True believers, rational actors, and bad actors: Placing The Prison and the Factory in penal-historiographic context

Early 21st century penal reform: A comparative analysis of four states' responses to the problems of mass incarceration

“…Although penal administrators in continental Europe are civil servants and therefore more protected from political vicissitudes (Savelsberg, 1994), US penal administrators are also central actors in penal change (Rubin, 2020). Up through the mid‐20th century, prison administrators had broad autonomy to organize prisons, probation, and parole as they saw fit (Perkinson, 2010; Rothman, 2017; Rubin, 2021).…”

What were “They” Thinking, and Does it Matter? Structural Inequality and Individual Intent in Criminal Justice Reform

“…Each of these assertions can be the topic of lively academic debate, focusing not only on factual evidence but on its interpretation. As Ashley Rubin (2019) points out, ascribing bad or good intentions to criminal justice reformers and institutional actors often fails to “understand the actors on their own terms” (6), which requires acknowledging that multiple motives can exist at the same time. Referring to Progressive Era prison administrators, Rubin remarks: In practice, penal reformers of various kinds who inserted themselves in prison administration, as well as formally appointed prison administrators, frequently faced competing motivations—their own frequently humanitarian concerns, pragmatic concerns of ensuring the prison worked (i.e., did not kill its occupants and did not get shut down due to costs), and various ideological concerns related to their status as (usually) white men expecting to continue to stay atop the social, economic, and political hierarchy.…”

“…The best representations of this trend, argued Cohen, were Marxist criminologists like Gregg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer (1939), for whom the structure of punishment was merely a response to the labor needs of the market; Dario Melossi and Massimo Pavarini’s The Prison and the Factory (1978), whose analysis treads similar ground but focuses on the carceral trend; or post-structuralist thinkers like Michel Foucault (1979), for whom modernization set the stage for a new era of gazing, measuring, and normalizing people as governable subjects. These and other works, when seen against the backdrop of their less critical contemporaries, were deemed revolutionary then, but in the context of today’s literature might appear almost tame (Rubin 2019). This paradigm is a much more cynical view than the one espoused by the “Good Intentions - Disastrous Consequences” model: the deplorable outcome in terms of social control is not an unexpected byproduct of misguided implementation, but rather the perfect realization of the nefarious intent underlying the system: a mechanism that allows inequality to crystallize, prevail, and worsen.…”