiry report as a plea in mitigation. She scowls . . . I ask her how she feels
about this. She laughs and says she would feel better about it if she was paid
£10,000 more. She moves back to the judges, “Oh, but some of them . . . ” She
shakes her head. (Westwood Fieldwork Diary)

Pam says that judges see social enquiry reports as “naïve.” She throws a bunch
of court papers at me, telling me she would like a judge to “come up” with
something on the basis of that, as she stabs a finger at the thin collection of
court papers . . . Pam notes that she would like to see the police reports because
they write down “just what took place” rather than relying on what is written
in there (another stab at the court papers). She states that we [i.e., social
workers] are just a small part of the system. She leaves this statement hanging.
(Westwood Fieldwork Diary)

Despite the fact that social workers were confident professionals in their
routine engagement with offenders and each other, many became less confi-
dent in having to engage with the legal domain through report writing.
Indeed, this general mentality is brought into further relief by contrasting it
with that of two individuals within the Southpark team who, unlike their
colleagues, were actually based at the court itself, a small court of three
judges. Through this positioning, they had become known to the local judges.
They had a greater self-assurance about their work, which seemed to be
rooted in their more intimate engagement with the judges.

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I ask about when Johnny is present in court. Do the judges ever call upon them?
He nods, looking quite serious as he shifts himself back in his chair. Johnny
adopts an air of importance here. He appears to stick his chest out. [Judge 1],
he tells me, does ask [them] to clarify points for him quite often. [Judge 2] uses
them a great deal and will often ask “for a word.” I look puzzled at this. Johnny
continues that [Judge 2] will quite often say, “I am thinking about doing this
[x,y,z] what do you think?” Johnny looks quite impressed with this. I say that
this must be rather unusual. He nods vigorously, saying that they have a good
relationship with the judges and that it is good to know you are respected as a
professional. (Southpark Fieldwork Diary)

Such confidence and professional self-assurance can be contrasted with the

experience of an “ordinary” Southpark social worker when he had to stand
in for Johnny while he was on vacation.

Joey tells me that over the summer both Johnny and Drew [the court-based
social workers] were on annual leave and he covered the court for a couple of
days. He found it really scary, “well, not scary” but he didn’t know all the
“protocols.” He gives me an example. At one point the judge had asked that the
social worker approach the bench. Joey was sitting in the jury box. So he stood,
thinking that was what he was to do. The judge again said “approach the
bench.” A bit unsure, he stood beside the solicitors. Again the judge said
“approach the bench!” and Joey finally went right up to the judge. He was very
embarrassed. (Southpark Fieldwork Diary)

The earlier fieldwork diary extracts about Hannah, Geena, and Pam,
which illustrate social workers’ insecurities in their relationship to legal pro-
fessionals, also reveal that their feelings of being marginalized rest in part
on the material conditions in which they operate. Unlike their neighbors in
England & Wales, social workers in Scotland do not have access to witness
statements and police reports. As the extracts show, this was a source of
considerable frustration for them. When constructing their reports, this pre-
dicament required social workers to trust the account of events offered by
offenders. However, this trust was sometimes misplaced, leaving the social
workers feeling duped and, in their perception, looking stupid in the eyes of
the court. Equally, as we indicated earlier, social workers have long been
outsiders to the court administration. They are trained in a different disci-
pline and employed by local government councils. They are generally also
physically located outside the court in local government offices and rarely,
if ever, attend court. This physical dislocation captures the marginalized
position they inhabited in relation to the sentencing process. The issue of
relative professional status invoked by these marginalized experiences inten-
sified their focus on what the judges might think of them as professionals, in
addition to the conclusions of their reports. They felt on the margins of
the legal domain, and thus uncertain of their place. Judges, at least in the
common law tradition, are the gods of the legal domain. The social workers,
then, wanted their voices to be valued and respected by the judges in
particular.

