TY - JOUR
AU - O'Brien, Cyrus J
AB - In the 1960s and 1970s, the United States built an enormous infrastructure for community treatment: more than sixty-five thousand beds in halfway houses and similar small-scale residential facilities. By promising to displace prisons and to establish forms of intervention that were less expensive, less restrictive, less dependent on institutional confinement, more effective in rehabilitation, and more humane, halfway houses became linchpins of criminal and juvenile justice systems, drug and alcohol treatment, and other court-ordered interventions. Nationwide zeal for community treatment caused the number of correctional halfway houses to explode from fewer than twelve in 1960 to more than two thousand in 1978. That year, more than two hundred thousand people spent time in residential treatment facilities, as common a fixture of 1970s American life as roller-skating rinks. The total capacity of all U.S. halfway houses rivaled the number of prison beds in California, New York, and Texas combined.1 Despite their treatment-focused, anti-institutional, and humane rationales, community treatment initiatives matured to become part of the broader infrastructures of punishment and confinement that characterized mass incarceration. By the late 1970s, “virtually all” people in halfway houses and similar facilities were confined involuntarily and risked incarceration in traditional prisons if they absconded or failed to comply with their treatment regimen. The staff at community treatment centers monitored residents' movements, controlled their material possessions, enforced work schedules, and oversaw their relationships to family and friends—typically in close coordination with probation and parole officers. Increasingly, administrators generated funding for community treatment initiatives by levying fees on residents or seizing a portion of their wages. Private groups—many of which were religious—operated a significant majority of community treatment programs, leaving community treatment initiatives particularly vulnerable to the pull of profit and the pressures of economies of scale; facing these financial realities, administrators allowed facilities to grow larger and adopt more institutional practices, such as regimented schedules and locking doors, to more efficiently manage people in large groups. For all its promises to create new and humane forms of court intervention by offering an alternative to the prison, the halfway house movement replicated prisons' technologies for surveillance, control, confinement, and management. Embraced in the 1960s because it seemed to be the opposite of the traditional prison, the halfway house by the 1980s had come to resemble the object of its antipathy.2 This essay traces the trajectory of community treatment in the second half of the twentieth century to demonstrate that the development of mass incarceration depended on the logics of rehabilitation and the existence of alternatives to imprisonment in addition to increased investments in policing and punishment. Until recently, the prevailing scholarship attributed the exponential increase in U.S. prison populations to the public's embrace of punitive and exclusionary policies in the latter half of the twentieth century. Scholars saw phenomena such as California's infamous “three strikes” law, the widespread prosecution of children as adults, increasingly punitive sentences for drugs, and the withering of prison rehabilitation programs as emblematic of “a punitive turn.” Politicians and the public grew so enthusiastic for punishment that they spurred what Marie Gottschalk has called “a bidding war on tough-on-crime” policies. Scholars focused on the criminal justice system's tremendous racial disparities and argued, with good cause, that mass incarceration functioned as “the New Jim Crow” or a new iteration of America's “peculiar institutions”; like slavery, convict leasing, and de jure segregation, mass incarceration acted to preserve the hierarchies of a racial caste system. This first wave of scholarship tended to conceive of mass incarceration as a conservative response intended to roll back many of the gains Black Americans had won through protests, boycotts, litigation, legislative campaigns, and other struggles during the American civil rights movement. This “backlash” argument points out that many of the “collateral consequences” of imprisonment or a felony conviction are the inverse of the rights secured through federal legislation in the 1960s. Indeed, many U.S. states used felony convictions to nullify rights supposedly ensured through the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. These scholars note that in its material realities and in its socially disparate manifestations, mass incarceration has served the regressive and racist politics of America's political and racial conservatives.3 In the past few years, a new body of scholarship has emphasized that the origins of mass incarceration lie in liberal as well as conservative politics and that almost every constituency in America has supported more policing and incarceration. Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, James Forman Jr., Elizabeth Hinton, and Naomi Murakawa make clear that political consensus defined the domain of “tough-on-crime” politics. They also demonstrate that the politics that resulted in mass incarceration were deeply connected to broader debates about the roles of the American state in providing welfare; combating poverty; and guaranteeing social, financial, and physical security. Mass incarceration was not simply a conservative backlash to the civil rights movement; liberals were the architects of many of its mechanisms and suppositions. The Johnson administration committed itself to antipoverty efforts, but its racial ideas about the causes of poverty gave rise to coercive interventions in urban areas and allowed the War on Poverty to almost seamlessly transition to a war on crime. Black communities and leaders who pressed for more and fairer policing as part of a broader initiative for economic and social justice did not win parks, jobs, or effective government, but they did win more police, prisons, and jails. The same state infrastructures that the federal government had leveraged to enforce school desegregation and wage the War on Poverty were later used to funnel massive expenditures to state and local governments for imprisoning and monitoring millions of Americans, especially those who lived in urban areas.4 This essay makes three contributions to histories of penology, mass incarceration, and the American state. First, the speed and ease with which treatment initiatives became part of the punitive carceral state calls attention to the multiple points of convergence between liberal treatment regimes and the more punitive penologies against which they defined themselves. Although liberal treatment and law-and-order punishment could hardly have differed more in ideological orientation—one emphasized social reintegration; the other sought social and political exclusion—in their material practices they relied on many of the same mechanisms and technologies. Community treatment initiatives replicated, if in somewhat diluted form, prisons' capacities for surveillance, involuntary confinement, and extractive labor. Moreover, they acquired their legitimacy and secured the compliance of their residents from their adjacency to traditional prisons: Administrators secured compliance from people targeted for treatment through threats of incarceration in a more restrictive facility. A central argument of this essay is that treatment and punishment are not dichotomous but are twin centerpieces of America's criminal justice systems that deploy nearly identical technologies for control, surveillance, and confinement. Second, this essay extends an important trend in recent scholarship to expand histories of mass incarceration to arenas beyond traditional prisons. Community treatment centers, halfway houses, and mental asylums were all sites of involuntary confinement, even if their stated missions obscured this fact (both to policy makers of the time and to contemporary historians). In the mid-1950s, mental asylums held three times as many Americans as did prisons. In the late 1970s, the sixty thousand people confined to halfway houses equaled one-fifth of the nation's prison population. Broadening the genealogy of mass incarceration to encompass halfway houses and other sites of involuntary confinement helps reveal that, at key moments, rehabilitative interventions expanded and legitimated the carceral state. New forms of more “humane” community treatment—alongside increased police presence as part of “wars” on crime and drugs—habituated Americans to an increasingly interventionist criminal justice regime rooted in involuntary confinement.5 Third, the trajectory of community treatment initiatives in the United States requires a reconsideration of the relationship between private interests and the carceral state. Private interests—especially religious organizations—played pivotal roles in funding, expanding, and legitimating state intervention. Public-private collaboration arose organically as a practical response to the challenges state agencies faced in establishing smaller facilities in urban areas, but private capital proved essential in building an enormous infrastructure for involuntary confinement. The public's trust in religious organizations insulated these arrangements from critical examination, allowing them to serve as incubators for the nascent tendrils of the carceral state. Relatedly, this essay provides a new history of prison privatization by demonstrating that the roots of the private prison industry lie in small-scale, nonsecure treatment initiatives rather than the maximum-security arrangements that have attracted the most controversy. Notwithstanding inevitable jurisdictional variations, nearly all community treatment initiatives followed a path toward increasing control, exploitation, and punishment, regardless of whether they were in the relatively punitive criminal justice territory of the Deep South or the relatively liberal prison systems of the upper Midwest and Northeast. Individual organizations mirrored the national trajectory of the halfway house movement most closely in states that embraced community treatment as a liberal criminal justice reform. Massachusetts Halfway Houses, Inc., for instance, began as an outgrowth of a prison ministry, providing voluntary room and board to people recently released from prison. In 1969 the organization contracted with the Massachusetts Parole Board to house its first nonvoluntary residents, people under parole supervision who risked return to prison if they quit the program. After the 1972 passage of legislation establishing community corrections in Massachusetts, which Governor Francis Sargent announced at Massachusetts Halfway Houses, Inc., the organization opened a new facility. It soon established a pretrial diversion program for federal criminal defendants, under which participants would see their charges dropped if they stayed at the facility and complied with the halfway house's rules. In 1974 the organization contracted with the Massachusetts Department of Corrections to confine “pre-release residents,” a euphemism that referred to people who legally remained prisoners. Though they lived alongside people who were not prisoners, prerelease residents could be returned to state prison for any reason—or for no reason—at the discretion of state authorities. Between 1975 and 1980, Massachusetts Halfway Houses, Inc. entered into contracts with local governments to operate an array of criminal justice programs ranging from employment assistance to drug abuse treatment. By the end of its fifteenth year of existence, what had begun as a small outreach ministry had become a multimillion-dollar operation that contracted with every level of government (federal, state, county, and city) to confine 1,200 people per year. Commonalities in the structures of community treatment initiatives overwhelmed the pull of regional or cultural factors.6 This essay narrates a national history of treatment centers using evidence from Illinois, Florida, and the Federal Bureau of Prisons. In addition to maintaining