Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• CORBETT, RONALD P.

Titel

Probation and Mass Incarceration: The Ironies of Correctional Practice

Ist Teil von

• Federal sentencing reporter, 2016-04, Vol.28 (4), p.278-282

Ort / Verlag

New York: University of California Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2016

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Professor Gary T. Marx has been a strong influence on generations of sociologists and criminal justice practitioners, who have absorbed his teaching about the impact social science can have on social progress. Marx particularly encouraged his students to examine the underside of society, where noble aims become corrupted through blindness to the double-edged nature of all reforms and where progressive practice could be undone by the unforeseen and unplanned perversity of social engineering. Ever the progressive, Marx counseled a pragmatic approach, where efforts to do good were carefully studied and monitored for the dynamics that can throw even the best concepts awry, threatening the potential for doing good as ideas struggle to survive contact with reality. Marx encouraged his acolytes to go forward in their work unencumbered by the kind of naivete that can afflict the well intentioned. But always go forward. The Marxian perspective examines the way in which a classically derived progressive practice--sentencing offenders to a community sanction, that is, probation, in lieu of incarceration--came to present its own peril to those who eagerly accepted an apparently benign option and, in doing so, incredibly to many, became victims of the modern scourge referred to widely as "mass incarceration." Here, Corbett examines the sinister side of probation, where a humane alternative to the toxic effect of imprisonment becomes a kind of Trojan horse for too many probationers, where the promise of redemption is subverted by a lurking punitiveness.