Poor Discipline

This book reveals how modern strategies of punishment - and, by all accounts, their failure - relate to political and economic transformations in society at large. Jonathan Simon uses the practice of parole in California as a window to the changing historical understanding of what a corrections system does and how it works. When parole first emerged as a corrections strategy in the 19th century, work was supposed to keep ex-prisoners out of trouble. What followed was a rehabilitative strategy, where the clinical expertise of the parole agent replaced the discipline of the industrial labour market in controlling criminal deviance. Today, Simon argues, as the economy has virtually locked out an entire class, rehabilitation has given way to mere management. The result is an escalating cycle of imprisonment, destabilization, and insecurity. No improvement in the current penal crisis can be expected until we better understand the relationship between punishment and social order, which this book explores in theoretical, historical, and practical detail.