accessible records, these systems played crucial roles as models for a national movement: Illinois birthed the halfway house, the Federal Bureau of Prisons replicated and regulated it, and Florida demonstrated the profitability of fusing treatment and control. I also use evidence from Texas, where the centralized, statewide nature of the Texas Youth Commission affords an understanding of how community treatment reshaped entire justice systems. Though community-level studies promise to show how community treatment transformed urban neighborhoods and reshaped metropolitan space, evidence from the systems discussed here demonstrate how community treatment legitimated state intervention on an unprecedented scale and helped create the national condition of mass incarceration. The first section of this essay briefly captures the liberal origins of halfway houses, emphasizing the role religious groups played in establishing them in the 1950s. Using as a case study the nation's first correctional halfway house, St. Leonard's House in Chicago, I show that halfway houses were practical responses to shortcomings in midcentury penal systems that gave thousands of people without strong family ties little prospect of release on parole. The second section analyzes the fervor for “community treatment” in corrections and its emergence as the national model for prison systems in the 1960s and early 1970s. Troubled by the tendency of prisons to “institutionalize” prisoners, policy makers seized on the example of the religious halfway house as an alternative to traditional prisons. Reflecting a broad consensus about institutions' tendencies to harm their inmates, the 1967 President's Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice hailed community-based facilities as “the antithesis of the traditional, fortress-like prison” and imagined them as centers for treatment and education. As social-welfare agencies at all levels of government poured funding into halfway houses, they became linchpins not only of prison systems but also of pretrial detention, probation and parole, mental health and drug treatment, juvenile justice, and welfare regimes. The third section examines the forces that transformed institutions intended for treatment into extensions of an emerging and punitive carceral state. New and expanded federal funding initiatives in the 1970s and into the 1980s funneled millions of dollars to state corrections agencies, allowing them to displace social-welfare agencies as the primary sources of funding for community treatment initiatives. This shift granted oversight of community treatment to current and former prison administrators who generally combined a weak ideological commitment to treatment with a practiced affinity for institutional modes of management and control. Under the oversight of institutionally minded administrators, halfway houses strengthened their mechanisms for control, surveillance, and exploitation—even as they continued to discursively espouse treatment and rehabilitation.7 Halfway houses melded treatment with control to forge a durable combination capable of winning acolytes almost irrespective of penological ideology. To liberal reformers, community treatment promised rehabilitation and the opportunity of a second chance. To people invested in law and order, the material practices of community treatment guaranteed near-constant surveillance, confinement, and control. The seemingly divergent possibilities of community treatment did not represent a contradiction but instead formed the basis of a consensus that drove unprecedented investments in correctional infrastructure and propelled the United States into an era of racialized mass incarceration. In highlighting the affinities of treatment and punishment, this essay challenges a fundamental dichotomy that has framed both scholarly and public policy debates about criminal justice, welfare, and other forms of state intervention. Informal Religious Beginnings Halfway houses became part of America's correctional landscape in the 1950s in response to shortcomings of parole systems that made securing release on parole difficult for people without strong family ties. In the mid-1950s, Christian groups founded halfway houses in a handful of cities. By providing a place to live and a framework for seeking employment, early halfway houses were a pathway out of imprisonment for many prisoners who struggled to make parole. The daily administration of halfway houses drew religious organizations into deeper relationships with prison systems and, in the 1950s and 1960s, these religious organizations became critical of criminal justice systems' other obvious failings, especially pervasive racial disparities and the prisons' tendency to “institutionalize” inmates. An examination of the case of St. Leonard's House, the nation's first correctional halfway house, demonstrates the trajectory of the halfway house movement. As the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare noted in 1967, “St. Leonard's philosophy may be said to represent the philosophy of halfway houses everywhere.”8 The Episcopal priest James G. Jones founded St. Leonard's House on Chicago's Near West Side in 1954. Jones worked as volunteer chaplain at Cook County Jail and, through his prison ministry, encountered many prisoners who, because of the parole procedures, were left in prison with little prospect of release. Like most U.S. criminal justice systems at midcentury, Illinois and Cook County embraced the tenets of “modern penology.” Rather than releasing prisoners after they had served a term fixed at a sentencing, criminal justice administrators utilized discretionary release mechanisms, such as parole. The rationale of parole was that “experts” could evaluate each prisoner's case and determine whether he had been successfully rehabilitated and appeared ready to adjust to life outside prison. Parole officials were also concerned that a prisoner might become public charge if released, so they required prisoners to find a suitable place to live and to secure a paying job before their release.9 Housing and employment could be difficult to attain from prison, and most prisoners relied on family members to negotiate with prospective landlords and employers, whose letters of support were required for prisoners seeking release on parole. Prisoners who lacked or had weak family ties struggled to secure housing and employment, often languishing in prison as a result. In many cases, prisoners with weak family ties remained incarcerated long after parole officials seemed inclined to release them. By one estimate, one in ten prisoners in 1965 was incarcerated past his prospective release date, unable to produce the documentation for parole without support from kin. The functioning of modern penology, in other words, depended nearly as much on the labor of prisoners' families as that of experts such as parole officers and social workers. Without familial support and labor, prison and parole systems ground to a frustrating halt, stranding tens of thousands of people in prison with greatly diminished prospects for release.10 For prisoners poor in kin, prison ministry efforts were a lifeline of sorts, connecting them to relatively well-resourced religious groups such as the Episcopal Church, the Catholic Church, and the American Society of Friends. Christian groups felt “called” to prisons in part by Matthew 25:36 (“I was in prison and you came to visit me”) and were welcomed by prison administrators who saw utility in some forms of Christianity that promised to reform, redeem, or, at minimum, help manage their charges. Notably, all or nearly all religious outsiders allowed in American prisons during this period were white and Christian, as administrators perceived Black-led religious groups to be subversive. Incarcerated Black Americans, especially those who were not Christian, practiced religion without the sanction of administrators or the benefit of outside volunteers. In addition to leading worship services and Bible study groups in prison, religious volunteers often helped kinless prisoners find housing or employment that would satisfy parole authorities and facilitate their release. Jones, for instance, shared his apartment with former prisoners and asked members of his congregation to offer jobs to people in prison so they could be released. For such prisoners, religious groups fulfilled the functions of family that modern penology took for granted.11 In establishing St. Leonard's House in 1954, Jones hoped to scale up his efforts to help people get out of prison. He convinced the Episcopal Dioceses of Chicago to allow him to use an abandoned house it owned, which accommodated seven or eight men at a time but fell far short of meeting demand. In 1956 St. Leonard's expanded into a large house on Warren Avenue adjacent to an Episcopal church. The building soon housed twenty-five men (they later added six beds for women), all of whom had struggled to attain parole because they lacked strong family ties. As was the case for most criminal justice policies in the post–World War II United States, women were an afterthought for halfway house administrators. Until the 1980s, few programs prioritized women in halfway house design or implementation.12 St. Leonard's House accepted released prisoners through informal agreements with the state. Prisoners typically learned of the house through prison chaplains or religious volunteers, who would make arrangements for their release to the facility. Far from institutionalizing the relationship between St. Leonard's House and the state, the parole board approved releases to the halfway house on a case-by-case basis for the first several years of its existence, allowing the house to stand in as an employer for the purpose of parole applications. After operating the house for four years, Jones incorporated St. Leonard's House in 1958 as an agency of the Episcopal Church, apparently so that it could accept state funds from the Illinois Department of Public Welfare's Division of Alcoholism for a consulting psychologist, who visited once per week. The halfway house had “close” relationships to correctional authorities in both the Illinois Parole Board and the U.S. District Court Probation and Parole Office, but, until the mid-1960s, none of these relationships were formal or even documented. Good relations with parole officials were facilitated by the fact that St. Leonard's House employees performed many state functions, and the house is best understood as part of what Brian Balogh calls the “associational state.” Private employees ensured that resident parolees complied with curfews, reported to work, and avoided drugs and alcohol, thereby relieving parole officers of many of the tasks of supervision.13 Many halfway house administrators expressed concern about “the disease of institutionalization” caused by the “totalitarian” conditions of prison. They believed that prison made people anxious, paralyzed their decision making, and left them unable to function outside of institutional settings. “Inmate institutionalization is often observed at St. Leonard's House among men who are recently released from prison,” Robert Taylor wrote in 1960. “It is a result of the complete adjustment of the inmate to the totally artificial conditions of prison life.” Halfway house advocates began to speak of prisoners as “victims of penal institutions,” and Jones decried prisons as “too large to produce anything but anonymous, nameless, de-baptized members.” Increasingly, Jones and Taylor began to see prisons as inherently flawed due to the institutions' geographical and social separation from society. As Taylor wrote, “the pains of institutionalization derive from the distance between the institution and the free community.”14 Daily life in the religious halfway houses of the 1950s and early 1960s largely accorded with the anti-institutional bent of their administrators. The facilities were small, organized around discourses of “family,” and had relatively few rules and regulations. When new “guests” arrived at St. Leonard's House, they were welcomed with prayers such as this one from 1961: “For Willis, Richard, and Leo, our newest guests, that they may rapidly become a part of our family.” St. Leonard's House accommodated most residents in group