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D. TECHNIQUES FOR ALLEVIATING STATUS ANXIETY

How did the social workers respond to their status anxiety? And how did
these responses operate to curtail their welfarist ambitions? We observed two
interrelated practices that represented a quest for greater credibility and
status within the legal domain.

i. Welfarist Narratives Weakened by Inclusion of Dissonant Information

First, despite developing a clear welfarist narrative, social workers would, at
the same time, include information in the report that was dissonant with that
narrative and undermined it. In doing so, they displayed a lack of courage in
their welfarist convictions because of a fear of appearing naive or excessively
lenient. An example of this can be found in the case of WW19. The offender
in this case had pled guilty to misuse of drugs, carrying an offensive weapon,
and theft. He had a long history of analogous offenses and was now in breach
of bail, of an existing probation order, and of a release licence. The social
worker believed that the offender’s drug use explained his offending behav-
ior. She believed that, despite a history of similar offending, he should be
given further probation with a support program to help him address his drug
addiction. At various stages of the social enquiry report, she attempted to
build up this picture of the offender and give signals to the judge about the
appropriateness of this as a sentence. She attempted to tell a story of the
offender as a young man who turned to drugs because of personal tragedy
rather than an unstable family environment, who committed crime to feed his
habit, who was a threat to property rather than persons, and who was now
ready to address his addiction having missed the opportunity to do so pre-
viously.7 However, the social worker also included additional information
that was dissonant to the story of redeemability. She felt that it was impor-
tant to “alert” the judge that the offender had been charged with a similar
offense that had not yet been resolved. She also discussed the offender’s
history of offending and breaching probation orders. She explained to our
fieldworker that, by including this information, she was keen to demonstrate
to the judge that she was “not daft” but was, rather, “living in the real
world.” In other words, despite having clear welfarist ambitions and having
developed a narrative of redeemability, she undermined its strength and
clarity because of her anxiety about how she would be perceived by the judge
who would read the report.

Sentencing Realism
Second, and related, social workers’ desire to be viewed as credible profes-
sionals within the criminal justice system translated into a concern with
“realism” in their discussion of various sentencing options. As one senior
social worker put it,

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I think credibility is a . . . professional thing. It’s just around your professional

competence . . . highlighting what’s . . . good sentencing . . . So to be credible,
it’s got to be linked to professional realism. (Interview: Westwood senior social
worker 2)

The sentencing mentality of social workers was framed in part through an

anticipation of what they thought the judge likely to read the report would
regard as being within the appropriate range of possible sentences (Tata et al.
2008). So, although social workers were a partner professional group in the
criminal justice system, in their routine work they showed considerable
deference to judges about where the line between welfarism and “excessive”
leniency was to be drawn. Many social workers were inclined to “pitch” for
sentencing options that fell within a range of “realistic” disposals in the eyes
of the particular judge likely to read the report, as the following fieldwork
diary extracts illustrate.

[Barry, the senior social worker] thinks the social workers write social enquiry
reports with judges in mind. I ask him why he thinks this. He maintains that if
[Judge 1] is on the remand court they tend to “bump up tariff” when writing
their reports, knowing that this judge will consider custody more frequently
than his colleagues. (Southpark Fieldwork Diary)

Jodie is unsure over what [sentencing option to go for]. She is concerned about
whether there is evidence that [the offender] bit the police officer. If there is, it
is really quite serious. She is considering a deferred sentence. But is this appro-
priate for an assault on a police officer? [She thinks] it would be too lenient.
(Southpark Fieldwork Diary)

Tony tells me that he would have included a community service assessment [in
the social enquiry report] . . . I ask why—the judge did not ask for one. Surely
that would be “up-tariffing” this person? Tony agrees, but immediately points
to the judge. The judge in his eyes is “cornered.” It is a relatively serious offence,
it is “high profile” and “emotive” at the moment and therefore the judge may
feel the need to up-tariff. Tony points to the media’s interest in crimes such as
Jane’s (smuggling drugs into prison) and reiterates that it is “a highly emotive
issue.” (Westwood Fieldwork Diary)

E. STATUS ANXIETY OR PRAGMATISM?

Social workers’ concerns with sentencing realism operated to impose a sys-

temic limit on the significance of social enquiry for sentencing in that it
constrained the social workers’ perceptions of their range of options and with
it their ability to significantly challenge judicial sentencing practices. In
seeking to understand social workers’ motivations, however, it might be
suggested that they practiced sentencing realism because of simple pragma-
tism. Perhaps, it might be posited, this is no more complicated than the desire
to be effective. Although both social workers and judges, in effect, practice
sentencing decision making (e.g., they both make assessments of harm, cul-
pability, the possibility of change, appropriate punishment, etc.), it is, of

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course, the judges’ decisions that are implemented. Since judges command
sentencing authority, surely they need to be persuaded on their own terms?
The answer to the question is that some social workers certainly did work
within the limits of “sentencing realism” in order to increase their chances
of wielding influence, albeit on compromised terms. This was an attempt
to mitigate a common “discouraging circumstance” highlighted by Lipsky
(1980) whereby street-level bureaucrats do not retain control over the
outcome of their work.

