Although parole and the processes of prisoner reentry have received considerable attention, how individuals on parole respond to the State's efforts to regulate their conduct and govern their personhood remains under theorized. Drawing from ethnographic research with individuals on parole, this article examines how parolees navigate the social control inherent in this penal practice. Parole entails both productive and repressive power; responsibilizing and de-responsibilizing elements. The parole agency's efforts to govern up-close-through supervision and regulation of everyday conduct-are frequently met with subversion, resistance, and hostility, while efforts to govern-at-a-distance are more productive. In general paroled subjects reproduce the injunction to transform their lives, becoming committed to 'going straight', ethical reformation, and responsible citizenship. This 'reformed subjectivity' guides how individuals enact parole, but does not reflect subjection or their full acquiescence to penal power. Rather, by engaging selectively with the rules, they render their conditions of parole malleable. These individuals on parole are committed to going straight but doing so, as much as possible, on their own terms. In this way, the reformed subjectivities they display both reflect and resist penal power.

This article examines how the diverse goals (promoting public safety, rehabilitation, and reentry) of the California parole agency function collectively, focusing on how field agents and supervisors make sense of and instantiate the agency’s mission. While these goals display fracture and can compete, the parole system displays an incorporative capacity as field personnel integrate these elements together into what they see as a coherent project. I argue that this fusion is both made possible and structured by a ‘punitive ideology’ common among field personnel that is undergirded by the construction of paroled subjects as always precarious and as responsible for their own reformation. Following this, parole personnel privilege a ‘tough love’ approach that emphasizes surveillance, sanctioning perceived misconduct, and utilizing (or threatening to utilize) reimprisonment. Yet, rather than entailing the abandonment or delegitimation of the goal of offender assistance, this approach keeps rehabilitation – as a potentiality – present through folding it within a web of punitive regulation. While this undercuts rehabilitation and reshapes it as a mechanism for surveillance and sanctioning, parole personnel view this approach as the most effective way to promote self-betterment and steward individuals towards ‘parole success’.

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In recent decades, risk prediction has proliferated in the penal realm. Risk instruments currently guide an array of correctional decisions—such as participation in diversion programs, the provision of correctional services, and probation and parole supervision levels—and are being increasingly utilized or considered in pretrial detention and criminal sentencing. This article reviews empirical and theoretical accounts of the proliferation and effects of risk in the penal realm and also reflects on ongoing debates about the promises and perils of risk. Risk techniques have impacted the practices, discourses, and logics of punishment. Yet they have not triggered the abandonment of rehabilitative approaches (or retributive ones), nor have they replaced human judgment with a rationalized utopia or iron cage. This article also offers several interventions that complicate and further our understandings of risk. First, it highlights the complex entanglements between, on the one hand, actuarial and algorithmic risk instruments and, on the other, subjective, moral, and affective methods of evaluation. Second, it calls for increased attention to the performative effects of risk technologies: to the ways in which assessments not only report on but also create and alter the social world. The article concludes by reflecting on emerging topics and directions for future research.

This article explores the ways in which practices of risk assessment exert material and semiotic effects that structure how penal subjects are constituted, imagined, and governed. In so doing, it proposes conceptual shifts in how we understand risk logics and practices. It contends that techniques of assessment and classification within parole operate performatively; that is, they do not so much describe reality as they constitute, structure and alter what they appear to report on. While this occurs through shaping the beliefs of penal actors – that is, through ideological mechanisms – this article focuses on the ways in which assessments exert institutional, bureaucratic and automatic effects independent of beliefs. I argue that, through exerting these effects, assessments make the risk of paroled subjects an institutional and practical certainty. While the dangerousness of individuals on parole is historically and ideologically contingent, contemporary practices of risk operate in a way that precludes the possibility of a non-dangerous individual.