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Penal optimism and second chances: The legacies of American Protestantism and the prospects for penal reform

Punishment & Society 15(2) 123–146 ! The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1462474513477789 pun.sagepub.com

David A Green City University of New York, USA

Abstract This article first makes the case that optimism in the reform potential of criminal offenders has recently increased among American policymakers, as evidenced by the bipartisan passage of the Second Chance Act of 2007, which encourages prisoner reentry and sets ambitious targets for recidivism reduction. It then sets this apparent renewal of ‘penal optimism’ in historical context by drawing on American evangelical Protestant traditions and examining how these affect contemporary perceptions of the redeemability of criminal offenders. One aim is to acquaint criminologists with the discourse of evangelical Protestantism, a significant and driving force in contemporary penal reform efforts – particularly in the realm of prisoner reentry – by outlining key religious concepts and their implications for penal discourse and policy. Keywords penal policy, politics, punishment, reentry, religion

Introduction The dominant narrative of contemporary American penal culture holds that the United States stands unmatched in the western world in its harsh treatment of lawbreakers. The USA now holds 2.3 million people in prison or jail, and the

Corresponding author: David A Green, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York, Sociology Department, 524 West 59th Street, New York, NY 10019, USA. Email: [email protected]

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number of state prison inmates increased by 708 percent over the past 35 years (Pew Center on the States, 2010a). Since the collapse of faith in the successful rehabilitation of offenders in the early 1970s, criminologists have produced a growing corpus of scholarship tasked with explaining this punitive turn and exploring its consequences. The penal pessimism embedded in and further engendered by Martinson’s (1974) famous overstatement that ‘nothing works’ to rehabilitate offenders has cast a long shadow over penal policy for over 30 years, legitimating the punitive, tough-on-crime policies that criminologists have become so comfortable deriding. While the best of this criminological work is certainly important and necessary (see, for instance, Garland, 2001; Roberts et al., 2003; Savelsberg, 1994; Simon, 2007; Tonry, 2004, 2011b; Whitman, 2003), there is the danger that the very success and proliferation of the harshness narrative have produced an orthodoxy about American punitiveness which hinders our ability to notice and appreciate developments in penal thinking and policy that run counter to it. The Second Chance Act of 2007 (SCA), among other indicators, might signify that a more nuanced rethinking of simplistic tough-on-crime rhetoric and policy is underway at both state- and federal-government levels. The Great Recession has pushed states to reconsider correctional policies across the country (Brown, 2012). Overall state prison populations have stabilized; half of states have witnessed declines in their prison populations and only a handful have experienced increases over 3 percent (Pew Center on the States, 2010b). Crime has fallen sharply and consistently since the early 1990s, and crime as a public or political issue has been relegated to the level of more distant concerns in favor of more pressing ones, like unemployment, health care, immigration, and terrorism (Gallup, 2011). One early sign of an apparent shift in mainstream penal thinking occurred a decade into the crime decline, when President George W Bush stunned many progressive observers in his 2004 State of the Union address by declaring: ‘America is the land of the second chance, and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.’ With these words the President became the unlikely catalyst for an extraordinary bipartisan effort to address the myriad needs of released prisoners. The Second Chance Act of 2007: Community Safety through Recidivism Prevention passed easily in the House of Representatives, with 80 percent voting in favor of it, and without controversy in the Senate by unanimous consent. The SCA authorized a two-year program to assist the 650,000 (now 700,000) ex-offenders released from prison each year. It continues to fund a range of demonstration projects and mentoring programs provided by over 300 government and non-profit organizations in 48 states (Council of State Governments Justice Center, 2012). These grants are intended to increase public safety through recidivism reduction and to assist states and communities to reintegrate released ex-offenders through programs targeting employment, housing, family support, and substance-abuse and mental-health treatment (Nelson and Turetsky, 2008). The Obama administration has since launched a cabinet-level Federal Interagency

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Reentry Council to promote and coordinate reentry research and services. Congress is considering a bill to reauthorize the SCA. Before 9/11, the Bush administration was initially defined in part by its swift launch by executive order of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives to ‘rally America’s armies of compassion’ (Bush, 2001). In congressional speeches, several Republican co-sponsors of versions of what became the SCA focused on the promise of faith-based programs aimed at reducing recidivism. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus frequently invoked passages from the Bible in support of the bill, as well as language about redemption and ‘reclaiming’ those who have fallen from the path. To help sell the notions of offender redemption and second chances President Bush invoked biblical rhetoric and referenced American Judeo-Christian values. He drew as well upon his own personal redemption story – how he was able to quit drinking in the 1980s – and cited his own personal faith as critical to his success (Bush, 2008). Religious rhetoric of this kind, combined with the support of Christian groups like Prison Fellowship and The Salvation Army, helped unite a broad coalition of right and left in support of the SCA. This rhetoric has featured prominently outside of Washington, DC, too, to help make the case for progressive reforms in traditionally conservative states. Republican Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, now its governor, became an ardent supporter of the SCA, stating in a Judiciary Committee Hearing in 2007 that Americans need to recognize ‘that every person is a beautiful, unique soul, a child of a living God, regardless of whether they are in prison or not’ (US Senate, 2007: 5). In a recent Washington Post op-ed former governor Haley Barbour (2012) defended his decision to pardon 215 convicted offenders, including 26 who were subsequently released from prison: In Mississippi, the constitutional power of pardon is based on our Christian belief in repentance, forgiveness and redemption – a second chance for those who are rehabilitated and who redeem themselves . . . I am very comfortable giving such people that opportunity.

