Justice realigned: How front-line community correctional work has changed under California's realignment

• In Event: Implications of Statewide Policies for Correctional Populations

Abstract

As Garland (2001) observes, the administration of criminal justice is no longer primarily a moral matter. Rather, it is an increasingly economic concern. Nowhere is this reality more apparent than in California. Through the Public Safety Realignment Act of 2011 (commonly referred to as "A.B. 109"), thousands of California state prisoners convicted of low-level offenses have been shifted from state to county custody. Many crime-processed individuals no longer see a prison cell, instead serving out their sentences either in jail or in a growing nexus of community correctional programs. Critical social scientists (Miller & Rose, 2008) have conceptualized the boom of the community corrections industry as an example of “government as a distance.” Using Dorothy Smith's Institutional Ethnography as my methodological and theoretical foundation, I examine this trend in the lives of crime-processed women and the front-line institutional agents with whom they interact. I consider the ways in which realignment, on one hand, signifies a dismantling of Garland’s “culture of control” out of economic necessity, while simultaneously contributing to the expansion of punishments which are hidden or rendered invisible altogether.

Author

• Megan Welsh, CUNY Graduate Center / John Jay College of Criminal Justice