| The project identifies parallel pitfalls and shared qualities in social change movements that earnestly struggle, but fail, to effect substantive benevolent penal change. Findings show that various properties consistently found in their expression contribute to, or ensure, a recurrently regressive outcome---thus accounting for how collective action aimed at reducing and substantially altering the punishment system ultimately grows and embeds it. The study examines the latest wave of benevolent reform, restorative justice, and demonstrates that this cycle is again underway. In addition, the analysis asserts that the United States' persistent penal reform rut is not inevitable and can be interrupted and redirected.; Such inquiry is pressing as criminal justice discourse tends to reify the existing penal reform schema and is somewhat cynical regarding meaningful change. The country's penal repertoire swells, growing ever more costly in both human and financial terms, and continues to fall short of its stated aims or satisfy the public's will. By identifying specific characteristics that facilitate this repeated outcome a way out of an enduring penological paradox, one in which the struggle for change reinforces the status quo, is forged.; Building on the work of Armand Mauss this study asserts a new social movement type, a 'regressive' model, that is used to frame the careers of various American benevolent penal reforms. Regressive campaigns, the study demonstrates, have all the traditional sociological markers of movement success (significant logistical gains and legitimacy granted to its ideas or participants) and yet are actually failures that serve to intensify and further embed that which they aimed to replace. To chart the character of regressive movements and uncover what properties contribute to their unique outcome the study examines and compares three benevolent penal reform campaigns--- the penitentiary, the adult reformatory, and parole, and builds a "regressive reform profile" (RRP). The comparative analysis uses a set of eight movement characteristics to (1) assemble the RRP, (2) demonstrate the pattern of regressive movements in the penal sphere, (3) explore and account for how sincere action goes 'wrong,' and (4) test whether the restorative justice movement is delivering a repeat performance. |
