The ‘no man’s land’ of intermediate legal sanctions

Abstract

This is an exercise in convict criminology, taking its orientation from the literature on legal narrative and storytelling. It addresses a current and long-standing area of criminal justice policy, the use of intermediate sanctions in corrections, doing so from a participant’s perspective. Prison is described as being part of the crime problem, in part because it brings lasting harm to those within its persistent embrace. Intermediate penal sanctions, touted as a true corrections alternative, are shown to have significant shortcomings. Convict criminology and legal storytelling are presented as encouraging restorative responses to instances of harm occurring through both crime and crime control.

Keywords:

• convict criminology
• legal storytelling
• mass incarceration
• prison
• decarceration

Notes

The Forbes Book of Business Quotations: 14,266 Thoughts on the Business of Life.

1. This paper was prepared with the assistance of many current and former prisoners, particularly my friend and colleague, Chuck Terry. The collaborative nature of this project suggests that I honor many unnamed colleagues through the occasional use of the pronoun ‘we’ to denote the authorial voice within the text. I also acknowledge the patient assistance of Michael Braun, Bud Brown, and Joel Henderson, and the encouragement of many others, including Mary Maguire and Dan Okada.

2. Although we begin our discussion via the written word, it bears noting that the popular bias toward respecting published thought at the expense of oral communication has its costs. The principals of ‘corrections’ are, have been, and will always be the prisoners themselves. We must not mistake their absence from our journals and symposia for their silence. They are far from silent. Our effort here, in fact, represents a move to give tangible voice to the myriad, unceasing, and ultimately decisive opinions of prisoners.

3. Sherman’s (1993) defiance theory is a fine example of the insights produced by mainstream criminology. When examining the literature on defiance, however, we find ourselves overwhelmed by the more than five-hundred published articles that draw upon the theory. For the sake of timeliness we will stick with our stories, and let better scholars work on integrating the results.