Sometimes they process people for other bureaucracies, which ultimately

dispose of cases. Police often complain, for example, that their actions are not
supported by judges and prosecutors; they feel uncertain whether their perfor-
mance of a good job as they define it will result in a desired outcome. (78)

However, pragmatism and the search for greater status are not mutually
exclusive findings. Our argument is that both were evident in our study. In
addition to some social workers having the desire simply to be effective,
others also wanted to be valued as credible professionals by other profession-
als they encountered in their work. Their engagement with the legal domain
brought into relief their relative professional status in relation to lawyers and
judges and prompted them to seek greater status and credibility in that world.
In the following section we relate these findings to Lipsky’s work and set
them in a wider analytical framework with reference to Bourdieu.

V. DISCUSSION

The predicament of the social workers in our study fits well with aspects of
Lipsky’s description of the “alienation” commonly experienced by street-
level bureaucrats (1980: 75–80). In addition to lacking control over the
outcome of their work, mentioned above, the social workers experienced
compromises on their welfarist ambitions and inclinations in constructing
reports within the limits of judicial senses of sentencing realism. This chimes
with Lipsky’s discussion of the limits on the extent to which “street-level
bureaucrats are able to respond to clients in a fully human way” (1980: 76).
In addition, however, they also felt marginalized and undervalued as profes-
sionals in the legal domain. This goes beyond Lipsky’s point about street-
level bureaucrats not having control over the outcomes of their work. There
is a difference between feeling a lack of control and feeling a lack of respect.
This matches the distinction we made above between social workers’ desire
for effectiveness and their desire for credibility.

A. SHIFTING “CAPITAL” VALUES IN DIFFERENT “FIELDS”

Bourdieu’s conceptual tools of “capital” and “field” help to make greater

sense of this distinction. Bourdieu developed and deployed the concept of

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field (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992) as a site of struggle in which various

social actors compete over, contest, and construct influence and power. His
notion of capital and his assertion that there are various species of capital
beyond the mere economic—symbolic, cultural, social, juridical, and so
forth (Bourdieu 1986, 1987)—points to the fact that within fields there is
a range of resources retained and sought after by individuals and groups
that structure inequalities (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 118–19).
Bourdieu’s account of social practice also allows for struggles at the
margins and “open interface” (Madsen and Dezalay 2002) of fields as well
as within fields. Further, social actors or groups may find themselves
operating across fields. Equally, they may take part in the creation of, and
compete for, capital within new fields (see, e.g., Dezalay and Garth 1996;
Madsen 2004).
This conceptual map provides insights into the social workers’ alienation
and their coping mechanism of seeking credibility. While we might conceive
of criminal justice social work as a field in itself, it also represents an inter-
section between the relatively discrete fields of criminal justice and social
work. Whereas in many jurisdictions probation or correctional services are a
part of the justice system and thus subject to its own particular vicissitudes,
in Scotland, as we noted earlier, the position of criminal justice social work is
more complex. Social workers are not primarily criminal justice actors;
rather, they are professional social workers working in locally based social
services but having to operate at the margins of the criminal justice field.
Having to engage with, and work within, the criminal justice field dislocates
them, in a sense. The social workers in our study feared that the cultural and
symbolic capital they retained within the social work field was undervalued
in the symbolic economy of criminal justice, putting them in a position of
relative inferiority.
Educational background, as a form of cultural capital, is of relevance here.
Although no systematic research has been conducted concerning the cultural
capital of Scotland’s judiciary in the way the Danish judiciary has been
explored, for example, by Hammerslev (2003), it is certainly the case that
university law degrees are culturally valued more highly than university
social work qualifications in Scotland, despite their formal academic equiva-
lence. Such is reflected, for example, in the greater competition for places and
the much higher entry requirements for law degrees. Equally, lawyers in
general, and judges in particular, are more highly rewarded in economic
terms, a point not lost on the social workers in our study, as the extract from
our fieldwork diary above demonstrated. Judges also enjoy greater symbolic
capital. As Bourdieu (1994) reminds us, the symbolic capital of nobility has
now been objectified and bureaucratized in law. In contrast to all other
professions, judges in the Scottish courts enjoy the titles of Lord and Lady (in
the higher courts) or Sheriff (in the intermediate courts). However, even in
the Sheriff courts, judges continue to be formally addressed as “My Lord”
or “My Lady.” The wearing of judicial gowns and wigs and the physical

