The ideological work of penal reform: How reformers justify penal-welfare hybridization

Abstract

This article uses the Santa Clara County Reentry Resource Center (RRC) as a case study to explore the cultural content of penal reform. Specifically, we explore the discourses that officials use to publicly justify projects of penal-welfare hybridization, or the linking of state systems of punishment and welfare to manage criminalized populations. Our qualitative analysis draws on a dataset consisting of county planning documents, budgets, videos, press releases, and newsletters published online between 2011 and 2023. By examining these materials over time, we are able to chart patterns of consistency and variation in how officials justify hybridization. We find that the discourses of cost-savings and recidivism reductions have remained durable frameworks for justifying hybridization over the last decade. Layered upon this instrumental framework was a moral discourse that constructed the deservingness of returning citizens through narratives of reentry success. Over time, we find that online materials increasingly incorporated the language of trauma to justify the expansion of the RRC, revealing an overlooked process of policy diffusion that links victims’ advocacy to prisoner reentry. Our findings suggest that hybridization can entail expansions of welfare capacity within and alongside the penal state, not simply an eclipse of the penal state over the welfare state.

Keywords

content analysis criminal justice reform penal–welfare hybridization prisoner reentry Realignment

Introduction

In 2012 Santa Clara County leaders unveiled the Reentry Resource Center (RRC), a “one-stop” service hub where county residents released from jail and prison can access a menu of wraparound services in coordination with probation and parole. Located in downtown San Jose, California, the RRC co-locates multiple criminal legal and social welfare agencies under one roof, including probation, public assistance, mental health counseling, expungement services, and a referral network of transitional housing facilities and community-based service providers. The RRC was designed by a coalition of county leaders, law enforcement officials, and community-based organizations, who developed the center in response to the 2011 California Public Safety Realignment Act (AB 109), which shifted responsibility for supervising and incarcerating people convicted of nonviolent, nonsexual, and nonserious felonies from the state to local counties in response to federal court orders to reduce California's prison population by one-third (Simon, 2014).

The RRC's one-stop model creates organizational links between state systems of punishment and welfare, an institutional configuration that scholars refer to as “penal-welfare hybridization” (Sweet, 2023; Lara-Millán and Gonzalez van Cleve, 2017). A growing body of research demonstrates how state systems of punishment and welfare work hand in hand to manage the risks and needs of criminalized populations (Halushka, 2023; Stuart, 2016; Miller, 2014; Miller and Stuart, 2017). Projects of penal-welfare hybridization have proliferated in recent years, as demand for community-based rehabilitation programs has increased in response to fiscal pressure to reduce prison populations by improving reentry outcomes (Miller, 2014; Simes and Tichenor, 2022).

In these ways, projects of penal-welfare hybridization, such as the RRC, are part and parcel of a broader national reform movement that emerged in the early 2000s aimed at reigning in the excessive costs of mass incarceration (Aviram, 2015). A growing body of scholarship seeks to “name and characterize” this “new history of the present” in the penal field, particularly the forms of cultural representation that have emerged to justify penal reform projects (Schoenfeld, 2016: 170; Garland, 2001; Seeds, 2017). However, scholarship on penal change, particularly Realignment, has overlooked the role of hybridization within the penal reform movement. Conversely, scholarship on penal-welfare hybridization has failed to examine how political actors represent hybridization in the public sphere. This article addresses these gaps in the literature by examining the dominant cultural narratives that actors in Santa Clara County utilize to justify the creation and maintenance of the RRC as a project of penal reform.

Our focus on dominant cultural narratives of penal reform builds on previous scholarship highlighting the significance of symbolic framing to processes of penal change (Beckett, 1997). This scholarship illustrates how penal change is “produced by struggle among actors…who compete to determine the nature of punishment within the structural confines of a given time and place” (Page, Phelps and Goodman, 2019: 823; Garland, 2001). Building new state capacities involves discursive struggles in which actors compete to define social needs deserving of state resources and jockey to make claims about the state's responsibility to intervene on their behalf (Haney, 2010; Sweet, 2023). Thus, successful projects of penal-welfare hybridization require social actors to deploy “a distinct set of discursive practices to gain political traction” (Piehowski, 2022: 222). They must develop a “promotional machine” of public speeches, publications, images, and videos to garner “the resources and legitimacy” necessary to expand state capacity and to justify the ongoing maintenance of these new capacities (Piehowski, 2022: 222; Sweet, 2023).

In other words, penal change requires actors to develop a coherent story to justify reform. The official story that emerges reflects the outcome of symbolic struggles between competing actors to define policy priorities within the penal field (Page, 2013). The actors that dominate these struggles are able to disseminate a repertoire of cultural artifacts (e.g. public websites, press releases, newsletters, and policy planning documents) in an attempt to publicly broadcast a singular narrative of policy development. This official record represents the efforts of dominant actors in the penal field to tell the story of penal change as one of smooth development and political consensus that elides the complex processes of political contestation inherent in policy development. While these official records obfuscate the symbolic struggles that produced them, they can provide a window into understanding the vision and priorities of dominant actors in the penal field.¹

What is the official record of hybridization in Santa Clara County, and what can it tell us about the consistency and variation of dominant penal reform rhetoric in the era of “late mass incarceration” (Seeds, 2017)? Following Schoenfeld's (2016: 169) call for a new research agenda on penal reform, this article uses the RRC as a historical case study to document the dominant cultural content of penal reform narratives, exploring “the consistency of reform rhetoric across time…sources of variation, and the movement of ideas.”

We address these questions through a qualitative content analysis of the Santa Clara County Office of Reentry Services (ORS)² website, including policy planning documents, yearly budgets, promotional videos, press releases, and newsletters. The various materials presented on the ORS's website cohere around a “discursive braid” (Piehowski, 2022) that combines the language of cost-savings, recidivism reduction, and therapeutic healing to justify the expansion of welfare programs to address the needs of criminalized populations. By examining the ORS's online promotional materials over time (2011–2023), we are able to chart patterns of consistency and variation in the composition of this discursive braid, providing broader insights into the dominant cultural content of penal reform rhetoric in the era of “late mass incarceration” (Seeds, 2017; Schoenfeld, 2016).