Another former Republican governor, Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, invoked similar rhetoric in justification for granting clemency to over 1000 offenders, including Maurice Clemmons, who was shot by police in 2009 after he killed four police officers in Washington State: I would not deny that my sense of the reality of redemption is a factor [in clemency decisions] . . . And I don’t know that I can apologize for that because I would hate to think of the kind of human I would be if I thought people were beyond forgiveness and beyond reformation and beyond some sense of improvement. (View from the Right, 2009)

Former Republican State Senator and Attorney General of Virginia, Mark Earley, whom Chuck Colson chose to replace him as head of Prison Fellowship,

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came to regret his support of harsh penal policies aimed to incarcerate more people and for longer, citing the Bible to explain why: ‘If Moses [who murdered a man] or Paul [who oversaw the stoning of Saint Stephen] had lived in Virginia or any state in the United States today, they would be serving, had they been caught, a multiple-decade prison sentence’ (New York Times, 2006). Fewer Democrats appear as comfortable articulating progressive positions on criminal justice. This might reflect a classic ‘Nixon in China’ phenomenon whereby only conservative Republicans, and perhaps only those whose views can be defended on religious grounds, can afford the gamble of issuing pronouncements that opponents might charge are dangerously soft or liberal. However, some Democrats have done so, with religious justifications. For instance, the New York Times (2011) reported that Illinois’s Democrat governor Pat Quinn’s decision to abolish capital punishment was a matter of conscience, based on his Catholic beliefs and a book he had read by Cardinal Joseph Bernardin. Christian fundamentalism has long been associated with the rise of retributive justice. It is no accident that the new retributivism of current penal policy has gone along with the rise of Christian fundamentalism, especially in the United States. Many of the arguments in favour of it resemble those of evangelical Christians in the nineteenth century who believed that prisons ought to be places where criminals made atonement. (Gorringe, 1996: 29)

However, to equate Christian doctrine with only punitive sentiments overlooks and ignores the doctrines of compassion and forgiveness throughout the Bible, particularly the New Testament, examples of which Bush invoked in his remarks at the SCA bill-signing ceremony. In fact, vengeful anger is considered sinful,1 and ‘the claim that offences can be answered other than in kind is at the heart of the gospel’ (Gorringe, 1996: 253). Criminology has also overlooked this tension, focusing almost exclusively on the role of religion in feeding punitive attitudes rather than human capacities for forgiveness (Applegate et al., 2000). Growing evidence suggests, however, that religiously rooted rationales and goals have contributed to the success of the SCA and to a range of other progressive reforms, including the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 and the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 (Pat Nolan, author interview, 14 June 2011). Echoing Swidler (1986), Melossi (2001: 403) rightly cautions that linkages between religious beliefs and penal policies should not be considered causally deterministic; instead, religious beliefs are components of ‘conceptual and rhetorical toolkits’ that shape penal orientations, often in inconsistent ways. Conceiving of religious ideas as cultural and cognitive tools is useful because, following contests of conflicting traditions, the ascendancies of ideas can be understood in part as recognition of the utility of a given tradition in a given context at a given time. Christian traditions contribute to a ‘repertoire of motives’ (Melossi, 2001: 415), both punitive and forgiving, and changing contexts and contingencies condition

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which side in each contest dominates for a time. For instance, notions of offender redemption embedded in religiously driven optimism might have greater utility in settings and times where and when crime is falling, while religiously loaded condemnatory scripts might be appropriated when and where crime is on the rise. This article considers in nine remaining sections the American religious-historical origins of recent shifts in penal rhetoric about the redeemability of convicted offenders. The aim in part is to help criminologists to become conversant in the language of evangelical Protestantism, a significant driving force in contemporary penal-reform efforts, by outlining key religious concepts and their implications for discourse and policy. The first section defines and justifies the notion of penal optimism. The second makes the case for a religious-historical approach to the study of penal optimism, one which traces the legacies of Protestantism that continue to impact the reformative aspirations of American criminal justice. The four sections to follow explore penal optimism through the lenses of four binary oppositions embedded in American Protestantism. The seventh section connects the historical discussion to the reform rhetoric of George W Bush and Chuck Colson. The eighth considers the role the crime decline has played in bolstering penal optimism. The conclusion offers some final reflections.

Penal optimism and recidivism reduction In his study of deviance in the seventeenth-century Puritan settlements of Massachusetts Bay, Kai Erikson (1966: 15) writes, On the whole we are a people who do not really expect deviants to change very much as they are processed through the control agencies we provide for them, and we are often reluctant to devote much of the community’s resources to the job of rehabilitation.

Yet, while the SCA arguably provides seed funding for reentry and rehabilitation services that many regard as insufficient, it nonetheless signals a bipartisan and decidedly sanguine view of recidivism reduction that few who lived through the decline of the rehabilitative ideal would have predicted. All programs funded under the SCA must produce a plan to reduce recidivism by an extremely ambitious 50 percent over five years. Martinson’s (1974) famously pessimistic evaluation of rehabilitation programs did much to assist in the collapse of the rehabilitative ideal, and while many scholars have since asserted this pessimism was overstated, there was still very limited grounds for optimism at the time. In 1977 David Greenberg (1977: 141) wrote, ‘The blanket assertion that ‘‘nothing works’’ is an exaggeration, but not by very much.’ As Michael Tonry (2011a: 637) put it more recently, Proposed alternatives [to unduly harsh policies] – exemplified by most reentry initiatives – are generally supported by arguments about reduced cost or improved

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recidivism reduction. This is a mistake. As 30 years of program evaluations have shown, most ‘alternatives’ cannot keep their promises. A few well-managed, wellfunded programs with charismatic leaders can divert offenders from prison, save money, and reduce reoffending, but few real-life programs are like that.

Tonry (2011a) further contends that in debates about the iatrogenic effects of mass incarceration, instrumental arguments about cost savings and reductions in crime and recidivism will eventually fail because the harsh policies that have led to the explosion of imprisonment were premised on normative or moral arguments, not on logical or instrumental ones, and these arguments must be won by direct engagement with the moral rather than instrumental consequences of Americans’ ‘overindulgent’ use of imprisonment. Much of the SCA debate, particularly from supporters on the left, however, has steered clear of these moral arguments, at least publicly, perhaps for the fear they might be spun by the opposition as soft on crime. Moral-religious rhetoric has helped inoculate those on the right from such risks. Some prominent conservatives – like George W Bush, Sam Brownback, Rob Portman, Pat Nolan, and Michael Gerson – have indeed employed moral principles in defense of the SCA and other reform legislation. In fact, Gerson and Peter Wehner (2010: 123), both advisers in the Bush White House and both evangelical exemplars of the ‘compassionate conservativism’ of the first Bush administration, contend that to be persuasive in the public square, Christians must do more than think strategically about messaging and delivery: ‘Employing the right tone . . . depends on more than utilitarian considerations. More fundamentally it has to do with reflecting a view of human persons and their inherent dignity.’ The elevation of questions of human dignity is a goal not dissimilar to those of Tonry and others who argue for a fundamental reconsideration of American penal policy on moral grounds. Whether justified in utilitarian or moral terms, the SCA is one apparent indicator that a shift is taking place in the American penal climate, but there are others. Another is found in the recent push for a range of penal reforms – including prioritizing prisoner reentry and drug treatment, reducing ‘overcriminalization’, repealing mandatory minimum penalties, and decreasing Americans’ heavy reliance on incarceration – by the conservative ‘Right on Crime’ initiative launched in late 2010 by the Texas Public Policy Foundation (www.rightoncrime.com). The initiative’s growing list of 50 or so conservative signatories includes Newt Gingrich, Grover Norquist, Ralph Reed, Jeb Bush, John DiIulio,2 William Bennett, and Ed Meese – household names to many Americans. Other prominent signatories to the Right on Crime initiative include two Christian Republicans who remain strong proponents of the SCA and who served time in prison themselves. Chuck Colson, whose recent death at the age of 80 was met with a flood of published tributes to his commitment to prisoners’ needs, was special counsel to President Richard Nixon. He founded Prison Fellowship in 1975 after his ‘born-again’ conversion and eventual release from