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elevation of the Bench all signify the honor and prestige of the judiciary.
Further, generally in the common law world (Bourdieu 1986), and specifi-
cally in Scotland, in addition to holding superior cultural and symbolic
capital, judges also enjoy supreme juridical capital within the criminal
justice field—in this context the ability to pass sentence and to determine the
parameters of sentencing realism.
Our data about how lawyers and judges interpreted and used social
enquiry reports confirms the social workers’ fears about their relative posi-
tion in the field of criminal justice. These findings have been discussed else-
where (Tata et al. 2008). However, the focus of this article has been on the
social workers’ perceptions of their place within the criminal justice
field—their “habitus”8—and its significance for how they conduct their
routine work. These perceptions have not been derived primarily from
direct interaction with legal actors. It is important to recall that social
workers do not generally come into contact with courtroom actors and do
not generally receive any direct feedback from judges about the quality of
their input to the sentencing process. As we have seen, on the basis of
largely untested presumptions, they expressed concerns that the capital
they enjoyed in the field of social work had limited purchase in the field of
criminal justice. They feared that their professional discourse of welfare
and care would be undervalued as “namby-pambiness.” Their skills in
understanding the causes of offending behavior and in assessing the reha-
bilitative needs of the offenders might be written off as naïveté (see also
Tata et al. 2008). This anxiety about lacking credibility was a negative
feature of their work. Despite their academic and professional training, a
strong sense of purpose in entering their profession, and a belief in their
potential as social workers, they felt that their input and expertise was
undervalued by the most powerful professionals within the criminal
justice system. Judges, as the ultimate status group within the criminal
justice field, are capable of conferring or withholding esteem, or symbolic
capital, on others within the system by valuing their work as being of high
quality or by dismissing its quality or relevance (Roach Anleu 1992). For
many of the social workers we observed, their routine work was influenced
by the desire for such esteem and by their fear of its absence. Whereas
the court-based social workers in Southpark, through physical proximity,
enjoyed such commendations through routine face-to-face interactions
in a small court, social workers in general did not obtain such reassurances.
For most of Southpark’s social workers and all of Westwood’s, although
the reading of reports by judges was a constant feature of their work, the
judges had no formal role in assessing individual reports. The experience of
writing into a vacuum, then, sustained many of these social workers in a
position of chronic uncertainty about their credibility and so perpetuated
their anxieties. The writing of reports was both an expression of status
anxiety and an act of status seeking. Correspondingly, the perception of
relative status inferiority was a discouraging condition of street-level work,

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and the restless pursuit of credibility was an attempt to cope with and
mitigate that fact.