Our findings are organized chronologically. First, we outline dominate reform rhetoric during the initial development of the RRC amidst Realignment and its immediate aftermath (2011–2016). Online materials from this period justified the creation of the RRC as a fiscally prudent means to reduce recidivism rates and manage corrections costs. Next, we show how alongside this instrumental framework was a moral discourse that constructed the deservingness of returning citizens through the promotion of reentry success stories. The final section explores continuity and change in this braided discourse (2016–2023). As the fiscal and legal crises associated with Realignment subsided, online documents began to adopt more humanistic and inclusive language to justify the existence of the RRC. During this time, promotional materials and yearly reports began to increasingly incorporate the language of trauma to justify the expansion of welfare services for criminalized people. ³ Despite this progressive rhetoric, however, the underlying justification for expanding welfare services remained recidivism reduction and cost savings.

These findings contribute to literature on penal change by revealing how the dominant rhetoric of costs savings and recidivism reduction have remained consistent frames over the last decade of reform (Aviram, 2015; Schoenfeld, 2016). Our findings also illustrate how dominant actors have continuously used reentry success narratives as rhetorical tools to advance penal reform agendas across the timeframe we analyzed. However, our analysis also reveals how the medicalized language of “healing trauma” has recently emerged as a discourse that dominant actors utilize to advocate for “evidence-based” rehabilitation. Building on the work of Sweet (2023), these findings illustrate how the discourse of trauma has become increasingly central to state projects that link punishment and welfare. While trauma discourse has long been central to hybridization projects around victims’ rights and domestic violence (Piehowski, 2022; Sweet, 2023), this article illustrates how trauma discourse has migrated into the reentry field. In addition, this article illustrates how the links between punishment and welfare continue to strengthen in the era of mass incarceration, and have been central to high profile reform projects like Realignment. Efforts to expand welfare services for criminalized populations are inextricably linked to crime control techniques. We conclude by discussing the promises and limitations of this model of hybridization, as well as implications for future research in light of recent political developments.

Literature review

Penal change and penal-welfare hybridization

By examining how county officials represent the RRC online, this article brings together literature on penal change with literature on penal-welfare hybridization. Literature on penal change examines how historical events, political-economic structures, and shifts in cultural sensibilities interact with the actions of politicians, bureaucrats, and other frontline actors “to explain changes to the governance of crime and punishment” (Schoenfeld, 2016:158; Goodman, Page and Phelps, 2017). According to this framework, national-level historical events alone do not explain shifts in penal policies. Instead, this approach focuses on the ways in which macrolevel phenomena (e.g. changes in the economy, crime rates, electoral politics, and racial inequality) are filtered through localized “penal fields” to explain “particular criminal punishment outcomes in particular places” (Page, 2013: 152).

Page (2013: 159) defines the penal field as “the social space in which agents struggle to accumulate and employ penal capital—the legitimate authority to determine penal policies and priorities.” Penal fields are composed of a hierarchical network of actors and institutions, each of whom possess varying levels of power and resources (or penal capital), and who compete to dominate the field and advance their policy priorities (Page, 2013; Goodman, Page and Phelps, 2017). We can imagine actors in the penal field arrayed on a map, with actors possessing greater amounts of penal capital occupying dominant positions on the map relative to actors possessing less capital. Penal fields structure the “rules of the game” by which agents can make sense of large-scale problems and craft solutions within the constraints of their localized penal field (Page, 2013; see also Schoenfeld, 2016; Goodman, Page and Phelps, 2017). Struggles in the penal field are both material and symbolic. Agents not only vie for political power, bureaucratic capacity, and economic resources, but also the moral authority to orient public perceptions about crime and punishment, define policy priorities, and set the agenda for what is possible within the penal field (Page, 2013).

California's penal field was relatively stable during the final decades of the twentieth century. The policies of mass incarceration enjoyed widespread popular support, allowing law enforcement bureaucracies to accumulate penal capital and occupy dominant positions within the field (Page 2011). However, the Great Recession of 2008 and the 2011 Public Safety Realignment set off a “legitimacy crisis” in the penal field that opened space for reform agents to challenge the dominance of mass incarceration (Aviram, 2015; Simon, 2014, 2025). Over the last decade, penal fields in California and elsewhere have been marked by a series of material and symbolic struggles to redefine the priorities of penal policy.

The Great Recession of 2008 brought about one of the worst budget crises in California's history. With the bursting of the housing bubble in 2007 and the ensuing Great Recession in 2008, the state of California faced significant tax revenue shortfalls that led to multibillion dollar budget deficits over the next 5 years. The state legislature enacted a series of austerity measures to resolve the budget crisis. For the first time in decades, lawmakers and voters began to view California's overcrowded prison system as a form of government waste in need of fiscal discipline (Aviram, 2015).

California was not alone in this trend. States throughout the country faced a “fiscal crisis in corrections” that forced lawmakers to reconsider the financial prudence of tough-on-crime policies (Vera, 2010; Aviram, 2015). No longer facing the political liability of being labeled “soft on crime,” lawmakers adopted a new approach that relied on technical expertise and empirical evaluation, rather than populist outrage, to guide correctional policy (Halushka, 2017; Seeds, 2017; Schoenfeld, 2016). This “smart-on-crime” approach focused on implementing “evidence-based” policies designed to maximize public safety returns on corrections spending.

Aviram (2016: 261) refers to this “new correctional paradigm” as “humonetarianism”: “an assortment of rhetoric, policies, and practices that advance nonpunitive policies adopted out of fiscal prudence rather than human rights.” Promoting successful reentry has been central to the humonetarian paradigm. Experts identified cycles of incarceration and recidivism as a significant source of inefficient corrections spending. Through the expansion of “evidence-based” rehabilitation programs, lawmakers could lower recidivism rates, reduce prison populations, and cut corrections costs while still maintaining public safety.

In the midst of the fiscal crisis in corrections and the emergence of the smart-on-crime movement, the state of California also faced a legal crisis in 2011 when the Supreme Court ordered the state to reduce its prison population by one third. At the time, California's prison system was running at over 200% of design capacity. Inmates were “needlessly” suffering and dying in overcrowded conditions due to lack of “timely and adequate care,” violating the Eighth Amendment's “concept of human dignity” (Reiter and Pifer, 2015: 7; Simon, 2014). The court determined that serious overcrowding was the primary cause of the constitutional violations, and upheld a lower court's order to reduce the state's prison population by one-third or about 46,000 inmates (Lofsrom and Raphael, 2013). To comply with federal court orders, Governor Jerry Brown and the state legislature quickly passed Assembly Bill (AB) 109, the Public Safety Realignment Act. The policy shifted responsibility for supervising and incarcerating people convicted of low-level felonies from the state to local counties.