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federal prison, where he had served seven months after pleading guilty to obstruction of justice in a case involving a plan to smear Daniel Ellsberg, the RAND analyst who released ‘The Pentagon Papers’. The second, Pat Nolan,3 was recruited by Colson to join Prison Fellowship after he experienced his own spiritual transformation in prison after being convicted of receiving illegal campaign contributions as a member of the California State Assembly. Nolan, a passionate advocate for restorative-justice programs, now heads Justice Fellowship, the criminal-justice reform-advocacy arm of Prison Fellowship, and is credited with coordinating this extraordinary group of conservative leaders in support of the Right on Crime initiative. Colson’s early personal accounts of his moral transformation and activist faith provided the germ for this article (see Colson, 1976, 1979). His autobiographies in turn led to a wider historical consideration of the impacts and implications of American Christian – mostly Protestant – theologies in accounting for the oscillatory character of American optimism about the efficacy of penal intervention. The compelling redemption stories of Colson and Nolan likely did much to influence their conservative, former colleagues in politics to support the SCA and other reform bills, and their knowledge of the political process and connections to political operatives in both Washington, DC, and around the country have further enhanced their effectiveness as lobbyists for progressive criminal-justice reform (Lindsay, 2007). Winnifred Sullivan (2009) contends that the United States is exceptional among its western peers, by virtue of both its citizens’ high degree of professed religiosity and its heavy reliance on incarceration. Both increased significantly over the past 35 years, and both help explain the proliferation of faith-based social programs and the near impossibility of truly extracting religion from state functions.4 She also writes, Religious revival and law-and-order populism are not unique to the United States, but the U.S. stands out in both respects. The two are connected, historically and sociologically, and the story of one cannot be fully told without implicating the other. (Sullivan, 2009: 4)

Much of the criminological literature has focused on describing and explaining the darker aspect of American penality, but few have explored its religious underor overtones. Most scholarship has been preoccupied with explaining American punitiveness, whether in terms of public attitudes, political rhetoric, or penal policies, but there is another side to this story. Most recent studies of American penality have understandably focused on the conspicuously harsh nature of its policies, practices, and outcomes. An alternative approach is to investigate how and why confidence in the reforming potential of penal intervention, what is referred to here as ‘penal optimism’, has reemerged in a context that for 35 years has been associated with harsh penal treatment and repression. Just as important as the quintessentially American law-and-order

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penal project are the – perhaps just as quintessentially American – religiously driven inclinations to mitigate the damages rendered by harsh punishment, as through, for instance, the embrace of less demonstratively punitive, reintegrative impulses and policies of the Jacksonian and Progressive eras. It is surely premature to draw parallels between either of these eras and recent developments in our own. Nonetheless, the SCA’s recidivism-reduction targets and the priorities of Right on Crime indicate that change is occurring and inclinations are shifting the course of reform along a bearing that is more optimistic about the prospects of intervening successfully in the lives of offenders to reduce their chances of reoffending.

The case for a religious-historical approach to analyzing contemporary penal thinking and policy Religion matters to most Americans in ways that many criminologists have overlooked. Though many progressive social scientists might scoff at the importance of religion in public life, the United States remains an exceedingly religious country. Ninety-five percent of Americans profess to believe in God, as compared to 76 percent of Britons, 62 percent of the French, and 52 percent of Swedes (Morone, 2003). Seventy percent of Americans claim they would not vote for a president who was not a believer (Marsden, 2001). Nearly three-fourths of Americans belong to a church, 40 percent go every week, and one in 10 claims to go several times a week (Morone, 2003). One-third identify as evangelical Christians (Greenwald, 2007; Marsden, 2001). According to a 2007 Harris poll, more Americans believe in the existence of Satan as a literal being (62 percent) than believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution (42 percent) (Poole, 2009).5 So while it might be possible to overstate the significance of American religious heritage for contemporary penal thinking and practice, it is impossible to ignore it, particularly as it pertains to the reformative potential and redeemability of convicted offenders. Penal optimism has historically been innervated by two offender-reform mechanisms with deep roots in American Christian traditions running as far back as the nation’s Puritan origins. These mechanisms are, first, the conversion of the soul of the sinning offender, and second, the individualized treatment of the offender through tailored intervention in the offender’s mind, body, and/or environment. Broadly speaking, the will to conversion drove the penitentiary experiments during the Jacksonian era, roughly from the late 1820s–1840, though more so in Pennsylvania system than in the Auburn-style penitentiaries, where the scaled-back objective was the reduction of recidivism through the creation of ‘habits or obedience’ rather than ‘moral reclamation’ and prisoner conversion (Dumm, 1987: 117). The Progressive era (1890s–1920s) saw the beginning of the individualized model of penal treatment associated with the rehabilitative ideal, which remained intact and dominant until the early 1970s when it was attacked by liberals and conservatives alike (Rothman, 1980). Though the former individual-treatment model is

