PERHAPS ALL PAIN IS PUNISHMENT: COMMUNITY CORRECTIONS AND THE HYPERGHETTO

• Date: 09 December 2003
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S1059-4337(03)30006-7
• Pages: 125-159
• Published date: 09 December 2003
• Author: William Lyons

PERHAPS ALL PAIN IS PUNISHMENT:

COMMUNITY CORRECTIONS AND

THE HYPERGHETTO

William Lyons

We have for twenty-five years believed in and practiced a philosophy of “community cor-

rection,” whereby a correctional center is not an isolated fortress on a hill. Rather, we are a

correctional center seeking to be a contributor to the life of the community, and also welcome

into the institution the positive elements and aspects of the community.Sheriff Michael Ashe,

Welcoming Remarks at the Focuson Correctional Health Care Meetings held at the Hampden

County Correctional Center on November 9th, 2001.

We all know that an individual in a community with a criminal pattern of behavior can cost

his fellow citizens a tremendous amount of money, so the community agencies and groups

outside the fences certainly have a stake in successful community re-entry. They can serve

the community by becoming full partners with criminal justice agencies in seeking to assure

successful reentry. Sheriff Michael Ashe, as quoted in Montalto and Sheehan (2002).

COMMUNITY POLICING, COMMUNITY PROSECUTION,

AND COMMUNITY CORRECTIONS: WHY THE FOCUS

ON COMMUNITY?

Community policing has been around for at least two decades now and it is safe

to say that it has become, in large part, more about managing disruptive subjects

and virtuous citizens than preventing crime or disorder (Crank, 1994; DeLeon-

Granados, 1999; Yngvesson, 1993). While the rhetoric of community may be

Punishment, Politics, and Culture

Studies in Law, Politics, and Society,Volume 30, 125–159

Copyright © 2004 by Elsevier Ltd.

All rights of reproduction in any form reserved

ISSN: 1059-4337/doi:10.1016/S1059-4337(03)30006-7

125

126 WILLIAM LYONS

succeeding where the policing policy is failing, the experience has certainly con-

tributed to the growth of homologous efforts that include community prosecution

and community correction. We see a criminal justice system pro-actively seeking

to blur the boundaries between its institutions and the communities they work

within and, all too often, without.

In recent years, there has been a rapid growth in justice approaches that turn their attention

toward the community. There are literally hundreds of examples of this trend, from offender-

victim reconciliation projects in Vermont and Minneapolis to ‘beat probation’ in Madison,

Wisconsin; from neighborhood-based prosecution centers in Portland, Oregon, and New York

City, to community probation in Massachusetts. Of course, the most well-known version of

community justice is community policing, but localized projects involving all components of

the justice system have been widely promoted (Clear & Karp, 1998,p.3).

Like community policing and community prosecution, community correction

programs generally focus on partnering with service providers and community

groups in order to more finely calibrate their service delivery.For community cor-

rections the recent focus has been on delivering re-entry programs and expanding

the availability of intermediate sanctioning options. The sheriff (above) focuses

on re-entry, to link jails and communities in two ways: extending the correctional

continuum into power-poor communities and increasing political support for

expanding the criminal justice system in more affluent communities. Even as

fiscal stress translates into budget cuts in education, housing, drug treatment, and

other services, the reach of the criminal justice system expands outside the fences

as new community-based partnerships and inside the fences as an increasingly

program-rich environment. These partnerships are, not surprisingly as we shall

see, dominated by criminal justice professionals and dependent on coercive

control techniques. Further, their budgets are growing with funds in previous eras

earmarked for providing many of the same services in a social welfare, rather,

than social control, service delivery context. While these budgetary trends map a

macro political trend from an old democratic New Deal toward a new republican

new deal network of patronage relationships (see Lyons, forthcoming 2004), this

paper examines the micro politics of community corrections developing within

an increasingly punitive American political-culture.

An intake classification manager working in the Western Massachusetts Cor-

rectional Alcohol Center (WMCAC) described the Hampden County approach to

community corrections as an effort to expand the correctional continuum.

There’s a continuum. It starts with maximum, next stop is minimum and that’s basically you

are inside of a facility that does not have a secure perimeter, there is no fence and barbed

wire. Minimum, in terms of programming, are mostly in-house, they stay inside. And it is

at the Pre-Release building that is outside the secured perimeter, and they either do in-house

Perhaps all Pain is Punishment 127

work or they go into the community under staff supervision and do community service. The

next step from there is Howard Street (WMCAC). Theycome through here for their addiction

treatment. When they are done with us they go (back) to Pre-Release, they start working, and

earning a paycheck, putting money in the bank, and then from there they go to the Community

Safety Center (for either day reporting and after release programming), which is the electronic

bracelet, the monitoring .... For instance we know that people who have any pending legal

issues that are of a violent or felony nature, they can’t move through the system, that’s a

disqualifier. People who havebeen convicted of escape, arson, armed robbery, or a sex offense

cannot (move through the system). That’sa disqualifier, with certain exceptions that are clearly

definedandhave to be proven. They cannot move through thesystem.Theystay behind the walls

(Connor Interview).

“In short, the ideal of community justice is that the agents of criminal justice

should tailor their work so that its main purpose is to enhance community living”

(Clear & Karp, 1998, pp. 4–5). The jail takes on a series of junior partners – local

service providers, employers, and health care providers – to tailor its re-entry

programming partnerships according to inmate classification. These partnerships

can provide a mechanism for managing both the disruptive subjects (offenders)

floating between prisons and decaying communities and the virtuous citizens

(law-abiding, tax-paying publics) frightened by,and frustrated with, the criminally

poor who, they are persuaded, have chosen to accept generous welfare benefits

while repeatedly escaping punishment from our lenient and broken criminal

justice system (Beckett, 1997). At the same time, partnerships can serve as a public

relations tool for political leaders seeking to better “manage the consequences

of their inability to solve urban problems” (Katzneslon, 1976). Similar to the

combination of disciplinary and democratizing mechanisms of social control

constitutive of community policing, community correction efforts mobilize a

particular mixture of professional law enforcement and social welfare discourses

about protecting individuals, families, and communities, while also drawing on

these discourses largely to reinforce state agency (Lyons, 1999; Maynard-Moody

& Musheno, 2003).

In community policing this combination of democratizing and disciplinary

mechanisms force the residents of our most victimized communities to continually

choose between passivity, dependence and punishment. The “concentrated disad-

vantages” characteristic of these penal-community complexes that Wacquant calls

hyperghettoes can be, and often are in community policing efforts, transformed

into an invitation to more extreme and less accountable punishments tailored

for those already most victimized by crime and deindustrialization. This paper

explores the place of community correctional efforts in one Massachusetts county

in this larger drama of social control. Even in this more progressive, program-rich,

correctional facility, we find an expansion and evolution of control mechanisms