At the same time California was adapting to this new fiscal and legal environment, a parallel phenomenon was occurring in the penal field: the increasing hybridization of criminal legal and social welfare policy. With unprecedented numbers of people ensnared in the penal state—over 2 million incarcerated in prisons and jails and 5 million under community supervision (Sawyer and Wagner, 2023)—criminal legal institutions became central hubs for the distribution of public goods and services for large swaths of the urban poor. Through the provision of “carceralized aid,” marginalized populations are able to access food, shelter, healthcare, and substance abuse treatment, but only through contact with the criminal legal system and acquiescence in ongoing surveillance, behavior modification programs, and threats of sanction (Comfort, 2007).

For example, scholars have documented how “evidence-based” therapeutic interventions, especially substance abuse treatment, have proliferated in recent years, both inside correctional facilities and in the community through specialty courts and nonprofit service providers (Haney, 2010; McKim, 2017; Kaye, 2019; Phelps and Ruhland, 2022). Ethnographies of policing have shown how officers engage in “therapeutic policing,” offering unhoused people the coerced choice between access to treatment or arrest (Stuart, 2016; see also Pifer, 2023). Research on prisoner reentry has documented how a network of public and private human service agencies, working in conjunction with probation and parole, play a central role in delivering public aid and evidence-based rehabilitation to people released from custody (Fairbanks, 2009; Miller, 2014; 2021; Sered and Norton-Hawk, 2014; Gurusami, 2017; Miller and Stuart, 2017; Halushka, 2023).

As state and local governments search for ways to reduce corrections costs through lowered recidivism rates, demand for these types of community-based alternatives to incarceration and reentry programs has increased (Miller, 2014; Simes and Tichenor, 2022). States and counties are tapping into this expanding penal-welfare infrastructure to manage the risks and needs of criminalized populations who can no longer be absorbed by jails and prisons.

However, most scholarship on penal-welfare hybridization focuses on how state systems of punishment and welfare operate in practice, exploring how frontline actors implement penal-welfare projects (e.g. Lara-Millán and Gonzalez van Cleve, 2017) and how criminalized populations experience them (e.g. Sered and Norton-Hawk, 2014; Gurusami, 2017). By contrast, this article explores the dominant cultural content of hybridization projects, analyzing the rhetoric and symbols that officials utilize to publicly justify the fusing of the penal and welfare states. In addition, unlike previous statistical analyses of Realignment, which focus on demographic and sociopolitical factors that predict reform outcomes (e.g. Verma, 2016; Lin and Petersilia, 2014), this qualitative analysis focuses on charting the development of dominant penal reform narratives over time and documenting patterns of variation and consistency in the cultural artifacts produced by public officials.

The ideological work of penal change

Most literature on the rhetoric of penal reform has focused on the period between 2008 and 2011, during the immediate aftermath of the fiscal crisis in corrections and Realignment (Steen et al., 2012; Aviram, 2015; Gottschalk, 2015). These studies reveal how reform rhetoric remained relatively modest during the initial stages of mass incarceration's legitimacy crisis (Simon, 2025). Government officials were weary of embracing progressive reforms, fearing backlash from an imagined public that had supported mass incarceration for decades.

For example, Steen et al. (2012) found that reform debates within the Colorado Criminal and Juvenile Justice Commission, which formed in 2007 to address Colorado's fiscal crisis in corrections, were focused on reentry and organized around two polarized narratives. First, the “Reintegration Narrative” is centered on “an inclusionary principle” that focuses on “concerns for offenders’ needs and rights” (Steen et al., 2012: 31). By contrast, the “Recidivism Reduction Narrative” frames “the reentry population as a dangerous group whose defining characteristic is as a public safety hazard” (Steen et al., 2012: 38). Steen et al. (2012) found that members of the Commission ultimately put forth policy recommendations that were driven by the Recidivism Reduction Narrative, largely due to the Commission's fears of public backlash against more reintegrative reforms. Steen et al. (2012) argue that although policymakers and practitioners have complex views about crime and punishment, they feel pressured by an “imagined public” to view reentry policy as a zero-sum contest between victims and offenders.

Our analysis builds on this work, picking up where Steen et al. (2012) left off by analyzing how the rhetoric and representation of penal reform has evolved in the nearly 20 years since the fiscal crisis of 2007. The ORS's online materials reveal how the Reintegration and Recidivism Reduction Narratives have become increasingly integrated, coexisting in a discursive braid rather than in binary opposition (Piehowski, 2022). In the RRC's promotional materials, elected leaders, service providers, and law enforcement officials routinely linked the provision of public aid and therapeutic interventions (Reintegration Narrative) to increased public safety and decreased correctional spending (Recidivism Reduction Narrative). In these ways, they perform the “ideological work” of legitimizing rehabilitation as a risk management strategy (Sweet, 2023).

One of the primary vehicles for this ideological work was the “reentry success story.” Desistence literature has long established that “redemption narratives” are central to how formerly incarcerated people construct reformed identities (see e.g. Maruna, 2001). However, little attention has been paid to the ways in which public officials use redemption narratives as rhetorical devices for publicly representing and justifying penal reform (but see Maruna, 2025). As we show below, nearly every newsletter and video featured on the RRC's website features a human-interest story about how the RRC facilitated an individual's journey from incarceration to reintegration. These stories of individual transformation were designed to provide a human face to the RRC's policy success of lowered recidivism rates and cost-savings.

Over time, the discourse linking welfare and punishment increasingly incorporated the language of trauma to justify the expansion of welfare provision and therapeutic services within the probation and sheriff's departments. Starting in 2016, online materials began identifying psychological trauma as a criminogenic risk, justifying welfare and rehabilitation as a means to control crime (Hannah-Moffat, 2005).