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often understood as a byproduct of the rise of positivism, most accounts overlook the role that religion played in setting the stage for both Progressivism and, as unintuitive and improbable as it might seem today, for positivism itself (see Skotnicki, 2000: 63). American religious heritage, as well as aspects of the notion of American exceptionalism, preceded even John Winthrop’s arrival in Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630. While still at sea, his sermon to the Puritans aboard the Arbella declared, ‘The God of Israel is among us . . . We shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.’ To justify American expansion in the Caribbean and Pacific, Progressive-era Senator Albert Beveridge claimed that ‘Almighty God has marked the American people as a chosen nation to finally lead in the generation of the world’ (Poole, 2009: 33). Lest one believe such aspirational thinking and its abiding faith in American ‘civil religion’ (Bellah, 1967) no longer endures, modern examples are plain. When George W Bush called the nation in his second inaugural address to ‘end tyranny in the 21st century’ (quoted in Greenwald, 2007: 75), he was reviving the Puritan notion of the USA as a redeemer nation (see Morone, 2003) and civil religion’s ‘deification of the national enterprise’ (Marsden, 2001: 51). The nature of religious influence on public life has shifted over time, often in confusing and crosscutting ways. This itself is due in part to another American religious peculiarity. The absence of a state church and the firm roots of antiestablishment (anti-Catholic), Protestant doctrines allowed the United States to become a unique incubator of religious innovation and ‘entrepreneurial religion’ (Sullivan, 2009: 3). The resulting American ‘religious effervescence’ (Morone, 2003: 110) began with the teachings of Anne Hutchinson, who was banished from Boston in 1638 by the Puritan authorities for her claim to have established through selfdirected Bible study a direct and personal relationship with God. The themes of personal conversions and of finding one’s own path to God would find explosive resonance over the next century in the mass revivals of the First (1730s–1740s) and Second (1790s–1840s) Great Awakenings. Both of these revival periods also reflected and helped facilitate American populism; the ordinary were deemed virtuous and the powerful deemed unworthy of the authority they claimed for themselves within traditional institutional hierarchies. Martin Luther’s notion of ‘sola scriptura’ (Skotnicki, 2000: 8) underlies the populist tendencies and the vigorous religious innovation that characterizes American Protestantism. The ‘Bible alone’ is the key to salvation in this view, and one does not need a formal church hierarchy or a congregation to follow the path of God. For Roger Williams and the early Baptists, ‘the doctrine of the conversion was a radically leveling doctrine. Anyone, even the poorest in society, could be the spiritual equal of anyone else and the spiritual superior of those unconverted who held power and prestige in the world’ (Marsden, 2001: 25). Similarly, the preachers of the Second Great Awakening during the Jacksonian era ‘pushed the same four moral innovations, which added up to religious democracy’ (Morone, 2003: 126). First, they rejected Calvinist predestination and held instead that no one was beyond salvation or ‘irredeemably depraved’. Second, they

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overruled the authority of clergymen and responsibility for salvation was now in the hands of the individual. Third, religious discourses infused American secular culture. Finally, providing support for Max Weber’s (1905/2002) thesis, all preachers of the time ‘pushed the personal disciplines of sobriety, piety, and hard work. . . [all of which would help] bend workers to the regulated, clock-driven monotony of mill and factory’ (Morone, 2003: 127). The proliferation of American Protestant faiths and denominational offshoots holding to myriad doctrinal beliefs makes it impossible to speak monolithically about the directions of Christian influence on penal matters. Nonetheless, several clear variations, distinctions, and historical tendencies cohere that are instructive in understanding penal optimism in the American past and today. Penal thinking and practice have been repeatedly conditioned by contests within four sets of binary oppositions over the history of American Protestantism. Each has its roots in various theologies that have shaped, and continue to shape, the American penal landscape and the underlying rationales and thinking that fortify it. These binary oppositions include Quaker optimism vs Calvinist pessimism, pre-millennialism vs post-millennialism, the social gospel vs neo-Puritanism, and the USA as the New Israel vs the USA as Babylon.

Quaker optimism vs Calvinist pessimism The story of American penal optimism, and pessimism, begins with the founding of the penitentiaries in Jacksonian-era Pennsylvania and New York. The precedents set during this period of penal experimentation remain evident to us today as we look back over periods of ebbing and flowing confidence in the effectiveness of reform-minded penal intervention. Optimism was embedded in the Quakers’ efforts at Eastern State Penitentiary in Pennsylvania and the Calvinist Puritan’s pessimism was on display in New York’s Auburn penitentiary model. Both systems were premised on the idea that the prison sentence itself served as ‘a pretext to reform the inmate through silence, work, and spiritual counsel’ (Skotnicki, 2000: 8). However, each system was built around deeper, and conflicting, religious notions about human nature. William Penn insisted that each individual was endowed with ‘Native Goodness’ (Skotnicki, 2000), and Quaker emphasis on individual treatment rested upon enduring optimism in the innate goodness of human beings, all of whom were believed to harbor an ‘inner light’.6 For the Quakers, then, the aim was to redeem and reclaim the offender, and ‘a justice of restraint was to reform, rather than deform’ him (Dumm, 1987: 80). In contrast, Calvinists believed in mankind’s fallen, depraved nature.7 The Auburn-style penitentiaries thus relied on repressive regimes that demanded obedience (Skotnicki, 2000: 7–8), for if one assumes, as the Puritans did, that a convict’s soul is permanently depraved and that sin is an inevitable part of his personal endowment, it makes very little sense to think in terms of ‘reform’ or

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‘regeneration’; the best one can do for him is to contain his reprobate spirit, in much the same way that one tames the wilder instincts of animals, and mold him into a passive, compliant, dulled member of the social order. (Erikson, 1966: 203)

