Description
In the wake of World War II, California emerged as leader in modern therapeutic corrections thanks to the structure of its military welfare state. By the late 1950s, however, prisoners, staff, the public, and the political leadership questioned the effectiveness of group counseling as the path back to citizenship, prompting the creation of a Correctional Research Division. Replacing case file evaluations with rigorous statistical prediction tools, the division built the necessary political legitimacy for a series of bold therapeutic community programs. Promoting personality change through democratic community life upset institutional discipline, industrial work order, and professional standards, but it also legitimized prisoners’ political awareness and group identities incompatible with reintegration into white middle‐class society. In the wake of the Watts riots, a conservative administration not only withdrew political support for rehabilitative research but also converted statistical prediction tools from an argument for bold liberal experimentation into an argument for incarceration.
