American parole boards have played a critical role in the formulation and administration of states’ prison policies in recent decades—and could play an equally important part in helping end mass incarceration. Long neglected by academic, research, and policy communities, systems of discretionary prison release are in need of improvement, if not “reinvention.” A plan for revitalization of parole release should lay out a comprehensive and aspirational model for the future. It must address the institutional structure of parole boards, how much release discretion they are given, the substantive grounds for release decisions, the use of risk assessments in the decisional process, decision-making tools such as parole release guidelines, the requirements of fair and reliable procedures, victims’ rights at parole hearings, the need for parole supervision in some but not all cases, the intensity of parole conditions, and the length of parole supervision.

The Future of Parole Release

As public sector work environments continue to embrace the digital governance revolution, questions of work surveillance practices and its relationship to performance management continue to evolve, but even more dramatically in the contemporary period of many public servants being forced to shift to remote work from home in response to the COVID‐19 pandemic This article presents the results of three surveys, two of them population‐based survey experiments, all conducted during the onset of the COVID‐19 pandemic in Canada that compare public servant (n = 346) and citizen (n = 1,008 phone;n = 2,001 web) attitudes to various cutting‐edge—though no doubt controversial among some—digital surveillance tools that can be used in the public sector to monitor employee work patterns, often targeted toward remote working conditions The findings represent data that can help governments and public service associations navigate difficult questions of reasonable privacy intrusions in an increasing digitally connected workforce Evidence for PracticeNew work surveillance technologies are available to use within the public sector and will present acceptability challenges to public managers as they contemplate the introduction of these technologies Multimodal survey data from Canada reveals that public servants and citizens find these emerging work surveillance technologies to be quite intrusive and unreasonable but show relatively more tolerance for digital surveillance over physical surveillance practices Understanding surveillance anxieties among targeted employees will be key to finding a balance between employee privacy rights and employer desires to manage employees in a remote or digital environment

An Empirical Assessment of the Intrusiveness and Reasonableness of Emerging Work Surveillance Technologies in the Public Sector

In this dissertation, I examine the challenges and contradictions as well as the expectations and aspirations involved in the provision of healthcare to inmates in a maximum-security prison in Pennsylvania. In 1976, the Supreme Court granted inmates a constitutional right to healthcare based on the notion that a failure to do so would constitute “cruel and unusual punishment.” Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork from 2014-2016 in the prison’s medical unit with inmates, healthcare providers, and correctional staff, I demonstrate how the legal infrastructure built around this right to healthcare operates in practice and the myriad effects it has for those in state custody. Through traversing the scales of legal doctrine, privatized managed care, and collective historical memory, bringing these structural components to life in personal narratives and clinical interactions, I advance the notion that the physical space of the prison’s medical unit is a “ward of the state” – a space of care where the state itself is “made” through interactions among individuals who relay and enact the legal regulations on inmate healthcare. I also argue that incarcerated men themselves are cast as “wards of the state” – the biological and financial property of the state placed in its custody. As such, the state has an obligation to care for inmates as quasi-citizens who are granted a right to healthcare in the setting of rights deprivation as punishment. Even though this right primarily exists as a mandate not to inflict too much harm, it also creates the conditions for which inmates come to rely on the state for life-saving and life-sustaining services, perpetuating historical forms of racial subjugation through care and containment in the process. Finally, I outline the paths inmates make for themselves to find meaning amidst the multitude of losses they experience and to seek belonging amidst disenfranchisement. While the forms of legal, personal, and political recognition that are available to inmates are few, the structural features of an institutionalized right to healthcare open up spaces for them to envision futures and to make both personal and structural appeals to justice with both tragic and hopeful consequences. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Anthropology First Advisor Philippe Bourgois

https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4136&context=edissertations

Wards of the State: Care and Custody in a Pennsylvania Prison

Summary:The United States' high incarceration rate gets a lot of attention from scholars, policy makers, and the public. Yet, writes Michelle Phelps, the most common form of criminal justice supervision is not imprisonment but probation—and thats just as true for juveniles as for adults.Probation was originally promoted as an alternative to imprisonment that would spare promising individuals from the ravages of institutionalization, Phelps writes. But instead, it often serves as a net-widener, expanding formal supervision to low-level cases. Like mass incarceration, she demonstrates, mass probation is marked by deep racial and class disparities, and it can have devastating consequences for poor and minority communities.In her review, Phelps covers three aspects of probation supervision—who is sentenced to probation, what they experience, and when and why probation is revoked (that is, when probationers are sent to jail or prison for violating the terms of supervision). She then presents policy recommendations for each of these three stages that could reduce the harms of mass probation. They include scaling back the use of probation, offering probationers more meaningful help to improve their lives, and raising the bar for revoking probation. Though probation reform may not be a cure-all, she writes, it could reduce the scale of our criminal justice system and temper its detrimental effects.

/pdf/ending-mass-probation-sentencing-supervision-and-revocation-20kmi7pdqg.pdf

Ending Mass Probation: Sentencing, Supervision, and Revocation

............................................................................................2 Lay Summary.......................................................................................4 Declaration..........................................................................................5 Acknowledgements................................................................................6

Carceral territory : experiences of electronic monitoring practices in Scotland

This paper examines pretrial judicial decision making, specifically the decision to impose bail. At the bail hearing, judges must decide whether defendants should be detained, released on their own recognizance, or granted bail. In California, judges make this decision largely by relying on County Bail Schedules, which are similar to sentencing guidelines and prioritize the seriousness of the charged offense when determining bail. Being detained pretrial, either due to the denial of bail or the inability to afford the bail that was set has negative implications, including the fact that defendants who are denied bail are more likely to plead guilty, and upon conviction are more likely to be sentenced to incarceration. They also face longer sentences than defendants who are released pending trial. Despite the significant impact of the bail decision, there is limited research on the decision, including on the factors judges consider in making the bail decision and how judges make the decision. This paper presents the results of a qualitative study of bail hearings in two California counties. Relying on court observations and interviews, it finds that bail schedules are the most important factor considered by judges and that bail is usually set without regard to the ability of the defendant to pay.

Pretrial Detention and the Decision to Impose Bail in Southern California

Decades of research on the impact of pretrial detention demonstrates that pretrial detention has consistent negative impacts on case outcomes. In particular, in the federal system, detained defendants are more likely to be sentenced to prison, and to receive longer sentences than comparable defendants released pending trial. Despite these negative impacts and despite an effective system of pretrial supervision, rates of pretrial detention in the federal system remain high, which impacts the overall federal prison population. This article explores the important role played by pretrial supervision in reducing prison populations by examining its impact on federal sentencing. Specifically, the article presents new research from the Central District of California, examining the mitigating role played by performance on pretrial supervision at sentencing. It concludes by highlighting the importance of judicial and legislative efforts to reduce federal pretrial detention rates.

Christine S. Scott-Hayward

Papers

Pretrial Detention and the Decision to Impose Bail in Southern California

Reducing the Federal Prison Population