Scholars have theorized “criminalized masculinity” as performances of criminalized men. We refigure the concept to identify narratives that facilitate and legitimize control of criminalized populations. Drawing on 109 California parole hearings, we show how parole commissioners use logics of deserving and dangerous masculinity to assert a boundary between men deemed ready for social reintegration and men relegated to captivity. Commissioners articulate criminalized masculinity along three dimensions: relationship to self; relationship to male peers; and relationship to subordinate others like women and children. These gender logics are materially significant because they justify parole grants and denials. Symbolically, narratives of masculinity legitimize the prison’s work of racialized social exclusion and obscure structural dynamics of punishment under accounts of individual difference.

In 2008 the California Supreme Court forced the state’s parole board to change how it justifies the decision to keep a person in prison. This article combines computational and interpretive analysis of 9,842 hearing transcripts to show how, to achieve compliance with the court, parole board commissioners refurbished an old rehabilitative way of talking about incarceration found in a set of secondary hearing procedures and placed it at the center of decisions. The article considers the consequences of this shift for inequality in incarceration in California. More broadly, it makes the case for focusing on the relationship between administrators and those who can directly intervene in their practices in the name of compliance to understand bureaucratic penal change.

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