The use of personalized narratives of trauma to justify the selective expansion of the welfare state finds parallels in similar strategies used by victims’ rights advocates in the 1980s. Indeed, these discursive strategies reflect an overlooked process of policy diffusion that links feminist victims’ advocacy to prisoner rehabilitation and reentry. In her study of the crime victim's movement, Sweet (2023) illustrates how advocates “used stories of brutalized rape victims and innocent children to establish” psychological trauma as a social need deserving of state intervention (Sweet, 2023:1707). Sweet (2023: 1707–1708) illustrates how elected officials and social movement actors “mobilized discourses of vulnerability to trauma” to “create novel programs that hybridized care and punishment while expanding welfare state functions inside criminal institutions.” Although the victims’ movement contributed to the expansion of the penal state through punitive sentencing laws and the erosion of offenders’ rights, it also generated “a new welfare state infrastructure” within the penal state, including “new compensation, advocacy, and counseling programs” that operated through courts and prosecutors’ offices (Sweet, 2023: 1680).

The types of “trauma-responsive interventions” that were implemented through court-based victims’ service programs eventually migrated into the penal field in the early 2000s. According to Pettus (2023), it was the work of feminist criminologists, who identified traumatic victimization as a significant risk factor for women's incarceration, that pushed practitioners to begin implementing trauma-responsive interventions for women in incarceration settings, using psychoeducational programs originally designed for women survivors of abuse (Pettus 2023; see also Haney 2010; McKim 2017). In the 2010s, these trauma-responsive interventions were adapted for incarcerated men and have since gained traction in community-based reentry programs (Pettus 2023).

Based on this literature, we infer that the appearance of trauma discourse on the ORS's website reflects the end result of this process of policy diffusion. Indeed, this timeline broadly tracks with our historical case study of the RRC, with trauma discourse first appearing in the ORS's online materials in 2016 when these programs began moving out of incarceration settings and into community-based reentry programs. In what follow, we explore the evolution of this reform discourse in the ORS's online materials.

Research methods

Municipal websites as strategic case studies

We chose to analyze the ORS website not only because it was an easily accessible public source of information, but also because government websites are analytically rich sources of data for analyzing how government actors convey the official story of penal reform to the public. Local municipal websites play a significant role in structuring interactions between citizens and local governments in the twenty-first century. These online spaces create an authoritative “cultural interface” that citizens rely upon to access government information and services (Jensen, 2010: 92). By centralizing “a set of images and information in one place” government websites present a cohesive representation of the state to the public (Jensen, 2010: 92). Indeed, although local government websites are created by a large number of actors, often with completing and conflicting interests, users experience “the end product of a website as a unified artifact” (Jensen, 2010: 93).

Government websites are designed to advance particular policy goals. Website architecture—the “hierarchical assemblage of images and text connected through hyperlinks”—structures how users interact with online content, directing them to access certain information and perform certain functions and not others (Jensen, 2010: 92). Link structures “can prioritize certain functions by making some accessible by ‘clicking’ through fewer links or prioritizing some features as a ‘quick link’ on the homepage while leaving others harder to locate” (Jensen, 2010: 93). Thus, through website architecture local governments can advance specific policy agendas by controlling the flow of information and structuring state-citizen interactions (Jensen, 2010).

In his study of 24 local municipal websites in the United States, Jensen (2010) finds that the structure and content of local government websites “predominantly direct users toward consumer interactions” rather than participatory ones (Jensen, 2010: 102). We similarly find that the link architecture of the ORS website prioritizes the consumption of services. The landing page of the ORS website features prominent links in large font directing users to county reentry services and a directory of community-based service providers. The link structure also played an active role in promoting the county's official story of reform and hybridization. The top of the page features prominent links in large font for “About Us,” “News,” and “Media and Events” that direct users to promotional content within one click, including mission statements, videos, newsletters, and press releases. These promotional materials were much easier to access than policy planning documents. To access these documents, users must locate a link at the bottom of the homepage in small font titled “Public Safety Realignment (AB 109)” to gain access to primary source documents, such as implementation plans, progress reports, and annual spending plans. This link structure illustrates how the ORS website represents a curated selection information and images that are designed to structure the public's perception of reentry in a particular way by drawing users’ attention to certain information (e.g. press releases, newsletters, and videos) while marginalizing or omitting other information (e.g. implementation plans and spending reports).

Although the ORS website appears to users as singular object, a number of actors contributed to the website's content. For example, in newsletter articles published between 2012 and 2016 we identified 23 unique contributors. These included staff from the county probation and sheriff's department (4), ORS (6), community-based service providers (6), county program managers (4), and RRC clients (3). However, beginning in 2017, the newsletter began omitting the names of individual authors and instead attributed all articles collectively to the ORS. At this time, the newsletter switched from a print to a blog format and was renamed “Opportunity.” It grew significantly in length, growing form about 4 pages per issue to up to 25, although several of the articles are duplicates from press releases, which were authored by the Office of Communication and Public Affairs (OCPA).

We attribute online videos to the various YouTube pages where they were published. The majority were published on government affiliated pages, including Santa Clara County's official YouTube page (9), Santa Clara County Newsbeat (3), and California State Association of Counties (1). Three videos were published by community-based service providers (Carry the Vision, Enneagram Prison Project, and the Roberts Enterprise Development Fund), and one video was published by the local news outlet KPIX. Policy plans, budgets, and reports were attributed to the ORS, but sometimes contained opening messages from the County Executive and Chief of Probation.⁴

The creation and publication of these materials undoubtedly involved struggles between multiple actors with conflicting interests and ideologies. Analyzing the behind-the-scenes negotiations of selecting and presenting online materials is beyond the scope of this article.⁵ Instead we are more concerned with analyzing the end product of these struggles: the cultural artifacts that the county ultimately publishes on the ORS website. Once published, these artifacts act as the county's official narrative of reform. By analyzing website content over time (2011–2023) we are able to document patterns of consistency and variation in the county's official narrative of penal reform, providing broader insights into the dominant cultural content of penal-welfare hybridization projects in the era of “late mass incarceration” (Seeds, 2017; Schoenfeld, 2016).

Data collection and analysis

We compiled a dataset consisting of the ORS's promotional materials and official reports, all of which were publicly available on the ORS website. Our dataset included 21 issues of the ORS newsletter published between September 2012 and July 2022; 20 press releases published between March 2017 and May 2023; and 18 online videos published between December 2017 and December 2019.⁶ We also analyzed various policy documents related to Realignment, including the County's AB 109 Implementation Plan (2011), Annual Spending Plans (2012–2017), Annual Progress Reports (2012–2021), and 5- and 10-Year Reports (published in 2016 and 2021, respectively) to understand key events and actors that shaped the initial development of the RRC and how these policies developed over time.