Though a small, chosen ‘elect’ are suitably pious to receive God’s favor, ‘it is necessary that the rest of the crowd be restrained by a forcible curb. For the sons of God are intermingled with the great, savage beasts, or with wolves and false men’ (Calvin, 1958: 188, quoted in Skotnicki, 2000). Notwithstanding the striking differences in the Quaker and Calvinist approaches to the reformation of individual offenders and their varying degrees of optimism in the potential for human perfectibility, it is important to recognize that ‘the religious movements sweeping the country in the Jacksonian era were the seminal influences in the creation and propagation of the belief that the penitentiary could restore the criminal to society with mind and spirit renewed’ (Skotnicki, 2000: 54). Confidence in the penitentiaries’ aims remained strong among both the Quakers and Calvinist Puritans. The scope of social, as opposed to individual, reform was also shaped by the two distinct operating theologies. Calvinist theology advocated small-bore reform efforts, like the eradication of vices like drunkenness and prostitution. Though Calvinists believed they must work at a calling to ‘fashion the earthly realm into a ‘‘theater of God’s glory’’’, the ambitions of that work were pared back significantly by their belief in predestination, which ‘removed the redemptive significance of action in the world’ (Skotnicki, 2000: 12) that other faiths held. There was little incentive to trouble oneself with virtuously working toward social reform on a broad scale because God’s will was sovereign and no earthly act could ever ensure one’s salvation. Weber (1905/2002) highlights this tension between the Calvinists’ will to do good works in the world and the incentive for pious separation from those within it. For Calvinists, good works, on the one hand, are ‘absolutely unsuitable as means for the acquisition of . . . the certainty of grace . . . Nevertheless, good works are indispensable as signs of election . . . [which] serve to banish the anxiety surrounding the question of one’s salvation’ (Weber, 1905/2002: 68, emphasis in original). The scope of such good works was limited by the deep division between the elect and the damned: With its character indelebilis [unchangeable character], this [spiritual] aristocracy [of saints] was eternally separate from the other part of humanity: the damned. In principle unbridgeable and, because of its invisibility, more mysterious than the division that visibly separated the medieval monk from the world, this gulf between the saved and damned invaded all social perceptions with a hard and piercing acuity. In light of his sinfulness, an attitude of compassionate helpfulness towards one’s neighbor (coming from an awareness of one’s own weakness) was not the appropriate response of the elect chosen by the grace of God (who thus were saints). More suitable instead was a hatred and contempt for the sinner as an enemy of God, one who carried with

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him the marks of the eternally condemned. (Weber, 1905/2002: 74, emphasis in original)

This pessimistic worldview, both of the nature of others and of the prospects for one’s own salvation, created a social detachment from others, a certain selfcentered preoccupation and concentration on piety, with a tendency toward the condemnatory repression of backsliders. Moreover, the revivals of the Jacksonian era emphasized individuality and the importance of a ‘personal change of heart’, which manifested in a brilliantly emotional experience. The focus on the individual meant that ‘national reform hinged on saving one soul at a time’ (Skotnicki, 2000: 28), rather than on major root-and-branch reform. The notion of the USA as the New Israel, as a chosen nation, meant that calls for reform were far more conservative, in both senses of the word, than they would be later on when reformers during the social-gospel movement would indict economic injustice and insist that social reform precede the conversion of individual souls. Jacksonian-era evangelicals were aware of deeperseated social ills: ‘They were, however, insistent that the conversion of the individual heart was the prelude to social action, and without a heart renewed in Christ, no amount of reform could restrain the dissolute from falling into error’ (Skotnicki, 2000: 30). The Quakers deviated from Puritan doctrines by preaching about the ‘inner light’ and the need for silent prayer, which, like Anne Hutchinson’s beliefs, negated the need for sermons or a church hierarchy, rendering the connection between God and the individual a very personal matter to be discovered on one’s own. The Quakers also turned their attention to worldly concerns about social justice, by, for instance, condemning slavery as early as 1671 (Morone, 2003:69). The clashes between the early Puritans and the Quakers in New England ‘is a story of clashing American impulses: inclusion and exclusion, internal grace and external force, toleration and repression’ (Morone, 2003: 73).

Premillennialism vs postmillennialism A second important and illustrative split among Christians grew from the ‘effervescent’ evangelical revivals of the Great Awakenings, manifested in diametrically opposed premillennial and postmillennial eschatology. Each of these periods of fervent religious revival yielded a contrasting dominant notion of mankind’s place in the chronology of Christian spiritual destiny. The notion of premillennialism, or what Wessinger (2011) helpfully refers to as ‘catastrophic millennialism’, developed during the mass religious revivals of the 1730s and 1740s. These ‘new light’ evangelicals were the forerunners of the premillennialist Fundamentalists who would first emerge in the early 20th century (Skotnicki, 2000). The premillennial preachers of this First Great Awakening popularized the idea of the imminent millennium – the apocalyptic ending of the age manifested by the Second Coming of Christ and the Rapture of the true believers – which continues to resonate today.

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Premillennialism’s revitalization was energized in the 20th century by the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 and its victory in the Six-Day War of 1967, which many view as miraculous evidence of the imminent apocalypse (Wessinger, 2011). Belief in the Rapture – the ‘heavenly airlift to safety of the true believers’ (Shuck, 2011: 517) – is again commonly held, due to the influence of Hal Lindsey’s 1970 book, The Late Great Planet Earth, and the massive popularity of the Left Behind novels by LaHaye and Jenkins. An estimated 40 million Americans today are premillennial dispensationalists who believe human history is divided into seven phases or dispensations, the final of which approaches with the imminent Rapture (Shuck, 2011). The premillennial point of view is decidedly pessimistic about both human nature and society (Wessinger, 2011). As a consequence, the premillennialist concentrates most on his/her own state of spiritual piety and awaits the Second Coming, when Jesus will return to usher in a thousand-year period of peace. The premillennialist evangelist Dwight L Moody (1837–1899) claimed to ‘look upon the world as a wrecked vessel’ and to regard his revivalist message as a ‘life-boat’ provided by God: ‘This world is getting darker and darker; its ruin is drawing nearer and nearer; if you have any friends on this wreck unsaved, you had better lose no time in getting them off’ (quoted in Williams, 1900: 149). This imagery implied ‘that one should concentrate on saving souls and stay away from social issues except for what could be reached through conversion and repentance’ (Wuthnow, 1988: 85). The engagement in the worldly affairs of politics or social reform and service was therefore even less of a priority for some premillennialists than it was for the Calvinists. The postmillennialist worldview, or ‘progressive millennialism’ (Wessinger, 2011), on the other hand, became popular during the Second Great Awakening, between the mid-1820s and the recession of 1837 (Skotnicki, 2000), and had entirely different consequences for reform efforts. For criminal justice, the postmillennial consensus during and following the Second Great Awakening was that ‘crime was symptomatic of an unredeemed social order’ and, as one evangelical in 1842 put it, ‘people cannot choose holiness of heart, speech, or behaviour’ (Skotnicki, 2000: 25, 24). With positivism the focus shifted to the ‘supra-natural’ genetic and environmental causes of crime. Some in the Progressive era, like one instructor at the Elmira reformatory in New York State, set bigger targets for reform, placing the blame for genetics and environment on ‘State neglect’ (Skotnicki, 2000: 100). Postmillennialists believe that Jesus will only return once humankind has prepared the way for Him by achieving for themselves a thousand years of peace and justice. This view has obvious consequences for the believer who, unlike the premillennialist, is now compelled to engage diligently in the sort of works that might bring social justice to the world. Postmillennialist zeal energized Progressive era reform: No one who notes the characteristic of the age we live in can doubt it . . . All things are manifestly tending with a rapidity unknown before toward their final consummation, the full development of their capacities, and their largest influence upon the condition

