Waste Managers? The New Penology, Crime Fighting, and Parole Agent Identity

Abstract

This ethnographic research, conducted in a parole field office in central California, looks at how Feeley and Simon's (1992) “new penology” paradigm plays out at the level of implementation, given competing pressures on agents to be tough on crime as well as successful danger “risk managers.” Findings suggest that agents embrace a traditional law enforcement role for themselves that primarily takes an individualistic approach to the clientele and an intuitive approach to their management, rather than taking on the new penological role of actuarial risk managers defined by upper management. The agents were influenced by the popular discourse on crime in defining their priorities and actively subverted directives management issued to reorder those priorities. As Simon (1993) foreshadowed in his work on parole, the agents in this setting did not appear poised to become mere human “waste managers.”