Parole Discourses: Constituting Subjects, Unleashing Effects, and Locating Risk

• In Event: Dangerous Subjects, Actuarial Knowledges, and Revisiting the ‘New Penology’: Critical Carceral Studies

Abstract

This paper examines the contemporary paroled subject and the risk that this subject is presumed to represent. In so doing, I highlight the ways in which language, classifications and evaluations within parole shape the reality that they ostensibly report on. I first document how the paroled subject is automatically imagined, and thereby interpellated by the state, as an always-already dangerous subject, a subject presumed to represent elevated criminal risk. This constitution provides the regime of parole with its target and operational mission: to supervise, regulate and govern the conduct and personhood of these risky subjects. I then turn to the ways in which this subject position is rearticulated by subsequent evaluations (which can be actuarial or more individualized and intuitive). In particular, I highlight how evaluations and classifications provide specific contours and content to the always risky paroled subject, mark some individuals as especially dangerous, and influence how parole personnel perceive clients and search for risk in the community. In so doing, this paper highlights ways in which understandings of paroled subjects interact with managerialism and actuarialism and, in the process, shape penal interventions.

Author

• Robert J. Werth, Rice University