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and destiny of our race . . . The past is a picture of darkness, and error, and corruption, and moral death, from which the eye turns instinctively to the brighter picture of the present and the future. (Pennsylvania Journal 1894–1895, quoted in Skotnicki, 2000: 102)

Such rhetoric contrasts sharply with the jeremiads of the premillennialist evangelical preachers. The consequential difference between the two millennial views is found in the compulsion, responsibility, and enthusiasm to engage in good works within the world. These distinctions continue to be consequential today. Jon Meacham (2012: emphasis added) examined contemporary beliefs about heaven and their implications for social reform in a recent issue of Time magazine: Both camps in the heaven debate . . . believe in good works . . . The issue is one of emphasis ... [Y]ounger believers in particular . . . [focus] on following Jesus’ commandment in Matthew 25 to feed the hungry, welcome the stranger and clothe the naked as though they had found Jesus himself hungry, homeless or bereft.

Again, the conceptual toolkit metaphor here is apt. Both competing convictions remain in the toolkit, and each one’s utility is determined by additional cultural factors and historical contingencies.

The social gospel vs neo-Puritanism The ongoing split between the ‘two great moral paradigms’ of social-gospel theology and what James Morone (2003: 497) calls neo-Puritanism reflects the split into liberal and conservative wings that was experienced by all Protestant churches in the 20th century. Skotnicki (2000) contends that the Jacksonian penitentiary experiment did not fail because it was ineffective in its reformative mission. Instead, it failed as the result of a broader split between liberal and conservative Protestants, which had great implications for the nature of penal reform to come: The threads of this separation are witnessed in the evolution of the Social Gospel movement within the liberal wing of American Protestantism. It featured a growing insistence on institutional reform as the catalyst for the continued unfolding of the reign of God. This dominant trend led to calls for new institutional configurations that precipitated the inauguration of the reformatory and the modern prison. The conservative, evangelical wing of Protestantism continued to place its emphasis on the traditional program of personal conversion. Although it continued, as it does today, to have periodic bursts of revivalism, it was diminished as the governing logic of the American religious community and, indeed, of the American social ethos. (Skotnicki, 2000: 5)

The social-gospel ethos downplayed the otherworldly aspects of Christianity (Marsden, 2001) and, allied with positivism, helped to push the conservative,

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conversionist model out of the prisons while retaining an evangelical drive and postmillennial zeal for worldly reforms. The ongoing yet historically rooted tension continues within criminology about whether to blame individuals for wrongdoing or to blame society, both poles of which are embedded in the legacy of Puritanism. As Morone (2003: 344) puts it, in the USA ‘you never really bury either side of our Puritan tradition’. The Victorians placed the bulk of the blame on the individual, just as the Puritans had blamed the sinner. During the period of social-gospel theology dominance – between 1932, with Roosevelt’s New Deal and ‘call to alms’ (Morone, 2003), and the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision – blame was placed instead on social and environmental factors that demanded reform. Social-gospel theology is credited to the work of the influential pastor Walter Rauschenbusch and associated with a postmillennial optimism for social and moral reforms. Rauschenbusch believed Christianity had become indifferent to human suffering and he helped lead a shift among evangelicals away from a preoccupation with personal salvation and the saving of souls toward a duty to engage in public service. During this period, ‘Policy makers blamed the system rather than the sinner’ (Morone, 2003: 349). Social-gospel theology began to erode after peaking during the 1960s civil-rights movement. The new evangelicals after this period were more conservative and were responding to and resisting the liberal character of the dominant social-gospel notions. They would be awakened en masse with the 1973 Roe decision when the ‘the political pendulum headed back toward the politics of personal morality . . . from the old Social Gospel dream of shared responsibility to the new Victorian fear of bad people and social decline’ (Morone, 2003: 444, 542).

The USA as New Israel vs the USA as Babylon The Christian fundamentalist movement of the 20th century fought back against the liberalization of Protestant doctrine, basing its theology on a series of 12 pamphlets called The Fundamentals published between 1900 and 1915 (Marsden, 2001). What most distinguished fundamentalists from garden-variety evangelicals was a belief in the literal reading of an inerrant Bible and a fervent militancy in protecting their doctrines. The distinction between contemporary evangelicals and fundamentalists was established by the revival crusades of evangelical preacher Billy Graham, particularly after 1957 when Graham caused a split within the fundamentalist-evangelical community. He had become adept at using his access to powerful figures in American government and public life to fulfill his mission to combat the evils of American secularization and Godless communism, and to save souls. The even more conservative fundamentalists, however, were separatists who rejected those – even the Protestant denominations and evangelicals – who engaged with a world and a culture they considered corrupt and irredeemable. Since 1957, the term ‘fundamentalist’ has tended to refer to this more separatist vision.

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Christian fundamentalists and evangelicals have always exhibited a ‘confusion’ about whether to regard the United States as the New Israel or the Whore of Babylon (Poole, 2009). Premillennialists would tend to regard the USA as Babylon, which would undermine political engagement in what might be regarded as a lost cause. Yet, fundamentalists . . . shared in the Puritan heritage that America was the new Israel. So [Jerry] Falwell and other new religious right leaders typically talked about a covenant between God and the American people and advocated a return to a ‘Christian America’. (Marsden, 2001: 276)

Again, the resolution of this tension has consequences for the nature of human engagement with the world. Premillennial visions of an American Babylon inspire pessimistic views about engagement with a corrupt culture and call the believer to spiritual warfare with it. The optimism of the New-Israel vision of American destiny is postmillennialist in its demand that one must work to deserve and hasten that destiny, through spiritual revival or social-gospel reforms or both. Some groups, like Pentecostals, hold strongly supernaturalist views about the nature of evil in the world that confirm the image of the USA as Babylon (Poole, 2009) and function, first, to exonerate one as an accomplice in the proliferation of human suffering and, second, to dis-incentivize engagement in reform in the social-gospel style. Morone argues American history has repeatedly cycled between neo-Puritan condemnation and social-gospel optimism. Whether changes within religious justifications for punishment have played a direct and causal role in the expansion of mass imprisonment over the past 35 years has not been empirically established, but ‘there is no question that the two are culturally congruent and mutually recognizable’ (Sullivan, 2009: 101).