B. MUST COPING MECHANISMS ACHIEVE THEIR AIM?

Nielson (2006) has recently refined our understanding of coping mechanisms

by suggesting that, in addition to street-level bureaucrats’ being compelled to
cope (stressed by Lipsky), they may also be “enticed” to cope. Her argument
is that coping is not always a flight from negative experiences; it may also
comprise the pursuit of rewarding experiences. Our analysis connects with
that of Nielson. Social workers’ pursuit of greater credibility and capital
within the criminal justice field was positively motivated behavior. However,
unlike Nielson’s analysis, the coping mechanism discussed here did not
amount to the actual attainment of a rewarding experience. But it was
certainly a response to a negative experience and a positive attempt to ame-
liorate it. It makes sense, we suggest, to frame this still as a coping mecha-
nism. Even within Lipsky’s analysis we can see that coping mechanisms do
not always solve the problems of street-level bureaucracy. Despite the force
of his description of coping mechanisms, Lipsky’s account is ultimately more
nuanced and recognizes contradictions and tensions within street-level
bureaucracy. For example, he notes that “professional norms of behaviour
towards clients provide a measure of resistance to bureaucratisation” (1980:
189). Lipsky does not seek to paint a black and white picture of bureaucracy.
The strength of his analysis is in portraying the tensions that arise in front-
line public service—the “dilemmas of the individual in public services”—and
in helping us understand how and why officials respond in particular ways.
On this basis, we can argue that specific coping mechanisms need not always
be entirely successful in eliminating the dilemmas of street-level work. For
example, does modifying one’s conception of the client and the job not also
contribute to some of the problems of alienation? A teacher who spends a
great deal of time with a minority of gifted students as a way of improving job
satisfaction (1980: 145) must surely at the same time recognize, on some level
at least, that he/she is unable to provide that service to all the children. The
essence of Lipsky’s analysis of coping mechanisms is that it helps us to
understand the practices and mentalities that bureaucrats adopt to permit
them to continue their work despite the tensions inherent in street-level work.
They need not always resolve those tensions. The point here is that in recog-
nizing such dilemmas and in understanding bureaucrats’ motivation to ame-
liorate their plight, notwithstanding various degrees of success, we can gain a
deeper understanding of the character of street-level bureaucracy and its
limitations. In the context of social work and social enquiry in Scotland,
recognizing the importance of relative professional status helps us under-
stand both the challenges faced by policymakers promoting greater use of
community-based punishments and the limited effectiveness of their efforts
(McNeill and Whyte 2007; Tata et al. 2008).9

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VI. CONCLUSION

Some scholars have questioned the extent of Lipsky’s continued relevance to

public administration within an era of new public management (Howe 1991;
Taylor and Kelly 2006) where performance targets might be thought to give
a clearer sense of organizational objectives and impose tighter restrictions on
front-line officials’ activities. Evans and Harris are correct, we would suggest,
in countering that the “death of discretion” in the wake of performance
targets is exaggerated (Evans and Harris 2004; Ellis 2007). In relation to
performance measurement Lipsky recognized the discretion inherent in
street-level bureaucrats’ ability to subvert attempts at controlling them
through targets and performance management (1980: 165–69). He also saw
that agencies may be subject to conflicting goals (ibid.: 164–65). In a complex
regulatory environment, which pulls public agencies in various directions,
street-level bureaucrats must exercise discretion about how to respond.
Accordingly, Lipsky’s insights into the relative autonomy of street-level
bureaucrats and the exercise of official discretion retain their contemporary
analytical purchase (Cowan and Hitchings 2007; Hupe and Hill 2007).
Attempts to build on and refine his thesis, then, may still enrich our under-
standing of the operations of the administrative and regulatory state (for
example, Nielson 2006; Hertogh forthcoming).
Our contribution in this article has been to highlight the significance of
interprofessional relations encountered in street-level work. The sociology of
the professions has long explored issues of interprofessional rivalry and
competition (for example, Larson 1977; Abbott 1988), relative prestige (e.g.,
MacDonald 1996; Roach Anleu 1992), and professional legitimacy (e.g.,
Cant and Sharma, 1995). However, interprofessional relations are underex-
plored, we suggest, in the study of street-level bureaucracy. Although Lipsky
focused on professionalism and was reasonably skeptical about its capacity
to counter the difficulties he described so well (1980: 201–04), our stress on
relative status in the interactions between professions adds something
distinctive to that skepticism.
Conceptualizing professional status as a concentration of various species
of “capital” in Bourdieuan terms (Dezalay and Garth 1996) and thinking of
professional domains as “fields” permits us to locate our ethnographic work
in a much wider analytical framework. It also allows us to suggest, induc-
tively, that relative status positions within interprofessional working will
have significance for street-level bureaucracy beyond the specificity of our
project. A sense of being undervalued and marginalized by other professions
may, somewhat paradoxically, provoke a response of deference and status-
seeking in relation to those same professionals. Of course, the status dynamic
may also run the other way. Engagement with other professionals of per-
ceived inferior rank may prove a rewarding experience and, in line with
Nielson’s broad thesis (Nielson 2006), may draw street-level bureaucrats
to those exchanges for positive reasons. The precise means of seeking or

