How do social control institutions contribute to the very problems they seek to manage?
Prison and parole populations in the United States have grown dramatically in the last three decades—just at the moment many predicted they would stabilize or actually decline. My work focuses specifically on the role that parole systems play in the era of “Mass Incarceration.” Returns from parole have contributed to escalating prison populations nation-wide, but especially in the largest prison and parole system in the country, California. I examine how the organization of community supervision—legally and bureaucratically—contributes to the extraordinarily high rate of parolees returning to prison in California. This work challenges conventional wisdom that individual attributes like criminal history, personal, and psychological characteristics are sufficient to understanding why some parolees wind up back behind bars. How do local communities receive and remake law created at the “higher” levels of the legal system? A fundamental problem of governing by the “rule of law” is that so
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