We adopted an abductive data analysis strategy, involving a “recursive cycle” of coding, engagement with relevant literature, and memo writing (Timmermans and Tavory, 2012: 179). Our initial coding scheme was inspired by Steen et al.'s (2012) Reintegration/Recidivism Reduction framework. Our first round of coding began by applying this binary framework to the video data. Our initial hypothesis followed Steen et al.'s (2012) conclusions: human service professionals would utilize the Reintegration Narrative, law enforcement officials would utilize the Recidivism Reduction Narrative, and the Recidivism Reduction Narrative would ultimately drown out the Reintegration narrative in the promotional materials.

We watched each video multiple times, coding key quotations, images, and sequences that fit either the Reintegration or Recidivism Reduction category. However, as our analysis unfolded, this binary categorization broke down. We began to observe how these narratives coexisted within each video, overlapping in ways that were difficult to disentangle. Human service professionals would discuss how the RRC was necessary to address the underlying needs of criminalized populations, but would also justify expanded rehabilitation services as a tool for recidivism reduction. Law enforcement officials would discuss the public safety benefits of rehabilitation while also taking pride in their efforts to offer a welcoming environment to returning citizens at the RRC.

These “anomalous” findings required us to broaden our “theoretical repertoire” (Timmermans and Tavory, 2012: 179–180). After engaging with literatures on sociopolitical theories of penal change (Aviram, 2015, 2016; Schoenfeld, 2016; Goodman, Page and Phelps, 2017) and penal-welfare hybridization (Sweet, 2023; Piehowski, 2022), we began to view the coexistence of the Reintegration and Recidivism Reduction Narratives as less of an anomaly and more of an example of discursive braiding that was indicative of broader processes of penal change and hybridization. This broadening of our theoretical repertoire led to the development of a more robust set of codes that formed the basis for our analysis.

The primary goal of our analysis is descriptive: we seek to chart patterns consistency and variation in county officials’ dominant narrative of penal reform over time. By constructing rich descriptions of the county's official penal reform narrative, and bringing these descriptions into conversation with secondary literature, we seek to generate “conceptually generalizable” claims about the dominant cultural content of penal change and hybridization that can be extended to similar, unobserved cases (Collins, Neely and Khan, 2024; Small, 2009).

Findings

Realignment as a hybridization project (2011–2012)

At the outset of Realignment in 2011, Santa Clara County officials were being asked to absorb thousands of criminalized people into their jail and probation systems in the wake of one of the worst budget crises in the state's history.⁷ The RRC was born during this period of upheaval. The county's AB 109 planning documents framed the creation of the RRC as an “evidence-based” approach to penal policy. Officials discussed their plan to link the county's law enforcement and social service agencies at the RRC as a data-driven approach that would maximize public safety returns on corrections spending.

To help local counties shore up the costs of housing and supervising this new population of justice-involved people, the state allocated a total of $4.4 billion to county governments between 2013 and 2017 (Lin and Petersilia, 2014). State Realignment funds incentivized county governments to engage in projects of penal-welfare hybridization. AB 109 required all 58 counties to form a Community Corrections Partnership (CCP), consisting of “the Chief Probation Officer as chair, the District Attorney, the Public Defender, the Presiding Judge of the superior court (or his/her designee), the Chief of Police, the Sheriff, and a representative from social services,” including at least one reentry service provider and one crime victims advocate (Lin and Petersilia, 2014: 14). The role of the CCP in each county was to design a Realignment budget and implementation plan (Lin and Petersilia 2014). As Lin and Petersilia (2014: 14) observe, “In its formation of Community Corrections Partnerships, AB 109 appeared self consciously designed to create cross-systems collaboration and buy-in among the various actors responsible for implementing the new regime in each county.”

In these ways, penal-welfare hybridization was foundational to Realignment, providing counties with the resources and legitimacy necessary to forge institutional links between state systems of punishment and welfare. State officials pushed forward “cross-system collaboration” as a key evidence-based strategy for reducing recidivism rates and lowering corrections costs. Santa Clara County leaders embraced this approach. In the county's AB 109 Implementation Plan, county officials wrote, “Incorporating both system and community based partners on the re-entry team will ensure a collaborative and coordinated approach that is both creative and effective in this fiscally uncertain environment.” In these early planning documents, we can see how county officials initially framed penal-welfare hybridization as a cost-saving strategy. This approach laid the groundwork for the initial development of the RRC.

In addition to forming the mandatory CCP, the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors also voluntarily established “a cross-system Re-Entry Network,” which included members of the CCP as well as a broader array of county officials and community-based service providers. It was through the initial meetings of Re-Entry Network that the idea for the RRC was born. After a year and a half of planning, the RRC opened its doors.

At the RRC's ribbon cutting ceremony in October 2012, county leadership took stock of their accomplishments:

“Over the past two years, Santa Clara County has been putting the building blocks in place to assist former offenders to successfully transition into the county, and at the same time create a stronger, safer and healthier community,” said President George Shirakawa. “The Re-Entry Resource Center supports the County Re-Entry Network's mission to create a seamless system of services, support and supervision for former offenders. Ultimately, our integrated system of services may serve as a model for other California counties facing the same challenges of recidivism and State realignment.”

Here we see how county officials initially justified the creation of the RRC as an innovative, evidence-based strategy for resolving the crisis of Realignment. This instrumental justification for hybridization would persist for the next decade, even after the acute crisis of Realignment faded.

Constructing the moral deservingness of returning citizens (2011–2016)

However, alongside this instrumental framework was a moral discourse that constructed returning citizens as community members deserving of public aid. The primary vehicle for this moral framework was the reentry success story—life history narratives outlining an arc of trauma, addiction, hitting rock bottom, and finding healing and redemption through the RRC.

