The Politics, Promise, and Peril of Criminal Justice Reform in the Context of Mass Incarceration

There is significant disagreement about what is needed to bring about meaningful penal reform and how these changes might be achieved. For critics of expanded carceral state power, measures that modestly reduce incarcerated populations by, for example, expanding probation and parole are inadequate as well as risky (see Cullen et al. 2016). For example, Kleiman’s (2013) call for enhanced criminal justice supervision supplemented by swift and certain sanctions for technical violations as a means of reducing incarceration would likely strike most critics of the carceral state as a Pyrrhic victory, one with the potential to lead to net-widening and the enhancement rather than diminution of carceral state power (e.g., Clear & Frost 2013).