Eric H. Monkkonen
This is a challenging book, which demands serious engagement by the reader. The author uses the occasion of his research on the California parole system to engage a broad treatment of parole, social control, and the nature of twentieth century state bureaucracy. His topic as well as his methodological and theoretical orientation all come under self scrutiny, so the book is also an exploration in current social research thought. Simon begins with the historical background to contemporary parole, from its beginnings in the 1880s to what he identifies as the transitional crisis of the 1970s. He locates his account in most of the current prison and crime history scholarship. To simplify: by the end of the nineteenth century, some forms of punishment and control were adopted to create alternatives to the penitentiary system's either/or punishment. These included probation, parole, and forms of juvenile justice. He notes that prior to parole, governors were quite busy pardoning sentenced offenders and that in part parole relieved this time consuming task (the amount and meaning of pardons seems to be unresearched). The idea of parole was that released offenders should be controlled and reintegrated into the community. This meant, at first, family and work and later evolved to include therapy. He also notes the problematic nature of the concept of community, then and now, but, like most of us, is ultimately trapped into using the term, even though he is clearly aware that it may have been and may now be a rather empty concept. Although he has little data, he seems to accept the notion that parole worked, at least in the sense that ex-offenders could be forced to take up jobs on leaving prison. In the second half of this century, parole changed. It changed for internal and external reasons. Internally, evidence began to mount that parole didn't work very well as simultaneously parole became more and more politically desirable (it is cheaper than prison). Externally, the disappearance of the mass labor market for unskilled workers eliminated the parole officer's main "community" contact, someone to hire a released offender. These internal and external circumstance created a tension which undergirds the current uneasy solution, at least in California: now, staying off drugs is the sign of a prisoner's successful parole and reintegration. Since drug consumption can be easily and objectively monitored, the result is that "[Drug] testing fills many of the functions that work and therapy did in earlier parole configurations" (189). Thus stated, Simon's book would have fulfilled its promise. His use of a wide range of sources, his probing of textual evidence for the adoption of a therapeutic model in California in the fifties and sixties, and his quantitative documentation of the current Page 155 follows: failure of most parole efforts are all genuine additions to the literature. But Simon has a second, higher aim. This is to assert that his study is really about the nature of bureaucracies, in particular their need to provide coherent self justifications ("accounts" or "narratives") or to fail. Early on he makes this clear: "One of the primary tasks of an institution that exercises the power to punish is to provide a plausible account for what it does...." (9). Or, later, "Parole supervision depends on the plausibility of the account it provides of how men who have proved themselves to be criminally dangerous can be safely controlled in the community" (205). He uses the word "account" or "narrative" interchangeably. His study is a different kind of history, he says, a "genealogy" (10), a reconstruction of "the narratives through which the power to punish in parole was exercised" (13). He has not convinced me that this institutional compulsion to provide accounts exists, nor do I see the narratives as some sort of power system in and of themselves. It often seems, instead, that the parole personnel and factotums of the bureaucracy themselves probably were quite aware of how their activities failed to yield the promised outcomes. It is hard to imagine that all or even a few people who labor in the corrections machinery care to provide plausible narratives, in the sense that such narratives claim that offenders are transformed. Moreover, it is hard to imagine that there is some sort of pressure or need for such bureaucracies to be concerned with self justification: if anything, it seems more the opposite, society turns towards imprisonment without any interrogation of its effectiveness. Even though Simon repeatedly asserts versions of this argument -- the bureaucratic need to have a coherent self narrative -- he fails to convince me that this is relevant to the understanding of contemporary parole. But, as a heuristic device, it has given him a terrific mechanism to examine parole, to look for behavioral outcomes and to mine the official descriptions and handbooks of the system. One can argue with his genealogy of narrative and still appreciate this book as a sophisticated and energetic analysis of modern parole. In addition, along the way Simon provides many wonderful insights into contemporary criminal justice. For example, he speculates that the penal system "has become the predominant government of the poor" (252). This is a fascinating insight, one worthy of a whole study in itself. On the same page he wonders if the nature of surveillance has not changed too, with a records keeping world of the middle class and a virtual penal colony for the poor, who, he argues, leave much less of an electronic trail. Such provocative observations make this a challenging and important book.