From the outset, human interest stories of “reentry success” played a central role in justifying hybridization. By focusing on stories of trauma and addiction, reformers constructed formerly incarcerated people as a vulnerable population in need of care. Expanding access to evidence-based interventions not only helped to alleviate their suffering, but they were also effective tools for reducing the risk of recidivism. Thus, individual reentry success stories were powerful rhetoric tools for justifying the selective expansion of the welfare state. This rhetorical strategy was present in the ORS's earliest promotional materials. For example, the following stories appeared the ORS's second newsletter issue (October 2012):

A second chance for a new beginning

Benny has been in and out of county jail and prison since 1972. “I was wild on the street and did crazy stuff to support my heroin…but I paid the price by going to prison,” said Benny. Last year with the passage of AB 109, Benny was one of the individuals eligible for release back into the County of Santa Clara…Benny is now 64 years old and was released a month ago to community supervision. “When I got out, I didn’t have anything. My wife passed away while I was in prison. All my properties were in her name. I lost everything I had. When I saw my probation officer, I told him I will do whatever he told me to do.” Benny's probation officer referred him to the Reentry Resource Center. There he met Jose Garcia, a peer mentor who connected him to housing, general assistance benefits, and drug treatment program. Benny has been clean and sober for 2 years. On a weekly basis, he goes to his drug treatment program and shares his recovery stories with others.

Throughout Steven's teenage years, he was going in and out of juvenile hall and the Ranch [juvenile detention facility]…On August 14, 2011, Steven was shot on the chest and thought he was going to die. “I just asked the Lord to forgive me for all my sins,” said Steven and “HE saved me.” Steven survived his gun wound and was incarcerated at Elmwood [County Jail].

Steven was released in September 2012. By this time, Steven's family has given up on him. He didn’t have anyone to go back to and no place to stay. He would sleep on the park bench. He learned about the Reentry Resource Center and came in. “I looked messy and came into the Center with the same clothes. The people there greeted me with a warm smile and fed me. They listened and connected me to general assistance benefits, housing, and work programs.”

It has been more than a month since Benny and Steven have been released. While both individuals have different life circumstances, they share one thing in common: both are getting a second chance for a new beginning.

Steven and Benny's stories are among over 30 reentry success stories featured across newsletters, videos, and press releases in our dataset. These narratives generate a “commonsensical” link between welfare and crime control (Sweet 2023). In both Steven and Benny's narratives, histories of trauma and addiction led to repeated cycles of incarceration. However, through access to therapeutic interventions and public assistance programs offered by the RRC, Benny and Steven were able to get a “second chance” to heal from their past and break the cycle of recidivism.

As the acute crisis of Realignment began to subside, online materials began to increasingly utilize this kind of inclusive rhetoric to justify the continued expansion of the RRC. In particular, online materials began to identify trauma as a significant risk factor for recidivism, warranting an expanded safety-net to meet these needs. However, despite this change in rhetoric the underlying justification for expanding welfare services remained the same: cost-savings and recidivism reduction.

Change and continuity in hybridization discourse (2016–2023)

2016 marked the 5-year anniversary of Realignment and the opening of the RRC. Starting this year and going forward, ORS materials began to increasingly spotlight the county's commitment to expanding “evidence-based” rehabilitation and jail diversion. This increasing emphasis on inclusive language began with the county's efforts to address mental illness in the jail system. During this time, county officials began to recognize that law enforcement agencies were frequently incarcerating individuals suffering from mental illness for minor offenses. Officials framed this practice as a drain on county resources that offered little public safety benefit.

The first mention of this approach appeared in the county's AB 109 Fiscal Year 2016 Spending Plan, where the county announced the Board of Supervisors’ approval to create “a Jail Diversion and Behavioral Health Subcommittee of the Re-Entry Network to consider best practices and programs that would divert individuals from being detained at the County's jails.” This new approach was publicized more widely in July 2017, when the RRC hosted a 2-day event on jail diversion for people experiencing mental illness. Various panels discussed how incarcerating people with mental illness were not only an inefficient use of correctional resources, but also a harmful practice that exacerbated the hardships of an already stigmatized population. The newsletter article covering the event highlights how law enforcement agencies are “approaching clients with an awareness of the mental health challenges they may be experiencing.” According to Erin O’Brien, a community-based mental healthcare provider, “Probation is looking at clients through a trauma lens, it's to be commended.”

That same year the county published its 5-year report on Realignment. The report reinforced the county's newfound commitment to addressing trauma as a crime control strategy. The document repeatedly identifies individuals with histories of trauma as a high-risk population in need of heightened intervention. In the Executive Summary, county officials write:

There is also a need to continually target the populations with higher risk/need. Services that support those with mental illness, trauma, and/or substance dependency, chronic homelessness, and populations that have been marginalized (such as Hispanic/African American communities), are needed to preserve public safety and strengthen communities.

In a subsequent section summarizing data from the county's principal risk assessment tool, “abuse/neglect/trauma” was ranked as the third-highest reported “criminogenic need” among AB 109 clients, with substance abuse and “criminal orientation” ranked first and second, respectively. To address the needs of this high-risk population, the report recommends strengthening the links between state systems of punishment and welfare. One of the key recommendations of the report is to “preserve, enhance, and expand cross-system collaborations” in order to increase “culturally competent, gender-responsive, and trauma-informed program offerings.”

However, the discourse of recidivism reduction existed alongside this inclusive rhetoric. Indeed, one of the key recommendations of the 5-year report was to “Preserve and Support Public Safety”:

While the findings within this report demonstrate Public Safety is not at greater risk after Realignment, ORS strives to facilitate the preservation and enhancement of public safety…ORS strives to support the evidenced-based movement away from punitive justice by supporting and pursuing initiatives that decrease reliance on traditional punishment without negatively impacting public safety. ORS will focus on expanding peer navigation to close gaps with warm-handoffs and expedite service linkage. In addition, the ORS will support programming that is culturally competent, gender responsive, and trauma informed. Public safety is better preserved if interventions are inclusive to all reentry subpopulations.

Although this section reiterates the ORS's progressive commitment to evidence-based rehabilitation over punishment, it also acknowledges that the ultimate goal of the ORS is to reduce recidivism and enhance public safety.

The following year, the county publicized its investments in the types of progressive “trauma-informed,” “cross-system collaborations” outlined in the 5-year report. The RRC's fall 2018 newsletter announced the creation of the Gender Responsive Opportunities for Women (GROW) pilot program. A hybrid project involving the Probation Department, the Office of the Sheriff, the Office of Reentry Services, and the Office of Women's Policy, the GROW program focuses on addressing the needs of “justice-involved women that are most at risk for reoffending” through wrap around services grounded in “gender-responsive and trauma-informed approaches.”