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asserting status will vary by context. Our ethnographic data pointed squarely
to “sentencing realism” and the undermining of welfare narratives with
dissonant information as the dominant means by which the social workers
sought credibility. However, the scope and subtlety of Bourdieu’s theoretical
framework suggests that differentials in various forms of capital within fields
may be expressed and reproduced in many forms of social practice, often in
quite subtle ways. All of this invites a close reading of one’s ethnographic
data to reveal the ways in which professional status dynamics are played out.
Nevertheless, interprofessional working is a significant and overlooked
element in our overall understanding of street-level work. As such, it invites
much more social scientific enquiry.

simon halliday is a Professor at the Law School of Strathclyde University and a

Conjoint Professor at the School of Law, University of New South Wales. His
research concerns public administration and administrative justice. His publications
include Conducting Law and Society Research: Reflections on Methods and Prac-
tices (with Schmidt: CUP, 2009), Judicial Review and Compliance with Adminis-
trative Law (Hart Publishing, 2004), and The Appeal of Internal Review: Law,
Administrative Justice and the (Non-)Emergence of Disputes (with Cowan: Hart
Publishing, 2003).

nicola burns is an Honorary Research Fellow within Strathclyde Centre for Dis-
ability Research, University of Glasgow. She has worked on a range of research
projects within a variety of subject disciplines including geography, housing studies,
disability studies, sociology, and criminology. Her research interests include housing
issues facing disabled people, discourses of risk around disabled people, and qualitative
research methods.

neil hutton was educated at the University of Edinburgh (MA 1976, PhD 1983) and
has worked at the universities of Edinburgh, Dundee, and Victoria University, New
Zealand. He was appointed as a lecturer in the Law School at Strathclyde in 1990,
became a Professor in 2001, and was Dean of the Faculty of Law, Arts and Social
Sciences from 2005 to 2009. His main research interest is in the field of sentencing and
punishment. He is a founder and co-Director of the Centre for Sentencing Research at
the University of Strathclyde and a leading member of the team that developed the
Sentencing Information System for the High Court in Scotland.

fergus mcneill is Professor of Criminology & Social Work at the University of

Glasgow where he works in the Glasgow School of Social Work and in the Scottish
Centre for Crime and Justice Research. Most of his work explores the interfaces
between desistance from crime, punishment, and social work. His recent publications
include Reducing Reoffending: Social Work and Community Justice in Scotland
(with Bill Whyte, Willan Publishing, 2007) and Youth Offending and Youth Justice
(with Monica Barry, Jessica Kingsley Publishers).

cyrus tata is co-Director of the Centre for Sentencing Research and Senior Lecturer
in Law at the University of Strathclyde, Scotland (UK). His main research interests are
in sentencing, justice processes in the lower courts, defence work, publicly provided legal
assistance, and plea negotiation.

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NOTES

1. Contrary to Cowan and Hitchings (2007), we do not regard a sympathetic por-

trayal of the dilemmas of street-level bureaucracy as necessarily involving a “legiti-
mating” analysis (380). Indeed, Lipsky’s portrayal of street-level bureaucracy is
both sympathetic and critical. The final chapter of his book offers suggestions
about how to address the problems he outlined.
2. It is true that once an adult offender (aged twenty-one or over) has served a
custodial sentence, presentence reports are not legally required before any such
second or subsequent sentence. However, even in such cases, reports are often
requested since the law requires that custodial sentences should be imposed only
when the court determines that no other option is appropriate.
3. During the same period the courts requested 227,464 social enquiry reports.
4. The research was funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council
(ESRC Award Number RB000239939).
5. Further examples of cases containing such narratives of redemption are given in
Halliday et al. (2008) and Tata et al. (2008).
6. “Pub” is a colloquial term for “public house,” meaning a bar.
7. This case is discussed in greater length in Halliday et al. (2008).
8. Although not discussed at length in this article, Bourdieu’s employment of the
concept of “habitus” may also be instructive. Elsewhere, we have explored how a
social work habitus becomes discomfited when compelled to move in and adjust to
an alien field. See McNeill et al. (forthcoming).
9. See Tata et al. (2008) for this analysis from the perspective of judicial use of social
enquiry reports.

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