The recent legal enactment of Chinese Community Corrections (CCC) typically meshes punishment and welfare principles in Chinese penality. Few studies, however, have addressed how these principles are applied in the daily activities of the correctional workgroup, mainly correctional officers and social workers. Drawing on ethnographic data from China's urban community corrections, this study examines how the ideal of rehabilitation or penal welfarism is interpreted and embodied in the collaboration between correctional authorities and social workers, as well as negotiated within the organizational dynamics related to rehabilitation. The analysis reveals an observed pattern of ‘pride and prejudice’ that emerges from the daily practices of the correctional workgroup when handling offenders. The ‘pride’ dimension signifies that the CCC's institutional leitmotif is continual punitiveness and latent strict supervision over the stated goal of promoting offenders’ welfare. The prejudice aspect of the penal-welfare nexus indicates the ingrained notion of offenders as evil and the social impulse to exclude them. The CCC's pride and prejudice are marshaled and configured in a process termed ‘strategic coupling’ of punishment and welfare tenets to garner legitimacy. Correctional officers wield ultimate power and strategically conjure penal and benevolent elements to legitimize the CCC as the Chinese state's capacity to deliver the People's welfare.
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