Background

The historical changes in Scottish criminal justice social work (CJSW) have been well documented (for example McNeill, 2004; McNeill and Whyte, 2007), but require some attention in this chapter as they are important for understanding possible ‘disjuncture’ and for contextualising the respondents’ comments from the research study explored later in the chapter. The Social Work (Scotland) Act 1968 was responsible for the reorganisation of social work in Scotland, including the incorporation of work with offenders within generic social work, and Section 12 of the Act puts a duty on social work departments to promote welfare for all service users. Furthermore, the International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW) states that:

Therefore, social work should be concerned with helping people with their welfare needs and with understanding and promoting social justice (see Chapter Sixteen for further details about social work values). Social work departments in Scotland operationalise these values via the Scottish Social Services Council (SSSC), the regulatory body for social services in Scotland, and its Codes of Practice, which state that social workers must ‘protect the rights and promote the interests of service users and carers’ (SSSC, 2009, p 22). Because work with offenders is part of mainstream social work in Scotland, it is based on the same values and should be concerned with the same things. This chapter, therefore, takes a utilitarian approach to the exploration of ethical tensions in CJSW, because a utilitarian theoretical framework is very congruent with the above welfare-based, social work approach to work with offenders. The chapter uses a vignette to illustrate the disjuncture that a social worker might experience. The chapter is part of Part Two and focuses on the dynamics of personal and professional ethics (see Figure 1.1). It also refers to some of the interprofessional perceptions and tensions to provide a context for the dilemmas faced by the social work profession and the social worker who might have to work in a manner not congruent with their personal beliefs.