Contemporary penal optimism in evangelical context The preceding history of penal optimism viewed through the lens of competing aspects of American Protestant theology has implications for indicators of penal optimism today. Bush’s views on prisoner reentry and Colson’s approach to broader penal-reform efforts provide two examples. Again, the very definitions of American Protestantism and religious entrepreneurism make pinning down consistent theological rationales for the range of an individual’s views impossible. Yet the categories of binary oppositions discussed above help to interpret and place in context the optimism apparent in the rhetoric and policies for which these men, and others, have lobbied. Prominent supporters of the reentry movement, like Bush and Colson, who explicitly justify their support with Christian theologies, appear to conceive the notion of the well-intentioned offender whose desired goal of desistance from criminality is impeded by personal, social, and structural barriers. Reentry for them is

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thus premised not on the Puritan notion of a fallen creature, ‘more or less frozen into deviant attitudes’ (Erikson, 1966: 196), but on a perfectible, or at least improvable, individual who needs the support and assistance of others to realize his/her potential (Miller, 2013). Drawing a connection between this optimism and the Quaker’s notion of the inner light seems appropriate, though few today would use such language or recognize the link. Colson (1979: 318–319) became convinced while in prison that: there was no clear distinction between good and evil men. Many who have a sense of decency and goodness in them had committed gross sins while in the grip of some kind of evil power. I no longer could accept the idea that some men simply had an evil nature.

His own evangelism, and Prison Fellowship itself, were ‘based on the simple premise that change and reform begin with changed hearts’ (Colson, 1979: 216).8 He acknowledged Calvinist beliefs in predestination and the sovereignty of God, yet Colson was driven by more than simple conversionist fervor. He was an admirer of Rauschenbusch’s compassion and seemed to identify himself as a social gospeler. He came to believe: the malaise of our society could be healed only by a profound spiritual movement . . . I yearned to learn more about the great Wesley awakening in England which sparked some of the most sweeping social reforms of modern times . . . [T]he great reforms of history . . . came about not so much because of political institutions but as a result of God’s power flowing through righteous and obedient people . . . I was discovering pockets like these all across America, simple men and women who loved God, little known Christians working for love and justice in the best tradition of 19th-century evangelicals when the church led the way in social reform. (Colson, 1979: 216–217, 221)

Bush, for his part, ‘appears to draw from a theological and ideological mosaic’ (Lindsay, 2007: 51), so his theological bearings are even more difficult to characterize. He once told journalists of his hope that his presidency would usher in a Third Great Awakening (Greenwald, 2007; Poole, 2009), but whether he had hoped such a religious revival might yield mass conversions or broader socialgospel reforms is not clear. However, Colson introduced Bush to Michael Gerson when the President was looking for a speechwriter, and Gerson, an evangelical who had previously worked for Colson, strongly influenced the President’s compassionate conservative philosophy and message (Lindsay, 2007). He is also believed by many to have actually written the clause about second chances in the 2004 State of the Union speech. Gerson echoes the compassion of the social gospel when he claims that ‘Christianity is not just a statement about personal piety; it’s a statement about social justice’ (Lindsay, 2007: 47). Bush’s Manichean view of the world is repeatedly made evident in his speeches, but for him spiritual warfare against evil appears to demand more than just martial commitments; it also requires worldly engagement and the good works that

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postmillennialist social gospelers might recognize. In a 2002 speech he said, ‘if you want to fight evil, we’ve figured out a way to do so militarily . . . But at home, you fight evil with acts of goodness. You overcome the evil in society by doing something to help somebody’ (quoted in Greenwald, 2007: 103). At the signing ceremony for the SCA the President said: It’s through the acts of mercy that compassionate Americans are making the Nation a more hopeful place . . . We believe that even those who have struggled with a dark past can find brighter days ahead. One way we act on that belief is by helping former prisoners who’ve paid for their crimes . . . The work of redemption reflects our values . . . The bill I’m signing today . . . will build on work to help prisoners reclaim their lives . . . [I]t basically says, we’re standing with you, not against you . . . [T]he Second Chance Act will live up to its name . . . It will help our armies of compassion use their healing touch so lost souls can rediscover their dignity and sense of purpose . . . [T]he least shall be first . . . (Bush, 2008)

The Bush administration’s unexpected decision to champion prisoner reentry, after decades of rampant, tough-on-crime posturing and practice from both Republicans and Democrats, appears deeply rooted in an optimistic Christian redemption theology that predates the first penitentiaries and stretches all the way back to the Quakers’ correctional enterprise of ‘friendly persuasion’ (Dumm, 1987: 65).

Penal optimism, legitimacy and the crime decline That penal optimism has begun to resonate in recent years, particularly among prominent Christian conservatives, is striking and undeniable. Penal optimism has roots in evangelical traditions, but cannot be explained solely by them. Though much more work is needed from scholars to identify the causes for this recent shift, it is plausible that religiously justified optimism in the reform potential of convicted offenders has been driven in part by a broader sense of confidence in human endeavor left in the wake of declining crime rates. Three decades of rising recorded crime abetted the pessimistic streak still evident in American penology. Rising crime in the 1960s and 1970s helped the pessimistic ‘nothing works’ message to resonate more resoundingly than it might have otherwise. As Erikson (1966: 17) points out, Merton’s (1948) idea of the self-fulfilling prophecy helps explain why: The common feeling that deviant persons never really change . . . may derive from the faulty premise; but the feeling is expressed so frequently and with such conviction that it eventually creates the facts which later ‘prove’ it to be correct.

The recent, fledgling penal optimism appears to be similarly abetted by the crime decline we have experienced since the early 1990s. And when the common feeling is

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optimistic about the prospects for offender reformation, facts and evidence accrue to support it. Studying the inverse conditions might cast light on contemporary penal optimism. Garland (2001: 107), for instance, describes how, by the early 1970s, ‘the normality of high crime rates’ undermined the legitimacy of the criminal justice system, which ‘came to be viewed in terms of its limitations and propensity for failure rather than its prospects for future success’. Dumm (1987: 73–74) suggests legitimacy is required for leniency; a regime’s belief in its legitimacy gives it the ‘confidence to forgive’. From this perspective it is plausible that falling crime rates have conferred upon agents of the criminal justice system a degree of legitimacy they previously lacked during the rising crime decades (see Gallup, 2011). The crime decline appears to have facilitated and fostered a greater sense of confidence in utilitarian criminal-justice goals, like recidivism reduction through individually tailored penal intervention, regardless of whether such confidence is empirically justified. This confidence and legitimacy could now be yielding a penal optimism dividend, allowing the State and its agents to display greater leniency than was possible heretofore. If all this is true, and much more work is need to make this determination, it suggests as well that the footholds penal optimists have recently established may not survive a sustained upsurge in crime rates, unless these footholds become more deeply, normatively established and institutionalized.