Another example comes from a November 2018 press release in which county officials announced a $6.1 million Request for Proposals (RFP) seeking community-based organizations to provide “psychoeducation and psychosocial programs, legal services, employment services, and service navigation.” The RFP specifically seeks providers who can offer “Seeking Safety, an evidence-based form of counseling to help individuals with trauma or substance abuse.”⁸ In the press release, Miguel Márquez, County of Santa Clara Chief Operating Officer, commented:

“These are the types of resources that will help our reentry community members heal and that will help break the generational cycle of incarceration…Investing in programs that address many of the main underlying causes of crime—poverty, mental illness, homelessness, unemployment and lack of education—reduces crime and saves taxpayers money in the long run.”

While Márquez uses the inclusive language of “healing” community members and addressing the socioeconomic causes of crime, he ultimately justifies the expansion of these services as a means to reduce recidivism and save taxpayer money.

During this time, human interest stories of reentry success also began incorporating the language of trauma to construct returning citizens as deserving community members. For example, at a 2017 book event, formerly incarcerated author Shaka Senghor narrated his story of trauma, incarceration, and redemption to advocate for reentry reform. His narrative was summarized in a newsletter feature:

As a child in Detroit Senghor was an honor roll student with dreams of becoming a doctor. But the physical and emotional abuse he suffered at home drove him to the streets and into the crack cocaine trade. Within six months of leaving home his childhood friend was murdered, he was robbed at gunpoint and was almost beaten to death. Then at age 17 he was shot multiple times. He was patched up physically, but his emotional wounds grew deeper…Angry, confused, afraid and suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder he started carrying a gun at all times, under his pillow, in the bathroom, and at meals.

At 19 he was convicted of second degree murder and spent the next 19 years in prison for killing a man he felt was threatening him when he refused to sell him drugs. He served seven and half of those years in solitary confinement…On June 22, 2010 Senghor walked out of prison after 19 years…Senghor is proving that incarcerated men and women are redeemable… “I am not an anomaly,” he said. “Incarcerated men and women's lives have value…An awful act of violence does not mean a person is indefinitely dangerous and unredeemable…Not one of you would want to be judged for the rest of your life based on that one moment,” Senghor said.

Senhor's narrative draws on the medicalized language of “post-traumatic stress disorder” to diagnose the root causes of his violent actions. In doing so, it makes the case the people convicted of violent crimes are not “indefinitely dangerous and unredeemable.” Instead, they are “the bearer[s] of trauma” (Sweet, 2023: 1708–1709), whose psychological vulnerability warrants expanding access to therapeutic services and welfare provision.

In subsequent years, ORS materials increasingly publicized their efforts to advocate for the deservingness of returning citizens and promote reintegrative policies. For example, in 2019 the ORS created the Lived Experience Advisory Board (LEAB). Made up of 11 former RRC clients, who “overcame incredible challenges, hardship, and trauma,” the mission of the board is to provide “policy recommendations and solutions to underserved and disenfranchised communities,” foster “justice, equity, and empathy for individuals within the justice-involved community,” and create “safer, healthier, and more diverse community resources and services.” In the wake of the murder of George Floyd, the Fall 2020 newsletter announced the creation of the Racial Equity and Leadership (REAL) Reentry Team to create “strong policies and procedures to reduce racial and ethnic disparities” and “to integrate racial equity in policies, practices, programs, and budgets.” Echoing trauma-informed language, the team was oriented toward shifting county policing toward “a healing-centered approach to address the harm caused by government institutions.”

While ORS was increasingly publicizing its efforts to reduce system harms and addressing the needs of vulnerable populations, the discourses of cost-savings and recidivism reduction never disappeared entirely as justifications for hybridization. In an April 2023 press release celebrating the fifth anniversary of the South County Reentry Resource Center,⁹ County Supervisor Sylvia Arenas commented:

“Providing these resources is the right thing to do to help our residents get back to productive lives, but it's also a prudent way of saving our taxpayers’ money while improving public safety…The expense of law enforcement, medical personnel, and incarceration takes a huge financial toll on our community. Housing one person in jail for a year costs approximately $105,000. In many cases, we can save money and have a greater impact by reducing recidivism if we target root causes of incarceration, such as substance use addiction, mental illness, generational poverty, and homelessness.”

Echoing the instrumental rhetoric that has persisted for a decade, Arenas frames the expansion of welfare services as a means to control crime and reign in corrections costs. She acknowledges that providing services “is the right thing to do,” but she quickly pivots to highlight how providing services in the community is a cheaper way to manage crime than spending taxpayer funds on costly jail beds.

Discussion and conclusion

Our findings contribute to literature on penal change and penal-welfare hybridization. First, these findings illustrate that since the 2008 financial crisis, the discourses of cost-savings and recidivism reductions have remained durable frameworks for justifying the expansion of penal-welfare projects. Although the RRC formed during the crucible of California's budget crisis and Realignment, county officials have continued to promote the RRC as a tool of cost-savings even after these crises have been officially “resolved” (Lara-Millán, 2022). For over a decade, their rhetoric routinely characterizes the collaboration between law enforcement and social welfare agencies at the RRC as a fiscally prudent means of crime prevention that saves taxpayer dollars through reduced spending on incarceration.

Layered upon of this instrumental framework were moral and medicalized discourses that framed returning citizens as deserving recipients of state resources. Human interest stories of reentry success were the primary vehicles for establishing the deservingness of returning citizens, appearing consistently throughout the decade's worth of materials we analyzed. These personal narratives provided a culturally palatable framework for justifying the expansion of welfare infrastructure to serve the needs of a stigmatized population. These findings illustrate how narratives of personal reform are not only important tools of individual desistance (Maruna, 2001), but also important political tools for legitimizing projects of penal reform (Maruna, 2025).

Starting in 2016–2017, ORS materials began to specifically identify trauma as a significant risk factor for criminalized behavior and highlighted the expansion of “trauma-informed” services to reduce recidivism rates. The appearance of trauma discourse in the ORS's online materials reflects the outcome of a process of policy diffusion that, ironically, links the victims’ rights movement to the penal reform movement. We can trace the migration of trauma-informed services from victim services programs in the 1980s to women's prisons in the 2000s to community-based reentry programs in the 2010s (Pettus, 2023). Our findings broadly align with this timeline, with the county's initiative to expand trauma-informed services emerging 2016. However, the discourse of trauma did not replace the cost-savings and recidivism reduction as the dominant framework for justifying hybridization. Instead, trauma discourse was subsumed under these frameworks, with the expansion of “trauma-informed” services justified as a cost-effective strategy for reducing recidivism rates.

The tight braiding of therapeutic and crime control discourses in our data has implications for literature on penal-welfare hybridization. First, our findings illustrate how penal-welfare hybridization was foundation to the project of Realignment, not just in Santa Clara County, but in California more broadly. AB 109's mandate that all 58 counties must form a CCP and incorporate stakeholders from penal and welfare systems in Realignment implementation planning illustrates how links between state systems of punishment and welfare continue to strengthen in the era of “late mass incarceration” (Seeds, 2017; Schoenfeld, 2016).

Our findings also suggest that hybridization is not a zero-sum contest between the penal and welfare state, as prior scholarship has argued (e.g., Wacquant, 2009). Instead, the development and expansion of the RRC shows how processes of hybridization can entail expansions of welfare state capacity within and alongside the penal state, not simply an eclipse of the penal state over the welfare state. Over the last decade, actors in Santa Clara County were able to significantly expand the footprint of welfare state capacity within the county probation and sheriff's departments. In these ways, the RRC does not merely grow the penal state. Instead, it represents a case in which “welfare and penal states expand as their capacities are joined” (Sweet, 2023: 1680, emphasis in original).

However, it is important to recognize that penal and welfare actors are not equal partners in hybridization, and researchers must continue to empirically document how the balance of power between the two shifts over time. The legal and fiscal crises of Realignment destabilized the penal field in California, opening space for reform-minded politicians and human service professionals to reorient penal policy toward a “smart-on-crime” approach. However, law enforcement bureaucracies still maintain significant power and resources in California's penal field. Smart-on-crime reformers have had to build strategic alliances with law enforcement bureaucracies to gain the resources and legitimacy necessary to implement welfarist reform projects.

Indeed, despite the fact that evidence-based rehabilitation was one of the cornerstones of Realignment, implementing these welfarist programs required service providers to collaborate with county probation and sheriff's departments to access the funding and bureaucratic capacity necessary to carry out these policy goals. This is not unique to California. As Simes and Tichenor (2022: 296) point out, in many parts of the country, “police, courts and jails are at the center of the existing social service infrastructure.” Creating political alliances with law enforcement bureaucracies is an unavoidable compromise service providers must make to grow welfare state capacity in the era of mass incarceration. As our findings illustrate, expanding the social safety-net requires service providers to engage in the ideological work of publicly justifying even the most progressive forms of “gender-responsive,” “culturally competent,” and “trauma-informed” service provision as a means to reduce recidivism rates and lower corrections costs.

This study is not without limitations. Our analysis focuses on surface-level representations of penal change. Our goal was simply to “name and characterize” the dominant narratives of reform that circulates in the public sphere (Schoenfeld, 2016: 170). As a result, our data cannot speak to the underlying structural causes of penal change, only to the ways in which dominant actors represent those changes after the fact. Nor can we make claims about the degree to which the materials posted online impacted public opinion in Santa Clara County. Future research should utilize public opinion surveys or experimental vignette studies to measure the degree to which the narratives we documented resonate with the public. Our data also did not allow us to observe the production of online content. Future research should utilize archival (Lara-Millán, 2022) and interview data (Steen et al., 2012) to uncover the “backstage” debates and struggles that produced the online artifacts we analyzed. Finally, our claims about the policy diffusion of trauma discourse from the victims’ movement to the reentry movement are based on inferences drawn from secondary literature (Pettus, 2023; Sweet, 2023; Piehowski, 2022; Haney, 2010; McKim, 2017) rather than primary source documents. Future research should utilize archival or interview data to test our claims.

Future research should also be comparative. There was substantial variation in how California counties spent state Realignment funds, with some focusing spending on jail expansion and law enforcement personnel, and others, like Santa Clara County, focused on building welfare state capacity (Lin and Petersilia, 2014). Future research should explore how Santa Clara County's public narrative of reform compares to the narratives of counties that pursued more punitive approaches.

Future research should also consider the future of penal reform and hybridization in light of the outcome of recent election cycles. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, rates of homicide, theft, and public disorder spiked in 2020 (Grawert and Kim, 2023). Opponents of penal reform seized on these developments, conflating rising crime rates with the Black Lives Matter movement, bail reform policies, and the election of progressive prosecutors, leading to a series of electoral defeats for the penal reform movement, culminating in 2024 when California voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition 36, which increased penalties for nonviolent drug and theft crimes, and rejected Proposition 6, which would have ended involuntary servitude in California's prisons. Future research should explore how these political developments shape the balance of power within California's penal field and the trajectory of future penal-welfare projects.

Moreover, as Ben-Menachem (2023) argues, perhaps we have reached the political limits of “evidence-based” discourse. Recent backlash against penal reform happened in spite of rigorous evidence showing that rising crime rates were not caused by decarceration. The movement against mass incarceration can no longer afford to hide behind the politically safe, technocratic language of “evidence-based” policy. In trying to depoliticize the issue of reentry by framing it around the discourse of cost-savings, recidivism reduction, and evidence-based healthcare, reformers were able to avoid populist backlash for a time, but now that crime rates have ticked up, the public appears to have lost faith in experts and bureaucrats to maintain public safety.

Putting an end to the punitive era in California requires reformers to step outside the rationalist box of the evidence-based paradigm and fight the battle against mass incarceration on the “terrain of emotions and values” by articulating a vision of “abundance and solidarity instead of austerity and punishment” (Ben-Menachem, 2023: para 32). It also requires working to help build the power of racial justice and working-class movements from the “bottom-up” to demand “larger structural changes to criminal justice, social welfare, and public health that go far beyond the scope of direct social services” (Simes and Tichenor, 2022: 298–299), including strong unions, social housing, living wages, universal healthcare, and basic income, that can address the root causes of poverty and insecurity that fuel crime and violence.

Footnotes

ORCID iD

John Halushka

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The research for this article was supported by the SJSU Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activities Assigned Time Program and the SJSU Teach Online Summer Certificate Program.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

John Halushka, PhD, is associate professor of Justice Studies at San José State University. His research examines how mass incarceration shapes patterns of poverty and racial inequality in the USA.

Brandon Miller, MS, is Project Manager for Uplifting Peace, a gun violence intervention program based in Antioch, CA, and Lecturer of Justice Studies at San José State University.

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