rooms but provided private rooms to its newest residents, conspicuously flipping the usual institutional procedures whereby the newest inmates occupy an inferior status and earn privileges such as increased privacy over time. The house offered several therapeutic programs—Alcoholics Anonymous, group therapy, occupational assistance, and psychological counseling—all of which were voluntary. The residents, 80 to 85 percent of whom were African American, shared “family-style” dinners at a single large table in the basement. Each resident of St. Leonard's House was required to pay $2 a day to offset the costs of running the house, but most of the funding through the mid-1960s came from Episcopal charities. In stark contrast to later arrangements, residents of St. Leonard's House stayed voluntarily.15 The white liberal Christians who operated halfway houses saw them as one component of a larger civil rights mission. Jones denounced racial disparities in the criminal justice system and linked them to a far-reaching system of oppression that he likened to biblical slavery. Within the Episcopal Church, the leaders of St. Leonard's House were among the most critical of the church's modest civil rights platform, which Jones criticized as “pathetically inept.” The church, he wrote, did not “exhibit a sufficient or serious familiarity with the scope, … pathology, or desperation of the racial crisis among both black and white in either the South or North.” In 1961 Jones and Taylor participated in a Freedom Ride of Episcopal clergy and were arrested upon their arrival in Jackson, Mississippi. To raise publicity, the duo remained in jail—mostly in solitary confinement—for more than two weeks. The experience caused Jones to fear “the whole idea of being incarcerated” and spurred him to make changes to distance St. Leonard's House from institutional practices.16 In the late 1950s, liberal, predominantly white Christian groups in other cities replicated the St. Leonard's House model. By 1961, halfway houses operated in Chicago; St. Louis; Pittsburg; Toronto; Los Angeles; Wilmington, Delaware; and Windsor, Canada. Like St. Leonard's House, these emerged from efforts to help prisoners without strong family ties achieve release on parole, grew through informal relationships with the state, and organized their interiors through metaphors of family rather than via institutional practices.17 Open in new tabDownload slide The Episcopal priest James G. Jones is shown here in the booking photo for his 1961 arrest in Jackson, Mississippi, for participating in the freedom rides. Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, “Episcopal Clergy Freedom Rider Mug Shot,” Sept. 13, 1961, 2-55-7-26-1-1-1ph, Series 2515, Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission Records Online, 1994–2006. Courtesy Archives and Records Services Division, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson. Open in new tabDownload slide The Episcopal priest James G. Jones is shown here in the booking photo for his 1961 arrest in Jackson, Mississippi, for participating in the freedom rides. Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, “Episcopal Clergy Freedom Rider Mug Shot,” Sept. 13, 1961, 2-55-7-26-1-1-1ph, Series 2515, Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission Records Online, 1994–2006. Courtesy Archives and Records Services Division, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson. “The Future of Corrections” Enthusiasm for halfway houses erupted in 1961 as the Federal Bureau of Prisons (Fbop) embraced the new facilities. Shortly after taking office as attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy met with James V. Bennett, the longtime director of the Fbop, to develop a strategy to address high rates of recidivism from federal prisons. Like Jones and Taylor, Kennedy and Bennett believed that the corrosive and deindividualizing effects of institutions contributed to the failure of the federal prison system. Without explicit congressional authority, Kennedy and Bennett opened “pre-release guidance centers” for youth in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and, later, Detroit. Thesse halfway house facilities were small—containing only twenty beds—and they received young men from federal youth prisons who were uniformly deemed to be poor candidates for parole because they had no families willing or able to sponsor them.18 Halfway houses appealed to Kennedy, Bennett, and other officials because they departed from what were seen as prisons' most problematic characteristics while also maintaining mechanisms for surveillance and control. Prisons were large; halfway houses were small. Prisons reinforced stigmatized social positions through uniforms and explicit hierarchies; halfway houses obscured them by allowing residents to wear street clothes and organizing interaction around the concept of family. Most significantly, prisons were often located in remote and sparsely populated areas; halfway houses could be located in the urban centers that white liberal reformers believed to be incubators of crime and delinquency. At the same moment that Kennedy and Bennett endorsed community treatment, they took steps to close facilities most emblematic of social separation such as the federal prison on Alcatraz Island, the epitome of a “fortress-like” prison.19 The idea of “reintegrating” and rehabilitating people within their communities instead of transporting them to remote prisons reflected rapidly changing conceptions of deviance and criminality in the 1960s that viewed criminality as a social ill, not as solely as individual pathology or moral corruption. In 1966 the American Correctional Association (Aca) affirmed its appreciation of the social factors influencing crime, writing that “efforts to rehabilitate offenders will only be as successful as the willingness and tolerance of the community to accept them.” Social acceptance entailed not only friendships and romantic relationships but also the ability to find and hold a job and achieve a stable domestic life. Like welfare initiatives and the Civilian Conservation Corps, these were fundamentally gendered and racialized projects that pathologized African American families and sought to remold residents as appropriately masculine, heterosexual, breadwinning heads of household. A major part of the appeal of halfway houses was their offer of an intermediate step between prison and community that enabled state oversight of work and family life.20 Bridging the divide between prison and community was easier said than done. As the Bureau of Prisons set out to open halfway houses for youth in the “semideteriorated sections” of the country's largest cities in 1961, its efforts were stymied by the fact that the Fbop owned few facilities in urban areas (none suitable for halfway houses) and had few ties to local community organizations. When newly appointed program directors set out to locate suitable spaces, all decided to lease or purchase facilities from religious organizations. In New York, Chicago, and Detroit, the Fbop leased properties from the Young Men's Christian Association. In Los Angeles the Fbop purchased space from a Baptist seminary. Though such collaborations between the state and religious groups were purely practical, they were an early indication that expansion of halfway houses would depend on private as much as public interests.21 Residential community treatment centers proliferated because of their ability to work in the service of the two most commonly implemented strategies to reduce institutional confinement: diversion and decarceration. The premise of diversion was that treatment-based interventions could replace imprisonment. People facing prison time could be “diverted” into an alternative treatment program instead. Decarceration involved transitioning people already in institutional facilities to less restrictive settings, in the same way that halfway houses in the late 1950s and early 1960s had accommodated people who otherwise would have remained in prison. Nearly every state adopted decarceration reforms such as work release, furlough, community placements, and conditional release programs—all borrowing elements from the halfway house model.22 The 1966 Narcotic Addict Rehabilitation Act (Nara) encapsulated the promises of diversion and decarceration—and foreshadowed the structural perils of such reforms. The act grew out of the 1963 President's Advisory Committee on Narcotic and Drug Abuse recommendation that Congress enact a federal civil commitment statute that would “provide an alternative method of handling the federally convicted offender.” Title I of Nara (the diversionary “Civil Commitment in Lieu of Prosecution”) allowed some defendants facing drug charges to avoid criminal prosecution and instead be civilly committed to “a residential treatment center” for up to three years. To be eligible for civil commitment, a defendant had to be examined and found to be “an addict … likely to be rehabilitated through treatment.” Defendants with more than one prior conviction or who faced charges for a violent offense or burglary were excluded from the diversion program. Alongside the diversion program discussed in Title I, Nara contained a decarceration reform in Title II, which allowed courts to sentence people convicted of drug offenses to residential treatment for up to ten years and to conditionally release prisoners “as if on parole,” provided they remained supervised in residential drug treatment programs. Noncompliance with treatment could result in the revocation of conditional release and a return to federal prison. Title III signaled the potential expansion of state capacity that often accompanied such reforms. The “Civil Commitment of Persons Not Charged with Criminal Offenses” gave federal courts the authority to confine people who had no contact with the criminal justice system. Importantly, Nara authorized the Fbop and the surgeon general to contract with private organizations for the custody and treatment of civilly committed narcotic addicts, ensuring that community treatment would take place largely in private facilities.23 In 1967 the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice built on the principles of Nara to strongly endorse community treatment as well as privatization. Like the administrators of St. Leonard's House, members of the commission found little to praise in institutional prisons. They wrote that many prisons were “unspeakably brutal and degrading” and, in others, prisoners lived in “conditions scarcely distinguishable from slavery.” The causes of these problems, according to the commission, lay primarily in prisons' “isolation from the outside world.” The commission recommended that corrections agencies resolve these concerns by embracing “community-based treatment”—primarily interventions based on the halfway house model. The commission recommended “the development of an entirely new kind of correctional institution.” “Architecturally and methodologically the antithesis of the traditional fortress-like prison,” the new facility would be “located close to population centers; maintaining close relationships with schools, employers, and universities; [and] housing as few as 50 inmates.” The new facilities would reflect prevailing rehabilitative ideologies positing that reform was best accomplished within everyday social settings. They would architecturally “resemble as much as possible a normal residential setting. Rooms, for example, would have doors rather than bars,” and residents would leave the facility during the day to work. Having a steady job would not only smooth the process for release but would also allow residents to accumulate modest savings, which they could use to rent an apartment or buy a car after their discharge. As commission members groped for alternatives to institutionalization, they seized on the halfway house model.24 The commission imagined this new kind of facility as a magic bullet for a barrage of social problems. Not only would it eliminate the harms of institutionalization for all but the most dangerous people but it would also be a place that provided group therapy, psychiatric counseling, job training, education, and drug treatment—all while keeping people close to their families. It would be a reception