Abstract
In the concluding chapter of Rita Shah’s book, The Meaning of Rehabilitation and Its Impact on Parole: There and Back Again in California, the author quotes the following statement from a 2009 presentation for Parole Officers’ week in California, entitled “The Rehabilitation Pinball”: “Over the past 100 years parole has bounced back and forth from enforcement to Rehab, many times just dusting it off and re-using the same old model” (p. 145). This characterization echoes two ostensibly contradictory trends in penal historiography that run throughout the book. On one level, the history of California parole appears to emblematize the “pinball” or “pendulum” model of penal change, rhythmically oscillating between punishment and rehabilitation. On another level, continuity rather than change emerges as a foundational feature of parole.
In many ways, Shah’s book is a historical inquiry of parole in California that “studies its creation and evolution throughout the centuries” (p. 10). As such, it joins a substantial body of work on the topic (e.g. Lynch, 1998; Messinger et al., 1985; Simon, 1993) and engages contemporary conversations on penal historiography (e.g. Goodman et al., 2017; Hutchinson, 2006; Robinson, 2008). This historical inquiry, however, is not strictly concerned with the past for its own sake. Rather, it is decidedly rooted in the present moment of crisis wherein bipartisan circles are (again) proclaiming rehabilitation as a promising paradigm for penal reform. Employing a Foucauldian genealogy, Shah notes that “[u]nderstanding modern conceptualizations of rehabilitation requires an understanding of prior contexts in which rehabilitation played a key role and the contexts in which rehabilitation fell from favor” (p. 149). History, then, becomes a platform for investigating the meaning of rehabilitation and examining what potential it holds, if any, to affect positive change in penal institutions.
Shah’s inquiry proceeds along three registers which may be tentatively dubbed the conceptual, the political, and the organizational. The first provides the theoretical underpinnings for the analysis by introducing four ideal-typical models of rehabilitation. Against this conceptual terrain, Shah situates the empirical inquiry that forms the core of her analysis. Using the historical case study of parole in California, Shah interrogates both shifts and continuities within the political (predominantly legislative) definition and organizational (correctional) understandings of rehabilitation since the late 19th century and until the contemporary moment.
Drawing primarily on legislative files, the analysis is organized around six laws that highlight key moments in the history of rehabilitation in California corrections and prefigure the book’s division into five chronological chapters. After summarizing the creation of parole in California and the growth of its bureaucracy until the late 1930s in chapter 1, chapters 2 to 5 are organized around three supposedly distinct periods. Each chapter begins by analyzing the key legislative statutes that signal a break from the past and ends by analyzing the meaning of rehabilitation as expressed in those changes and parole-related policy documents that followed them. Chapter 2 considers the rise of the rehabilitative ideal and the medical model between the 1940s and mid-1970s. Chapter 3 explores parole in California during “the fall of rehabilitation,” the rise of risk logic and an expansion in surveillance. During this period, two bills led to dramatic shifts in how prison and parole systems operated in California. While the bills did not eliminate the rehabilitative ideal, they installed “an official discourse that no longer supported [it]”. The last two chapters extend the temporal scope of previous work on the topic by addressing contemporary developments in California parole characterized by a legitimacy crisis and a turn away from a “tough on crime” and toward a “smart on crime” discourse (p. 77). Chapter 4 considers the re-emergence of rehabilitation between 2000 and 2005, while chapter 5 brings the analysis to the present by focusing on recent polices, including the 2009 corrections bill and the 2011 Public Safety Realignment—both viewed as attempts to address California’s prison overcrowding and bring the state in line with court-ordered mandates. The analysis in chapter 5 is complemented by 11 interviews Shah conducted with active and retired parole officers to gain a better understanding of the impact of legislative changes on contemporary practices.
This period-based organization, however, may obfuscate some of the book’s most significant observations. Thus, whereas the book’s subtitle and its table of contents reflect the canonical periodization of U.S. penality in general and of parole in California in particular—from “The Rise of the Rehabilitative Ideal” to “The Fall of Rehabilitation” to the “Re-Emergence of Rehabilitation”—much of the substantive analysis joins contemporary work in unsettling the assumptions that make this periodization possible in the first place. This recurring contradiction between change and continuity, which Shah compellingly animates throughout the book, seems to constitute the generative tension that propels the analysis forward.
Thus, resonating with organizational studies’ emphasis on the “loose coupling” of formal structure and actual practice, Shah finds that while the political meaning of rehabilitation shifted from one period to the next this “did not appear to change day-to-day policies and practices” (p. 142). In the context at hand, this implies that the conceptual distinction between punishment and rehabilitation has always been more productive as a political rhetoric than a practical matter. As for the latter, Shah finds that the tools of supervision and surveillance were foundational to parole from its inception and that during the heyday of the clinical model rehabilitation served, at least in part, “to disguise the punishing aspects of the parole system” (p. 33). By the same token, Shah’s findings regarding the following period (“The Fall of Rehabilitation”) align with previous work in demonstrating that the 1970s turn toward punitiveness was largely a way to “reframe” rehabilitative practices that survived well into this period. In other words, Shah suggests that whatever rehabilitation “actually” meant, it did not disappear but was rather refashioned and repurposed as a tool of supervision, surveillance, and risk management. In this way, punitive and rehabilitative practices did not so much displace one another over the past century but have rather been reframed and adjusted through different perspectives.
In the concluding chapter, Shah returns to a more conceptual and normative lens through which she considers her study’s implications. One avenue Shah entertains is to bring the correctional apparatus in line with legislative definitions of rehabilitation that rather consistently encompass not only the narrow goal of eliminating criminal behavior, but also that of undoing the collateral consequences of a conviction (e.g. eliminating stigma, returning legal rights, and restricting digital records). Whereas this avenue echoes the optimistic attitude often expressed in “gap studies” of the law and society tradition, Shah is quick to raise demonstrable skepticism concerning the capacity of penal reform to achieve positive change. Her historical inquiry suggests that if our commitment to rehabilitation is more than perfunctory or disingenuous, we may need to rethink the correctional system as a whole. As she notes, “[a] key question that must be grappled with is whether the correctional system is the appropriate site for offender rehabilitation. If the answer is no, then academics, practitioners, and legislators should focus on possible alternatives” (p. 136). In light of this, the book might have benefitted from a richer consideration of Shah’s findings in relation to bodies of literature that have long subjected to critical scrutiny correctional reforms that employ progressive, melioristic, or harm-reduction logic (e.g. Cohen, 1985; Murakawa, 2014; Platt, 1969). In this sense, Shah’s study could be read as a timely invitation to explore the surprising and fruitful nexus between organizational studies of penal institutions and critical work on penality and law such as radical criminology, penal abolitionism, and critical race theory.