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Waste Managers? The New Penology, Crime Fighting, and Parole Agent Identity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Mona Lynch
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Abstract

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This ethnographic research, conducted in a parole field office in central California, looks at how Feeley and Simon's (1992) “new penology” paradigm plays out at the level of implementation, given competing pressures on agents to be tough on crime as well as successful danger “risk managers.” Findings suggest that agents embrace a traditional law enforcement role for themselves that primarily takes an individualistic approach to the clientele and an intuitive approach to their management, rather than taking on the new penological role of actuarial risk managers defined by upper management. The agents were influenced by the popular discourse on crime in defining their priorities and actively subverted directives management issued to reorder those priorities. As Simon (1993) foreshadowed in his work on parole, the agents in this setting did not appear poised to become mere human “waste managers.”

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 32 , Issue 4 , 1998 , pp. 839 - 870
Copyright
Copyright © 1998 by The Law and Society Association

Footnotes

I wish to thank Gray Cavender, Gregory Coben, David Greenberg, Craig Haney, John Hepburn, and the anonymous Law & Society Review reviewers for their thoughtful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts. I am also grateful to the parole agents and parolees who were so generous in allowing me access to their lives. I am especially indebted to Craig Haney for providing me with the training, guidance, and inspiration to carry out this research.

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