center, a diagnostic center, a treatment center, a work-release center, and a prerelease guidance center. It would get some people out of prison faster, prevent the imprisonment of others, and provide services and counseling to a broad (and ill-defined) class of people. The President's Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice also charted a purposeful path toward privatization. As the commission endorsed unprecedented investments in community facilities, it recommended that the Fbop “divest itself systematically of much of its present direct service to offenders … [and] operate fewer institutions and community correctional programs.” The commission instructed the Fbop to outsource its operation to state corrections agencies or to private groups rather than operating facilities directly. The commission's zeal for privatization was far from subtle: “Private groups have an opportunity to play a most important role in bringing about needed changes in corrections.”25 Funding poured in from many of the initiatives of the Great Society and the War on Poverty to create facilities as “hubs for community treatment operations.” The Office of Economic Opportunity funded job training in halfway houses. The National Institute for Mental Health allocated money for drug treatment and mental health programs. The Department of Labor; the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare; and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, through the Model Cities initiative, underwrote an explosive expansion of halfway houses in the late-1960s. Analogous social-welfare agencies at the state level also poured money into community treatment initiatives, opening state-run facilities and funding private ones. Large charitable foundations such as the United Way joined the halfway house movement, funding private facilities across the country, including St. Leonard's House.26 In the late 1960s and early 1970s, halfway houses seemed to be the future of corrections. State-by-state variations largely centered on the extent to which halfway houses would displace institutional prisons as the main sites for criminal justice intervention, but all accepted the proposition that community treatment would play a central role. Even the Aca, a group historically resistant to all but the most cosmetic reforms, endorsed community treatment, touting its use “in lieu of imprisonment” and proclaiming that the practice would be “one of tomorrow's frontiers in corrections.” The Aca also offered a prescient warning about community corrections centers: “It is necessary and important that these centers do not become ‘prisons’ in the community.”27 From Community Treatment to Community Control In the 1970s, halfway houses morphed from places of community treatment into forces for community control. This shift was most evident in halfway houses' tendencies to expand the reach of U.S. criminal justice systems to new populations and to adopt institutional modes of management, surveillance, and control. Though involuntary confinement was built into the structure of most community treatment initiatives, their coercive characteristics had been muted in the 1960s, largely because community treatment initiatives were funded by social-welfare agencies and administered by people opposed to institutional confinement. The small size of halfway houses and the hesitance of their administrators to resort to more restrictive types of confinement (namely, institutional imprisonment or punitive solitary confinement) ensured that halfway houses were categorically different from institutional prisons. Over the course of the 1970s, the factors responsible for the qualitative differences between halfway houses and prisons disintegrated. As their funding and oversight shifted from social-welfare to corrections agencies, community treatment facilities grew and administrators made the lives of their residents more regimented and controlled. By the end of the decade, life in a community treatment facility was barely distinguishable from life in prison. The 1968 Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act funneled millions of dollars in federal funding to state and local law enforcement agencies for community corrections and halfway house initiatives. In 1970 the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (Leaa) gave $58 million in grants for adult corrections, “the general thrust [of which] … was predominantly to support community-based programs.” Leaa designated another $20 million to community-based interventions for juveniles. All told, these monies intended for community treatment represented 36 percent of all Leaa funding in 1970. Following the flow of federal funds, the administration and oversight of halfway houses shifted decisively toward corrections agencies.28 The shift in funding from social welfare to corrections agencies transferred oversight of community corrections facilities to administrators with few qualms about the problems of institutionalization or inhumane treatment. Louie Wainwright, the director of the Florida Division of Corrections, typified many of the new administrators. Pledging to “use every tool possible to correct [offenders'] deficiencies—whether they be physical, medical, [or] emotional,” Wainwright invested in drug treatment, education, and rehabilitation and vocational programs. Wainwright's enthusiasm for treatment established him as a national leader in corrections, and the Aca elected him as president in 1971. Wainwright's zeal for treatment, however, in no way precluded institutional confinement or using punishment as a tool for management. In an interview, Wainwright made clear his ideology about how to manage people in his custody: “I always tried to let them know that I'd treat 'em like a man if they let me treat 'em like a man. And if they didn't, I'd treat 'em like I had to, to make them behave in prison.” Rehabilitation and treatment, for Wainwright, were fully compatible with the punitive practices of physical violence, solitary confinement, and restricted rations.29 Administrators with little ideological opposition to institutionalization risked aggravating the structural tendencies of community treatment programs to expand the reach of criminal justice systems and to revert to more punitive mechanisms for inmate management. As with Nara Title III, diversion programs risked “widening the net,” targeting people who would have had little or no interaction with criminal justice systems. Decarceration might add to rather than reduce confinement. Instead of using halfway houses and strategies such as furlough to move people out of prison more quickly, administrators came to see them as prerequisites for release. “The community institution is not used to replace the prison,” the physicist turned sociologist David Greenberg wrote in 1975. “Instead, the offender is exposed to both the prison and the community ‘alternative.’”30 The widespread embrace of community treatment coincided with a massive restructuring of local law enforcement that exacerbated the structural problems inherent in diversion programs. Billions of dollars in cash infusions from the federal government vastly expanded the ability of police to arrest, sheriffs to detain, and prosecutors to file charges—especially in cases involving lower-level offenses. The intermediary position of community treatment initiatives—not quite prison, not fully diversionary—meant that they absorbed into the criminal justice system people who previously would have experienced little or no court involvement. For most people subject to community treatment programs, halfway houses were less an alternative to prison than an alternative to freedom. Efforts in Texas to use halfway houses to replace institutional confinement for juveniles are particularly illustrative of diversion programs' potential to expand the reach of justice systems. In 1970 the Texas Youth Council (Tyc), led by Ron Jackson, a former director of the state's juvenile prison in Brownwood, won $75,000 in Leaa funding to establish a diversion-based halfway house to reduce confinement in the state's juvenile prisons. Another federal grant in 1974 prompted the Tyc to initiate a “residential contract program” to treat children in privately operated community-based facilities. In the second half of the 1970s the Tyc expanded its contracting initiatives to such an extent that, in 1981, Texas confined children in ninety-five privately operated residential facilities and in previously existing institutions. (The Salvation Army was among the Tyc's biggest contractors.) The Tyc's community-based initiatives failed to be truly diversionary because they allowed the confinement of “predelinquent” youth alongside children who had been formally adjudicated in juvenile courts. The expansion of carceral settings for youth who had not violated a criminal law undermined due process protections at the same time that it brought more children into contact with the justice system. The predelinquent label also aggravated racial and ethnic disparities. Counterintuitively, Texas prosecutors were almost 20 percent more likely to intervene in predelinquent cases than in cases where a child was accused of a misdemeanor law violation—apparently because intervention with predelinquent children was heralded as “delinquency prevention.” In 1978 Tyc celebrated the “closing” of the century-old juvenile prison at Gatesville, but these gains were overwhelmed by the number of children newly confined in residential halfway houses, increasing from eighty-one in 1974 to 1,991 in 1981. Moreover, instead of shuttering the Gatesville facility after it ceased to confine children, Texas converted it to a women's prison. Rather than replacing institutional confinement, Tyc's halfway houses became its urban outposts. They enabled the state to intervene more heavily and more often, subjecting more and broader classes of children to supervision and confinement.31 As had been the case in the 1960s, the federal government continued to set the tone for community treatment initiatives and presaged nationwide privatization and criminal justice expansion. The Fbop's initial goal for its community treatment centers and work- release programs, begun in 1965, had been to move people out of institutional settings three to six months before their official release to facilitate their “social reintegration.” Following the advice of the 1967 President's Commission on Law Enforcement, the Fbop administered its work-release program largely through contracts with private groups, including the Salvation Army and St. Leonard's House. For the first several years, these arrangements were highly informal and, in part because they imposed few restrictions, retained the spirit of their anti-institutional origins. The Salvation Army of Florida, for instance, contracted with the Fbop to operate work-release facilities for federal prisoners returning to seven cities in the state. However, if a prisoner intended to return to a city without a work-release center, the Salvation Army would house him in one of its shelters. A handful of prisoners who returned to Titusville, Florida, in the early 1970s stayed in the Salvation Army's local homeless shelter. An unpaid, long-term shelter resident tracked their movements and ensured that they returned to the shelter each night. Though legally still prisoners, many people in work-release programs in the late 1960s or early 1970s would have easily been mistaken for free men or women.32 Programs such as the one in Titusville probably had success reintegrating returning prisoners but, as the Fbop expanded its contracted community programs over the course of the 1970s, their informality drew scrutiny. Not only were the community programs rife with financial mismanagement (including systematic overbilling of the government by vendors), but many also failed to provide even the appearance of treatment or supervision. In 1980 the Government Accountability Office (Gao) noted that most prisoners in community treatment centers received little if any drug treatment, vocational training, education, or therapeutic counseling. The Gao recommended that the Fbop standardize its contracts for community-based programs to mandate that prisoners participate in specific treatment interventions and that prisoners' progress