This chapter focuses on American exceptionalism in parole release and supervision. It first establishes a clear understanding of what is meant by granting parole and parole supervision in the United States and Europe within the respective sentencing schemes and then gives a comparative statistical picture. The chapter then considers the history of parole on both sides of the Atlantic, before examining and comparing current policies in the United States and Europe in more detail. The principal finding is that European parole, unlike its American counterparts, is dominated by a discourse that stresses and highlights human dignity and procedural justice rather than public safety. In the American discourse, by contrast, there is less emphasis on the rights of parolees. Parole decision-making and supervision are mainly shaped by risk aversion. To conclude, this chapter reflects on whether European ideals for parole may take root in the United States.
The privatization of punishment is a well-established phenomenon in modern criminal justice operations. Less understood are the market and technological forces that have dramatically reshaped the creation and sharing of criminal record data in recent years. Analysing trends in both the United States and Europe, we argue that this massive shift is cause to reconceptualize theories of penal entrepreneurialism to more directly address the role of technology and commercial interests. Criminal records, or proxies for them, are now actively produced and managed by third parties via corporate decision-making processes, rather than government dictating boundaries or outsourcing duties to private actors. This has led to what we term ‘disordered punishment’, imposed unevenly and inconsistently across multiple platforms, increasingly difficult for both government and individuals to control.
Over the past several decades, American penal exceptionalism—the tendency for U.S. penal policies and practices to proudly diverge from those of other Western countries—has severely limited the development of comparative criminal justice research from a U.S. perspective. However, in recent years, a growing consensus that America’s criminal justice policies and practices are too expensive, ineffective, excessively punitive, and often inhumane has laid the ground for a new phase of soul-searching. This article argues for an explicit rediscovering of comparative criminal justice policy in America, which would prove extremely helpful in providing bold yet practicable solutions in the current commendable but unimaginative era of criminal justice reform. We first contend that American exceptionalism is not as embedded in U.S. penal policy and culture as the past few decades might seem to suggest. Second, we discuss the main causes of the gradual demise of the comparative criminal justice enterprise in America. Finally, we discuss two areas of U.S. criminal justice reform suggesting mechanisms of comparative criminal justice policy that should be nurtured: (1) new prison reform initiatives pointing to renewed openness to comparative insights and (2) the growing chorus calling for prosecutorial reform, showing how many of the reform ideas proffered tap into characteristics found in continental systems.
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