The ideological work of penal reform: How reformers justify penal-welfare hybridization

Abstract

This article uses the Santa Clara County Reentry Resource Center (RRC) as a case study to explore the cultural content of penal reform. Specifically, we explore the discourses that officials use to publicly justify projects of penal-welfare hybridization, or the linking of state systems of punishment and welfare to manage criminalized populations. Our qualitative analysis draws on a dataset consisting of county planning documents, budgets, videos, press releases, and newsletters published online between 2011 and 2023. By examining these materials over time, we are able to chart patterns of consistency and variation in how officials justify hybridization. We find that the discourses of cost-savings and recidivism reductions have remained durable frameworks for justifying hybridization over the last decade. Layered upon this instrumental framework was a moral discourse that constructed the deservingness of returning citizens through narratives of reentry success. Over time, we find that online materials increasingly incorporated the language of trauma to justify the expansion of the RRC, revealing an overlooked process of policy diffusion that links victims’ advocacy to prisoner reentry. Our findings suggest that hybridization can entail expansions of welfare capacity within and alongside the penal state, not simply an eclipse of the penal state over the welfare state.