be regularly assessed. In response to the Gao report, the Fbop revamped its contracts to mandate that private groups provide treatment and place prisoners under greater supervision and control. The new contracts mandated regular property searches and, in keeping with the prevailing treatment paradigms of the time, mandated drug and alcohol testing. They also required that facilities keep detailed records of prisoners' whereabouts and to adopt a policy whereby prisoners would be confined or returned to prison for rule violations. The new requirements shifted federal community treatment programs toward more institutional modes of management. Life within treatment centers—replete with constant monitoring, drug tests, and prescribed procedures for punishment—came to resemble the experience of prison.33 At the same time that contract community treatment centers fused tactics for control and techniques for treatment, the terms of their contracts with the Fbop empowered vendors to choose the prisoners they accepted into their programs. Private contractors leveraged their ability to choose the most amenable inmates to such an extent that community treatment centers typically confined only “low-risk inmates with white collar crimes.” The Fbop published no data about the racial and ethnic composition of community treatment centers, but racialized terms such as low-risk and white-collar suggest that white prisoners may have had disproportionate access to the facilities, which remained preferable to institutional prisons. In 1981 the Fbop fully privatized its community programs, amplifying the influence of private contractors who refused to admit prisoners with more serious criminal histories. After the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 eliminated administrators' authority to release prisoners on parole, policy makers advocated that community treatment centers be used as release valves for a dangerously overcrowded federal prison system. Put simply, the federal decarceration effort had perversely become a way to incarcerate an expanding prison population rather than reduce it.34 State corrections agencies followed the federal model of privatization and increasing regimentation, with similar results. Facing severe overcrowding in 1976, the Florida Department of Corrections capitalized on vague legislative authority to contract with the Salvation Army and Goodwill for the care and custody of prisoners. The Salvation Army repurposed several of its shelters to house state prisoners but, in contrast to earlier cohorts of federal prisoners who stayed at informally staffed shelters, these prisoners were prohibited from leaving the facilities except under “the direct supervision of [Salvation] Army staff.” By 1980, at least three religious organizations entered into similar contracts with the Florida Department of Corrections to operate moderately sized facilities as large as one hundred beds. Outside of the era of convict leasing, these were among the first of America's private prisons.35 The billing of these facilities as “private prisons” deserves some qualification. Indeed, corrections agencies have contracted with private groups for the transport of prisoners since at least the 1930s and have placed small numbers of prisoners with serious drug problems in private treatment facilities since at least the late 1940s. Like the Salvation Army shelter in Titusville, these privatized arrangements were small in scale, lacked institutional forms of oversight and surveillance, and did not have prisons' capacities for enclosure en masse. The designation of a facility as “private prison” should not be simplified to the straightforward test of whether a public entity contracted with a private entity for the care and custody of a person who was legally a prisoner. Rather, the term should apply to public-private penal arrangements that combine the involuntary confinement of large numbers of people with institutional modes of management. I have called the facilities at the Salvation Army and Goodwill private prisons because they were premised on around-the-clock surveillance; maintained strict schedules for eating, working, and sleeping; utilized architectural structures to enclose bodies in large numbers; and engendered emergent capacities for violence and coercion.36 Private community treatment facilities appealed to corrections administrators who faced challenges relating to overcrowding because they allowed the state to quickly increase the capacity of the prison system without a legislative appropriation for capital improvements. The halfway house model made collaboration with private groups relatively simple because existing infrastructure could be cheaply converted to house prisoners. Homeless shelters, unused gymnasiums, and vacant warehouses could all be transformed into community corrections facilities with the installation of a few bunk beds and a working toilet. The characteristics that made halfway houses attractive to proponents of decarceration—lack of a secure perimeter, few locking doors, no infrastructure for solitary confinement—allowed them to become pop-up prisons.37 Beyond their convenience to administrators plagued by overcrowding, private and religious organizations helped legitimate the expansion of prison systems into urban communities. Large charitable organizations such as the Salvation Army enjoyed broad public support (a 1981 Associated Press/Nbc News poll indicated that six out of seven Americans held favorable views of the Salvation Army), and their popularity seems to have insulated them from media scrutiny and opposition from local officials and community groups. In contrast to many proposed state-run centers, which were hampered by “not-in-my-backyard” protests, private facilities—especially those operated by religious groups—drew little public opposition and virtually no critical media coverage until the late 1980s. Where proposed state-run halfway houses encountered resistance from community groups and local officials, media profiles of private facilities featured laudatory headlines such as, “Halfway House Unobtrusively Preparing Prisoners for Society,” which appeared in the New York Times in 1981. The popularity of religious organizations helped sanctify an enormous expansion of the state's infrastructure for involuntary confinement.38 The public's perception of religious halfway houses as more benign than state-run facilities had some basis in fact, in large part because most administrators remained ideologically opposed to institutional modes of management. Despite the increasing controls and regimentation that new contractual requirements imposed on their facilities, religious organizations continued to see their collaborations with corrections agencies as in alignment with their religious missions. Perhaps naïvely, many administrators saw their facilities as offering a viable alternative to confinement in an institutional prison, a perspective that many prisoners reinforced. Although prisoners were constantly monitored, many found the institutional regimens of private community treatment facilities to be relatively relaxed and lacking in the senseless punishments of state prisons. Even as contractual requirements compelled private facilities to adopt more institutional forms of management, their staff maintained some of the trappings of earlier halfway houses, particularly those that extended gestures of respect and dignity. For instance, residents and prisoners at St. Leonard's House and the Salvation Army wore street clothes rather than prison uniforms. Though most prisoners would have preferred to be released, these small gestures afforded degrees of dignity and led many prisoners to prefer confinement in a community treatment center rather than in an institutional prison.39 In facilities where administrators who had cut their teeth in traditional prisons set the rules and tone, community treatment initiatives took on more punitive and institutional flavors. In 1970 Wainwright won Leaa funding to establish Community Corrections Centers (Cccs) in Florida that, he said, would provide work release, furlough, and rehabilitative services. By 1978, the state of Florida operated twenty-nine Cccs and contracted with private groups to operate another several dozen. But what the Division of Corrections touted as an innovation was merely a rebranding of punishment regimes of the Jim Crow era. Many of the “new” Cccs were merely renamed “road prisons,” a type of small, low-security facility Florida had used since the 1920s to house prisoners who spent their days working on chain gangs.40 Little was required to convert a road prison into a Community Corrections Center because the facilities shared many material characteristics. Like halfway houses, road prisons were smaller than institutional prisons; they did not have secure perimeters; and prisoners left every day to work. Of course, the two types of facilities differed dramatically in ideologies, practices of punishment, labor, and humane treatment. But these were differences that, with creative bureaucratic practices and a veneer of rehabilitative programming, could (literally) be papered over. Although Florida's Cccs came to resemble the road prisons they replaced, prison officials touted their “more benign climate, … the opportunities for community interaction, and the chance to work in normal employment.”41 The comparison of halfway houses to road prisons is instructive because it shows the points of connection between technologies for treatment and those for punishment. For instance, in the 1950s and 1960s, community treatment centers emphasized labor and employment as key elements of social reintegration. Residents spent the first weeks of their stay looking for jobs, with the expectation that they would keep working these jobs after they had moved out of the halfway house and found their own living arrangements. Like St. Leonard's House, most halfway houses collected some of their residents' earnings to pay the bills, but residents generally maintained control over their own finances, and the money they paid was only a small portion of the facilities' budgets. Labor was also central to the structure of Cccs in the 1970s, but it was exploitative and extractive rather than socially integrative. Like the chain gang convict laborers who occupied some of the same bunks before them, most prisoners in Cccs spent their days working as part of a road crew for the Florida Department of Transportation. These were temporary jobs that ended upon a prisoner's formal release; another prisoner, newly transferred to the Ccc, would take the released prisoner's place. Many prisoners were assigned to Cccs that were in cities far from their homes, further straining the credulity of Wainwright's rhetoric about social reintegration. Prisoners were released from Cccs without the benefit of stable employment, and their work on state road crews meant that they did not gain marketable job experience or even a nonstigmatized reference from a private employer.42 In marginal contrast to the treatment of previous generations of forced convict laborers, the state paid Ccc prisoners meager wages. However, prisoners did not see most of the pay because the Department of Corrections (or its private contractor) collected prisoners' wages and garnished 45 percent—plus restitution and court fees. The Department of Corrections leveraged characteristic carceral coercion to ensure its share of earnings: The “collection of work release fees is enforced by threat of (and, when necessary, use of) return to prison.” The money collected from prisoners offset one-third of the expenses of Cccs. Other qualitative factors—Ccc prisoners wore uniforms; they were permitted no unsupervised time for leisure activities; they led administered lives with designated times to work, sleep, and eat—ensured that few observers would mistake a Ccc for anything but a prison.43 Open in new tabDownload slide Louie Wainwright, the director of the Florida Division of Corrections, promoted Florida's community corrections centers in a series of presentations to the public in the mid-1970s, which featured this slide. Despite its use of the term community, the slide contains no homes, neighborhoods, or any other signs of people. The promotional slogan “A PRISON IN