%0 Journal Article
%T Conceptualizing the Personal Touch: Experiential Knowledge and Gendered Strategies in Community Supervision Work
%A Megan Welsh
%J Journal of Contemporary Ethnography
%@ 1552-5414
%D 2019
%R 10.1177/0891241618777304
%X Tasked with a fractured institutional mandate of ensuring public safety while facilitating the rehabilitation of their criminalized clients, community supervision workers exercise a considerable amount of discretion in how to achieve these goals. Yet much remains unknown about these workers¡¯ strategies for doing so, which are informed by experiential knowledge and social identities¡ªwhat I call the ¡°personal touch.¡± Drawing on in-depth interviews conducted with California state parole agents and county probation officers as part of a larger ethnographic inquiry of prisoner reentry, I apply a feminist lens to analyze how workers leverage personal aspects of themselves that they value to manage the impossibilities of their work. My findings show how workers employ a personal touch to connect with clients in meaningful ways, but also how these approaches are built on normative assumptions about gender
%K parole and probation
%K gender
%K discretion
%K working alliance
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0891241618777304