I Come before You a Changed Man: “Insight,” Compliance, and Refurbishing Penal Practice in California

Abstract

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.