YOUR COMMUNITY” accurately if inadvertently captured what community treatment centers would become. Florida Department of Corrections, Doc Slides 1971–1982, 7, box 7, S2185, Photographs, Slides, Negatives, and Films, ca. 1940–2006, Rg 670 (State Archives of Florida, Tallahassee). Courtesy State Archives of Florida. Open in new tabDownload slide Louie Wainwright, the director of the Florida Division of Corrections, promoted Florida's community corrections centers in a series of presentations to the public in the mid-1970s, which featured this slide. Despite its use of the term community, the slide contains no homes, neighborhoods, or any other signs of people. The promotional slogan “A PRISON IN YOUR COMMUNITY” accurately if inadvertently captured what community treatment centers would become. Florida Department of Corrections, Doc Slides 1971–1982, 7, box 7, S2185, Photographs, Slides, Negatives, and Films, ca. 1940–2006, Rg 670 (State Archives of Florida, Tallahassee). Courtesy State Archives of Florida. The language of prison systems often has an Orwellian quality. The facility where Michigan prisoners are processed before being sent to other prisons is called the Reception and Guidance Center; for a time in the 1970s, administrators at Florida State Prison referred to punitive solitary confinement as “meditation”; the racialized term predelinquent connotes an omnipotent state and a dystopian society. The Florida Department of Corrections' public relations campaign to promote Community Correctional Centers in the mid-1970s is a rare example of a prison system speaking more truthfully than could have been intended. Wainwright and his colleagues toured the peninsula with a slideshow presentation featuring an apocalyptic-looking graphic of an orange setting sun on a yellow background. There are no homes, schools, or signs of people. The sun sits low on the horizon and looks as if it is capable of devouring a craggy live oak that occupies the foreground of the image. The accompanying slogan in bold block letters, “A PRISON IN YOUR COMMUNITY,” could not have more accurately described the endpoint of community treatment initiatives.44 Privatized, Punitive, and Expansive Legacies Few community treatment initiatives were insulated from the pervasive increases in coercion and regimentation. In part because of requirements in the contracts with corrections agencies, many organizations initially motivated by religious convictions to social welfare or deinstitutionalization operated facilities that were similar to institutional prisons. Though many charitable organizations were internally divided about their new roles, contracts with corrections agencies typically proved too lucrative to prompt a significant change in course. As one former administrator at the Salvation Army explained, the organization's correctional contracts gave it “a vested interest in prison programs.” Whatever the moral implications, the profitability of corrections contracts made leaving the prison industry difficult.45 At St. Leonard's House, conflict over the organization's relationship to the Illinois Department of Corrections broke out among several board members in 1985. St. Leonard's House confined its first involuntary “guests” in 1971 when it started a contract program to house juveniles. By the end of the 1970s, nearly all of the “residents”—the organization eventually ceased referring to its clients as “guests”—stayed involuntarily in circumstances dictated by several contracts with the Illinois Department of Corrections. In acts that suggest how its captive residents felt toward St. Leonard's House, residents vandalized the facility and destroyed most of its furnishings. In 1985 several board members, including Robert Taylor, the former director who had been jailed with Jones in Mississippi, resigned to protest the organization's close relationship with the Department of Corrections. “The St. Leonard's House of today is primarily a provider of contract services to government agencies,” Taylor wrote, adding that the relationship “enables a dysfunctional correctional system to function and runs counter to a spirit of reform we once had and have now lost.” The president of St. Leonard's House defended the organization's contracts with the Department of Corrections largely in financial terms: “the monies that the Department provides become ever more essential.” In Florida, corrections programs netted the Salvation Army nearly $8 million in profits in 1988. These funds became vital to supporting the organization's charitable missions.46 Having demonstrated the profitability of private corrections, religious and nonprofit groups quickly found themselves in competition with new, for-profit firms. Corrections Corporation of America (Cca), the nation's first for-profit prison firm, founded in 1983, followed narrowly in the path pioneered by its religious predecessors. Its first contracts were for small facilities without secure perimeters that resembled those operated by the Salvation Army and Goodwill. Cca operated only nonsecure correctional facilities until 1985, when it won a contract to run the Bay County Jail in Pensacola, Florida. Indicating the extent to which religious organizations and for-profit corporations operated in the same privatized milieu, the Salvation Army of Florida bid against Cca to operate a nonsecure component of Bay County's detention program, but lost. For-profit corporations saw religious groups not only as models but also as competitors in a loosely regulated corrections market that spanned everything from private probation to halfway houses, drug and alcohol treatment programs, and other forms of community treatment.47 Competition with for-profit corporations reshaped the private corrections industry by increasing the pressures of economies of scale and further supplanting rehabilitative ideologies. In jurisdictions where the state typically awarded contracts to the lowest bidder, competition encouraged a race to the bottom. Religious organizations reduced their per-client costs by increasing the size of facilities, relocating them to cheaper areas on the outskirts of cities, and cutting some rehabilitative programming. “The for-profit companies painted us into a corner,” a former administrator at the Salvation Army Correctional Services Division explained in an interview. After describing some of the changes the Salvation Army made in its facilities to continue to win contracts, she added, “They got much more [like] real prisons, you know?”48 For-profit prison corporations prioritized profit over rehabilitative or anti-institutional goals and reoriented community corrections programs so that they funneled people deeper into U.S. criminal justice systems. A 1997 document from SunTrust Equitable Securities makes clear a dramatic shift in the ideologies of halfway house operators. “Privatization Spectrum—From Schoolhouse to Jailhouse” shows how halfway houses, treatment programs, and other community corrections initiatives could function as pathways to prison rather than as alternatives. For-profit companies perceived community treatment as a lucrative point of leverage in a broader, more punitive criminal justice system.49 Some administrators of community corrections remained ideologically committed to treatment, but liberal treatment regimes fit neatly into the punitive folds of the carceral state. Treatment programs derived their legitimacy from adjacency to traditional prisons. Administrators relied on the threat of a more restrictive form of incarceration to win the consent of people they sought to treat, though some rationalized the coercive nature of their programs by reasoning that prison was worse. Though some administrators of community treatment sought to sublimate their programs' coercive tendencies, a few openly acknowledged and embraced what they saw as the productive potential of coercion. Linda Connelly founded a halfway house for women in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1978 and since then has administered both nonprofit and for-profit community treatment programs for men and women. Like many early halfway house administrators, Connelly rejected many institutional practices, seeing them as doing more to “tear people down” than build them up. By way of example, she cited the practices of some therapeutic communities, where “gay women were forced to wear dresses.” A pioneer of “client-centered programs,” Connelly described her treatment motto as “You're here. Welcome. What can we do to help?” In an interview, Connelly spoke passionately about the successes of community treatment and its potential to help states reduce prison populations. Her goal, she reiterated, was to “keep people out of jail.” When asked about the coercive potential of community treatment programs, Connelly answered quickly, “I don't have a problem with coercive treatment.” She went on to explain that she has observed positive changes in the lives of her clients “even if they're just sitting there [in treatment] mad at you.” Despite occasional misgivings by administrators, coercion and involuntary confinement were features, not bugs, of liberal treatment regimes.50 The New Community Treatment The fate of America's experiment in community treatment has particular relevance today. As prisons have come under increased scrutiny, a broad coalition of right- and left-leaning reformers has coalesced around “community-based alternatives to incarceration,” many of which trace their genealogies to halfway houses. The federal First Step Act, signed into law in late 2018, encouraged the Fbop to confine prisoners closer to their homes and to reduce incarceration in institutional prisons through the use of halfway houses and home confinement. Similarly, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio recently promised to close the fifteen-thousand-bed jail complex on Rikers Island and replace it with a system of smaller “borough-based” jails. The criticisms these reformers make of prisons (that they are too large, too remote, too punitive, and inhumane) as well as their proposed solutions (to promote criminal justice interventions that are less restrictive, less remote, and more treatment-focused) are practically carbon copies of those from fifty years earlier.51 Contemporary community-based alternatives to incarceration incorporate many of the same structural flaws that undermined prior efforts to remake U.S. criminal justice systems. In particular, they continue to rely on involuntary confinement, risk extending correctional control to new populations under the guise of “treatment,” and are vulnerable to the pressures of privatization and profit. The extent of problems with new community-based reforms is most clearly indicated by the enthusiasm with which the private prison industry has embraced them. In the past several years, Cca (which, in 2017, rebranded itself as CoreCivic) has bought companies specializing in community treatment and community monitoring. The corporation is bullish toward its residential re-entry centers (which house prisoners) and its electronic monitoring programs, writing in a recent release, “we believe the demand for these services will continue to grow as government agencies seek to increase evidence-based programs and services.” Most tellingly, CoreCivic anticipates that the growth of its community control programs will not significantly reduce its earnings from institutional facilities. The community programs, CoreCivic writes, are an “alternative for misdemeanor and low-risk felony offenders.” In other words, the private prison industry believes that new community programs will do little to reduce prison populations even as they will bring new groups of people under more restrictive forms of correctional control.52 State-mandated treatment entails surveillance, confinement, and the threat of punishment. In its most dystopian potentialities, the new push for community corrections, combined with new technologies for surveillance and monitoring, threatens to fortify the corrosive connections between U.S. criminal justice systems and neighborhoods that are economically isolated and racially and ethnically segregated. New systems for remote monitoring may reinforce modes of spatial governmentality that confine entire classes of people to areas of cities or suburbs with few jobs, underfunded schools, and little prospect for social or economic mobility. If America's first experiment with community treatment brought prisons into your community, the next iterations may transform your community into a prison.53 Notes I am indebted to Fannie Bialek, Charlie Bright, Jake Grossman, Matthew Lassiter, Lerone Martin, Emma Nolan-Thomas, Robert Self, Ronit Stahl, Heather Thompson, Lauren Turek, the editors Judith Allen, Benjamin H. Irvin, Cynthia Gwynne Yaudes, and six anonymous readers for the Journal of American History, whose thoughtful commentary greatly strengthened this piece. This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under Grant No. Dge 1256260, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Charlotte Newcombe Foundation, and Rackham Graduate School at the University of Michigan. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or other funders. Footnotes 1 Capacity figures for halfway houses are compiled from International Halfway House Association, Directory, 1977–78 (Cincinnati, 1978). This directory was an incomplete accounting of transitional halfway houses and largely excluded those that functioned as long-term care facilities, such as those for mental patients. In the compilation, 1,795 facilities reported combined bed capacities of 61,021; another 294 facilities did not report the number of beds. The median halfway house facility had 20 beds, suggesting that in these facilities were likely more than 68,000 beds. The number of people confined in halfway houses each year was calculated conservatively using studies that indicated the average length of stay in a residential treatment facility to be about 12 weeks. See Richard P. Seiter et al., Halfway Houses: National Evaluation Program Phase I Summary Report (Washington, 1977), 5. For estimates of the number of roller-skating rinks, see Steven A. Riess, ed., Sports in America from Colonial Times to the Twenty-First Century (New York, 2011), 794. In 1978 California, New York, and Texas had a combined prison population of 66,359. See E. Ann Carson and Joseph Mulako-Wangota, Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Prisoners in State and Federal Institutions on December 31, 1978,” May 1980, Bureau of Justice Statistics, https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/psfi78.pdf. 2 Eugene Doleschal, “Criminal Justice Programs in Model Cities,” Crime and Delinquency Literature, 4 (June 1972), reprinted in House Committee on the Judiciary, Community Anticrime Assistance Act of 1973: Hearing before the Subcommittee on Crime of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, Ninety-Third Congress, Second Session on H.R. 9175, H.R. 9809, and H.R. 1060, Community Anticrime Assistance Act of 1973, Part 2, 93 Cong., 2 sess., Feb. 21, 1974, p. 161. 3 Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York, 2010); Loïc Wacquant, “The New ‘Peculiar Institution’: On the Prison as Surrogate Ghetto,” Theoretical Criminology, 4 (Aug. 2000), 377–89; Franklin E. Zimring, Gordon Hawkins, and Sam Kamin, Punishment and Democracy: Three Strikes and You're Out in California (New York, 2001); Marie Gottschalk, The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America (New York, 2006); Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley, 2007); Donna J. Murch, “Crack in Los Angeles: Crisis, Militarization, and Black Response to the Late Twentieth-Century War on Drugs,” Journal of American History, 102 (June 2015), 162–73; Eric Schneider, Smack: Heroin and the American City (Philadelphia, 2008); Jonathan Simon, Governing through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear (Oxford, 2007); Michael Flamm, Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York, 2005). For comments on the “bidding war on tough-on-crime” policies, see Marie Gottschalk interview by Susan Page, “Marie Gottschalk: ‘Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics,’” Jan. 7, 2015, The Diane Rehm Show, Wamu, Jan. 7, 2015, https://dianerehm.org/shows/2015-01-07/marie_gottschalk_caught_the_prison_state_and_the_lockdown_of_american_politics. For mass incarceration's racially regressive effects, see Vesla Weaver, “Frontlash: Race and the Development of Punitive Crime Policy,” Studies in American Political Development, 21 (Nov. 2007), 230–65; Bruce Western, Punishment and Inequality in America (New York, 2006); and Becky Pettit, Invisible Men: Mass Incarceration and the Myth of Black Progress (New York, 2012). Civil Rights Act of 1964, 78 Stat. 241 (1964); Voting Rights Act of 1965, 79 Stat. 437 (1965); Fair Housing Act of 1968, 82 Stat. 73 (1968). 4 Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, Getting Tough: Welfare and Imprisonment in 1970s America (Princeton, 2017); Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, Mass., 2015); Elizabeth Hinton, “‘A War within Our Own Boundaries’: Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and the Rise of the Carceral State,” Journal of American History, 102 (June 2015), 100–112; Naomi Murakawa, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (New York, 2014); James Forman Jr., “Racial Critiques of Mass Incarceration: Beyond the New Jim Crow,” New York University Law Review, 87 (Feb. 2012), 101–46; James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America (New York, 2017); Michael Javen Fortner, Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment (Cambridge, Mass., 2015). 5 Anne E. Parsons, From Asylum to Prison: Deinstitutinalization and the Rise of Mass Incarceration after 1945 (Chapel Hill, 2018); Kohler-Hausmann, Getting Tough. 6 Commonwealth of Massachusetts, An Act Relative to the Administration and Operation of Correctional Institutions and Facilities in the Commonwealth (Boston, 1972), 777, http://hdl.handle.net/2452/21281. Massachusetts Halfway Houses, Inc., 1980 Annual Report (Washington, n.d.), 3–9, 12–13, 21–23. 7 President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, Task Force Report—Corrections: A Report to the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice (Washington, 1967), 11. 8 LaMar T. Empey, Alternatives to Incarceration: Studies in Delinquency (Washington, 1967), 60, https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED019322. 9 Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins, Incapacitation: Penal Confinement and the Restraint of Crime (Oxford, 1995); David Garland, Punishment and Welfare: A History of Penal Strategies (Brookfield, 1985). 10 The Keys of St. Leonard's, Nov. 1965, newsletter, quoted in Nancy Jane Ogle, “The Halfway House Concept: Contemporary Application to Offenders” (M.A. thesis, Kansas State University, 1967), 6, https://krex.k-state.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/2097/14144/LD2668R41967O3.pdf. 11 Robert Comie, “A Chance to Go Straight,” Saturday Evening Post, April 30, 1960, pp. 26–27, 101–4. 12 Welfare Council of Metropolitan Chicago, Application for Membership, St. Leonard's House, Dec. 29, 1959, box A664, St. Leonard's Ministries (Richard R. Seidel Archives of the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago, Chicago, Ill.); Coramae Richey Mann, Female Crime and Delinquency (Tuscaloosa, 1984). 13 Comie, “Chance to Go Straight,” 101–2. Robert S. Wolf, “A Private Correctional Institution,” n.d., unpublished manuscript, box A664, St. Leonard's Ministries; Welfare Council of Metropolitan Chicago, Application for Membership, St. Leonard's House, Dec. 29, 1959, ibid.; Brian Balogh, The Associational State: American Governance in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia, 2015). 14 Robert P. Taylor, “Preliminary Proposal for an Experimental Correctional Ministry,” March 27, 1969, p. 3, box A1570, Robert P. Taylor Papers (Seidel Archives of the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago); James G. Jones, “Justice,” in On the Battles Lines: 27 Anglican Priests in Rebellion in the United States of America, ed. Malcolm Boyd (London, 1964), 224–32. 15 The prayer is cited from St. Leonard's House, Intercession List, May 1, 1961, box A666, St. Leonard's Ministries. Procedures regarding individual rooms for new arrivals are cited from St. Leonard's House, n.d., box A664, ibid. Family-style meals are referenced in Robert S. Wolfe, “A Private Correctional Institution,” n.d., unpublished manuscript, p. 2, ibid. Sources of revenue are based on a review of financial data available in folder “Board of Directors Minutes 1961–1963,” ibid.; and September 1969 budget, folder “St. Leonard's House and Budget, 1962–1988,” box A670, ibid. St. Leonard's House administrators regularly emphasized that staying at the house was voluntary. However, most residents were on parole, which meant that they were unable to change their residence without with prior approval. Although this would seem to call into question the extent to which staying at St. Leonard's House was truly voluntary, records maintained by the halfway house indicate that residents sometimes left the facility after only a few days, apparently without risking return to prison. See Welfare Council of Metropolitan Chicago, Application for Membership, St. Leonard's House, Dec. 29, 1959, box A664, ibid. 16 James G. Jones quoted in John D. Callaway, “Father James G. Jones: A Pilgrim's Progress,” Chicago Scene, 4 (1963), 7, box A664, St. Leonard's Ministries. Emphasis in original. See also Jones, “Justice.” 17 Maurice Breslin and Robert Crosswhite, “Residential Aftercare: An Intermediate Step in the Correctional Process,” Federal Probation, 27 (Jan. 1963), 37–46; Ogle, “Halfway House Concept.” Lorna Rhodes, Camille Lancelevée, and Livia Velpry, “L'Intérieur institutionnel: Entretien avec Lorna Rhodes” (The institutional interior: Interview with Lorna Rhodes), Champ Pénal/Penal Field, 18 (Dec. 2019), https://doi.org/10.4000/champpenal.11525. 18 In 1969 the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science published a special issue, “The Future of Corrections,” which wholeheartedly endorsed community treatment. See John Conrad, “Introduction,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 381 (Jan. 1969), xi–xiii. On the Federal Bureau of Prisons halfway houses, see Robert F. Kennedy, “Halfway Houses Pay Off,” Crime & Delinquency, 10 (Jan. 1964), 1–7; and John J. Calvin, ed., Treating Youth Offenders in the Community: An Account of a New Approach in Correctional Treatment Launched by the United States Bureau of Prisons in the Fall of 1961 (Washington, 1966). 19 The racist conception that urban areas were the primary sites of delinquency was prominent among liberals and emerged out of scientific and political attempts to link Blackness and criminality. See Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Cambridge, Mass., 2010); Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime; and Murakawa, First Civil Right. 20 Daniel Patrick Moynihan's 1965 report is perhaps the best example of the degree to which social understandings of deviance and poverty influenced government policy, and it is also indicative of the ways that U.S. social policy pathologized African American families while overlooking systemic racism. Marisa Chappelle, Margot Canaday, and Ethan Blue have written fantastic analyses of state interventions based on racialized understandings of masculinity. See Daniel P. Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Washington, 1965); Marisa Chappelle, The War on Welfare: Family, Poverty, and Politics in Modern America (Philadelphia, 2010); Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, 2011), 91–135; and Ethan Blue, Doing Time in the Depression: Everyday Life in Texas and California Prisons (New York, 2011). On Progressive Era antecedents, see Muhammad, Condemnation of Blackness; Stuart Scheingold, The Politics of Street Crime: Criminal Process and Cultural Obsession (Philadelphia, 1991), 4–7, 23; and American Correctional Association, Manual of Correctional Standards (College Park, 1966), 140. 21 Calvin, Treating Youth Offenders in the Community, 5. For a detailed discussion of the reach of federal law enforcement agencies into urban communities, see Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, 49–62, 257–75, 284–91, 299–306. 