Conclusion The social science research invoked in support of either the condemnatory or reformative penal project has historically been secondary to the enthusiasm with which pessimistic or optimist approaches to offender reform have been embraced. Science has not driven these changes to the extent one might believe.9 For instance, the central coordinates of the separate and silent systems, silence, work, and moral/ religious training, were not found to be ineffective as formal guiding principles . . . [In fact] prior to the Civil War, the rates of reconviction were consistently less than 10%, with the data from the Eastern Penitentiary being the lowest. (Skotnicki, 2000: 145)

The separate system’s costs were a factor in its decline (Welch, 2011), but the disregard of the evidence of recidivism reduction shows, among other things, how deeper values about human nature and human progress shape penal practice. It also suggests that evidence of efficacy in recidivism reduction alone, even if we knew more than we currently do, would likely be an insufficient basis on which to base a penal system that retains public and political legitimacy. American history suggests penal optimism and pessimism are seldom evidence driven. Evidence is often utilized after the fact, to justify changing, a priori, normative positions and shifts in paradigms (Tonry and Green, 2003). The cycles or

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pendulum swings seen in the history of American punishment have been shaped by competing religious beliefs about human nature and the proper role for human intervention in the world. The recent enthusiasm with which recidivism reduction has been embraced suggests Americans are capable of a remarkable collective amnesia, or an equally remarkable and perennial optimism – both in human endeavor and in human capacity for change. This article endeavors to show in part that there is growing evidence of a shift – if not in the penal climate, then in the penal-policy ‘weather’ (John DiIulio, author interview, 22 July 2011). The great crime decline and the Great Recession’s constraints on corrections budgets have opened a window of opportunity (Moore, 1995; Tonry and Green, 2003) to revisit the conceptual toolbox, to rethink American penal policy and practice, to draw on a different, less pessimistic and condemnatory set of cultural and cognitive tools, many of which carry within them traces of evangelical-Christian traditions. Among the most vocal and active leaders in this shift are those with deeply held religious-moral convictions with long, historical legacies that criminology has often caricatured or overlooked. The SCA may prove to be among the first evidence of a change in the nature of contemporary penal debate, one that challenges the notion that ‘the political climate remains deeply and reflexively punitive’ (Gottschalk, 2011: 498). Traditional political orthodoxies on criminal justice appear to be shifting, and what this means for the future of penal policy remains to be seen. Whatever the case, for the first time in more than a generation there are reasons to feel hopeful about the possibility of a more deliberative and bipartisan conversation about progressive penal policy reforms, even if a misguided or overblown penal optimism in instrumental aims of recidivism reduction is first required to begin what must become – following Tonry, Colson, Nolan, Gerson, and Wehner – a normative conversation about values. Acknowledgements This project was generously supported by a fellowship from the Straus Institute for the Advanced Study of Law & Justice at New York University. I am especially grateful to David Garland and Jim Jacobs, and to my colleagues in the 2010–2011 Straus Fellows cohort. Thanks also to my CUNY colleagues from the Faculty Fellowship Publication Program for their suggestions on early drafts. Special thanks to Gene Guerrero and Pat Nolan for their generosity.

Notes 1. ‘Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you’ (Ephesians 4:31–32); ‘Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, ‘‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord’’’ (Romans 12:19); ‘You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord’ (Leviticus 19:18).

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2. DiIulio is actually a Democrat and ‘a self-described born-again Catholic’ (Lindsay, 2007: 49). He also served as the first head of the Bush White House’s Office of FaithBased and Community Initiatives in 2001. 3. Unlike most at Prison Fellowship who are Protestant evangelicals, Pat Nolan is Catholic. See Nolan (2004). 4. The enthusiasm of the past decade in the area of faith-based initiatives was shaken in December 2006 when a US District Court judge in Iowa found unconstitutional the in-prison InnerChange Freedom Initiative (IFI) program developed by Prison Fellowship Ministries. See Sullivan (2009). 5. Contrary to popular stereotypes, Lindsay (2007: 28) claims ‘fully 70 percent of American evangelicals do not identify with the Religious Right’. 6. Penn’s ‘holy experiment’ of Quaker rule in Pennsylvania predated the establishment of the first penitentiaries by a century. Penn himself had experienced imprisonment, and ‘the Quaker[s’] concern with toleration was a result of their [own] experience as victims of intolerance’ (Dumm, 1987: 77). In 1682, while the English penal code listed 200 capital offenses, the Quakers sought ‘to establish institutions which would redeem rather than torture’ and Pennsylvania’s criminal law designated willful murder the sole capital crime (Dumm, 1987: 65, 78). 7. This notion of human depravity is deeply embedded in American political culture, in the endemic distrust of those in power, and in the separation of powers: ‘Thus, the Constitution had to be designed in such a way as to curb the darker side of human nature’ (Wilson et al., 2011: 86). 8. Of the 360 evangelicals Lindsay (2007: 58) interviewed who served in prominent leadership positions across American society between 1976 and 2006, Colson, he judged, had the ‘greatest influence’. 9. Though the ‘nothing works’ consensus that Martinson’s (1974) report propelled in the 1970s had an empirical basis, rehabilitation had been questioned long before then (Allen, 1964; Lewis, 1949/1987). The reception of Martinson’s message was facilitated by a larger-scale shift away from the paradigm of indeterminate sentencing and individualized treatment, toward a religiously tinged pessimism about offender reform.

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David A Green is Assistant Professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY. He is the author of When Children Kill Children: Penal Populism and Political Culture (2008, Oxford University Press), winner of the 2009 British Society of Criminology Book Prize. His work has been published in Crime and Justice – A Review of Research, British Journal of Criminology, European Journal of Criminology, Sociology Compass, and Crime, Media, Culture.