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The Scandinavian penal exceptionalism literature has focused largely on imprisonment but has yet to explore other aspects of the penal field in detail. This chapter provides an overview of the penal field in Norway and how community sanctions and measures have evolved within it. The author uses the work of Wacquant and Bourdieu to argue that there are three important levels within the Norwegian penal field: political, policy and practice. The author also discusses how drivers from the political and policy levels are affecting community-based penal practice. Using McNeill’s dimensions of mass supervision, the author discusses the implications of these changes for three less-explored aspects of punishment in Norway: the serving of short sentences at home on electronic monitoring, supervision of people under 18 and ‘punishment debt’ enforcement.

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’.

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.