22 For the similarities between community treatment initiatives, see James A. Beha, “Halfway Houses in Adult Corrections: The Law, Practice, and Results,” Criminal Law Bulletin, 11 (July–Aug. 1975), 434–77. For a brief history of work-release and furlough policies, see Gordon Waldo and Theodore G. Chiricos, “Work Release and Recidivism: An Empirical Evaluation of a Social Policy,” Evaluation Review, 1 (Feb. 1977), 87–108. 23 Narcotic Addict Rehabilitation Act, Pub. L. No. 89-793, 80 Stat. 1438 (1966); President's Drug Advisory Council, President's Advisory Commission on Narcotic and Drug Abuse: Final Report (Washington, 1963), 9. 24 President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society (Washington, 1967), vii, 11, 50, 164, 172–73. Emphasis added. President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, Task Force Report, 11. 25 President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, Task Force Report, 105, 111. 26 Ibid., 109–10; Doleschal, “Criminal Justice Programs in Model Cities,” 156; Hinton, “War within Our Own Boundaries”; H. G. Moeller, “The Continuum of Corrections,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 381 (Jan. 1969), 81–88. On funding from the United Way, see Proposed Budget for Fy' 81, n.d., box A670, St. Leonard's Ministries. 27 American Correctional Association, Manual of Correctional Standards, 65, 138, 148. 28 Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, Pub. L. No. 90–351, 82 Stat. 197 (1968). The uptick in funding from the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (Leaa) coincided with a decline in the funding of halfway houses from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (Hud); the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare; and the National Institute of Mental Health (Nimh). The reasons for the funding decline were varied and not necessarily ideological. The Nimh embraced outpatient methadone replacement over halfway houses. Hud began to divest from halfway houses in 1972, after a series of studies demonstrated their inefficacy in reducing criminal behavior. See Doleschal, “Criminal Justice Programs in Model Cities”; and Richard Rettig and Adam Yarmolinsky, eds. Federal Regulation of Methadone Treatment (Washington, 1995). On how criminal justice spending replaced welfare infrastructures, see Kohler-Hausmann, Getting Tough, esp. 130, 142–50, 165–67, 197–203. Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, Annual Report 1970 (Washington, 1970), 83, https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/146878NCJRS.pdf. 29 Louie L. Wainwright, Presidential Address to American Correctional Association, Aug. 16, 1971, box 2, Series 594: Adult Corrections Programs Correspondence, 1969–1975, Rg 800 (State Archives of Florida, Tallahassee); Louie Wainwright interview by Cyrus O'Brien, Dec. 16, 2015, audio tape (in Cyrus J. O'Brien's possession). 30 James Austin and Barry Krisberg, “Nccd Research Review: Wider, Stronger, and Different Nets: The Dialectics of Criminal Justice Reform,” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 18 (Jan. 1981), 165–96; David F. Greenberg, “Problems in Community Corrections,” Issues in Criminology, 10 (Spring 1975), 8. Emphasis in original. 31 Texas Youth Commission, Annual Report 1981 (Austin, n.d.), 1, https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/85110NCJRS.pdf; William S. Bush, Who Gets a Childhood? Race and Juvenile Justice in Twentieth-Century Texas (Athens, Ga., 2010); Texas Youth Commission, Annual Report 1981, 10–11. On Leaa funding to the Texas Youth Commission halfway houses, see Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, Annual Report 1970, 15. On intervention rates of delinquent versus predelinquent youth, see Dottie Carmichael, Guy Whitten, and Michael Voloudakis, Study of Minority Over-Representation in the Texas Juvenile Justice System: Final Report (College Station, 2005), 39, dmcfinalreport.tamu.edu/DMRFinalReport.pdf. 32 Map of Salvation Army of Florida's Correctional Programs, Salvation Army, box 7, S996, Social Services Aid Guy Spearman Subject Files—1976–1978, Rg 103 (State Archives of Florida). The account of the Titusville, Florida, shelter is based on John McMahon, director of the Salvation Army's Correctional Services Division, interview by O'Brien, Dec. 3, 2015, notes (in O'Brien's possession); Salvation Army prisoner logs, n.d., private files (Salvation Army of Lutz, Florida). 33 General Accounting Office, Community-Based Correctional Programs Can Do More to Help Offenders (Washington, 1980), https://www.gao.gov/assets/130/128838.pdf; William J. Anderson, director of Federal Government Division, U.S. General Accounting Office, to Rep. Vic Fazio, memo, “Security and Supervision of Inmates in the Bureau of Prisons Community Treatment Centers (GAO/GGD-84-30),” Dec. 2, 1983, http://www.gao.gov/assets/210/206948.pdf. 34 U.S. Department of Justice, “Bureau of Prisons Residential Reentry Centers Assessment: Recommendations Report,” Aug. 22, 2016, https://www.justice.gov/archives/dag/page/file/914006/download, esp. 6. See also U.S. General Accounting Office, Prison Alternatives: Crowded Federal Prisons Can Transfer More Inmates to Halfway Houses, (Washington, 1991), https://www.gao.gov/assets/220/215170.pdf. Sentencing Reform Act of 1984, 98 Stat. 1987 (1984). 35 “Correctional Organization Act of 1975,” General Acts, Resolutions, and Memorials Adopted by the Fourth Legislature of Florida under the Constitution as Revised in 1968, during Special Session of November 19, 1974, and Regular Session, April 8, 1975, through June 5, 1975 (Tallahassee, 1975), 115, http://edocs.dlis.state.fl.us/fldocs/leg/actsflorida/1975/LOF1975V1Ch001-306.pdf. “Agreement between Department of Offender Rehabilitation and Salvation Army, State of Florida,” Feb. 20, 1976, box 9, series 115, Jim Williams Subject Files, 1975–1978, Rg 119 (State Archives of Florida). Mary Foote and June Sivilli, Survey of Residential Community Corrections Facilities in the United States (Washington, 1989). 36 This definition of imprisonment draws heavily on Erving Goffman's notion of “total institutions.” See Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (New York, 1961). 37 For an example of the facilities required to house prisoners in a community treatment facility, see “Agreement between Department of Offender Rehabilitation and Salvation Army State of Florida,” Feb. 20, 1976, box 9, series 115, Jim Williams Subject Files, 1975–1978, Rg 119. 38 David W. Dunlap, “Halfway House Unobtrusively Preparing Prisoners for Society,” New York Times, Aug. 11, 1981, p. B3. 39 These data are informed by ethnographic interviews with 68 Florida prisoners in 2015 and 2016, some former residents of community treatment facilities in Florida and elsewhere. These interviews were conducted as part of a study titled “The Prison through Faith and Character: A Focused Study of Wakulla Correctional Institution,” Irb number HUM00072448 (University of Michigan Medical Center, Lansing). Because the terms of this study preclude disclosure of participants' previous places of residences, I am unable to write with historical specificity about the social dynamics of community treatment facilities. 40 On Louie L. Wainwright and Leaa funding, see Louie L. Wainwright, “Prepared Testimony to the Select Committee on Crime, United States House of Representatives,” Dec. 2, 1971, Prison Reform, box 1, S594, Adult Corrections Programs Correspondence, 1969–1975. For Community Corrections Centers (Ccc) contract data, see Florida Department of Corrections 1977–1978 Annual Report (n.p., 1978), http://edocs.dlis.state.fl.us/fldocs/dcor/areports/1977-1978.pdf. On the conversion of road prisons into Ccc facilities, see Senate Committee on Criminal Justice, Staff Report on Corrections, Parole, and Probation, vol. 1 (unpublished government document, 1974), 338, Florida Public Documents (State Library of Florida, Tallahassee). For an in-depth portrayal of Florida's road prisons, see Vivien M. L. Miller, Hard Labor and Hard Time: Florida's “Sunshine Prison” and Chain Gangs (Gainesville, 2012). 41 American Justice Institute, Proposed Master Plan for Adult Corrections in Florida (Sacramento, 1974), 64, Florida Public Documents. 42 On the role of labor and employment in early halfway houses, see Kennedy, “Halfway Houses Pay Off;” and 1959 Budget of St. Leonard's House, History folder, box A664, St. Leonard's Ministries. Prisoners not employed by the Florida Department of Transportation worked for other state agencies. Florida Department of Offender Rehabilitation Annual Report 1975–76 (n.p., 1977), 22, http://edocs.dlis.state.fl.us/fldocs/dcor/retro_ar/1975-1976.pdf; Florida Department of Corrections 1977–1978 Annual Report, 10. The Florida Division of Corrections was renamed the Florida Department of Corrections in 1975 by the 1975 Correctional Reorganization Act. The act gave the new agency the ability to contract for any services it deemed necessary, opening the door for privately operated prisons. “Correctional Organization Act of 1975.” 43 The wages of prisoners working for state agencies were paid directly to the Department of Corrections, which made this provision largely obsolete. However, private employment remained a theoretical possibility and was more common in the privately operated work-release centers. Dale Parent, Recovering Correctional Costs through Offender Fees (Washington, 1990). 44 Florida Department of Corrections, Doc Slides 1971–1982, 7, box 7, S2185, Photographs, Slides, Negatives, and Films, ca. 1940–2006, Rg 670 (State Archives of Florida). 45 McMahon interview. 46 For the use of the term residents, see, for example, Earl Durham, Keys of St. Leonard's House, July 1969, newsletter, box A669, St. Leonard's Ministries. For an account of vandalism at St. Leonard's House, see Historical Survey of the Friends of St. Leonard's House, Fall 1988—Response from Bill Hall, ibid.; and Robert Taylor to Robert Ford, July 5, 1985, box A664, ibid. For the import of state funds, see Ford to Taylor, July 30, 1985, box A665, ibid. Salvation Army financial data are from Salvation Army Correctional Services, “Correctional Services in Florida,” internal report, 1989, electronic copy (in O'Brien's possession). 47 Prior to this contract, Corrections Corporation of America operated immigration detention in repurposed hotels surrounded by a chain-link fence and barbed wire. Theresa McHugh, Privately Owned and Operated Prisons (Salem, 1985); and Judith Hackett et al., Issues in Contracting for the Private Operation of Prisons and Jails (Lexington, Ky., 1987). 48 McMahon interview. 49 SunTrust Equitable Securities, “Discussion Materials regarding Youth Services/Juvenile Corrections Industry,” n.d., 9, electronic copy (in O'Brien's possession). 50 Linda Connelly, Ceo of Successful Reentry, telephone interview by O'Brien, Sept. 25, 2017, notes (in O'Brien's possession). 51 First Step Act of 2018, P.L. 115-391 (2018). For concise accounts of the goals and motivations of these reforms, see “De Blasio Administration Unveils Plans for Borough-Based Jails to Replace Facilities on Rikers Island,” Aug. 15, 2018, NYC, https://www1.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/413-18/de-blasio-administration-plans-borough-based-jails-replace-facilities-rikers; and Jonathan Lippman and Melissa Mark-Viverito, “Closing Rikers Island Is a Moral Imperative,” New York Times, March 31, 2017. 52 “News Release: CoreCivic Reports First Quarter 2019 Financial Results,” May 8, 2019, CoreCivic, http://ir.corecivic.com/news-releases/news-release-details/corecivic-reports-first-quarter-2019-financial-results; and Patrick Swindle, “Rmoms Extends CoreCivic's Reentry Mission,” May 11, 2018, ibid., http://www.corecivic.com/news/rmoms-extends-corecivics-reentry-mission. 53 Michelle Alexander, “The Newest Jim Crow,” New York Times, Nov. 11, 2018, p. SR3; Sally Engle Merry, “Spatial Governmentality and the New Urban Social Order: Controlling Gender Violence through Law,” American Anthropologist, 103 (March 2001), 16–30. © The Author 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - “A Prison in Your Community”: Halfway Houses and the Melding of Treatment and Control
JO - Journal of American History
DO - 10.1093/jahist/jaab065
DA - 2021-06-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/a-prison-in-your-community-halfway-houses-and-the-melding-of-treatment-jJabCoKfr0
SP - 93
EP - 117
VL - 108
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -