Abstract
Rehabilitation often sits in a familiar tension between administrative efficiency and substantive change. Using a case from China—where ideological education is highly standardized, documented, and linked to incentives—this article makes the mechanisms behind that tension especially legible. Based on fieldwork in a South China prison, it shows that reform is organized around what can be documented and verified. It then traces three arenas where inner change meets paperwork: emotional narratives, legal consciousness, and perceptions of sentencing. Emotional expression, though valued in rhetoric, is mainly taken up when it signals compliance. Legal consciousness is treated as a key sign of moral transformation, yet is shaped with limited reference to everyday social experience. Views about sentencing reveal gaps between institutional logic and people’s sense of proportion and fairness. Together, the analysis shows how rehabilitation can look effective on record while resonating unevenly with lived realities, thereby identifying standardization, documentation, and incentive coupling as mid-level mechanisms.
Introduction
In recent years, prison systems worldwide have increasingly adopted efficiency as a key principle in managing rehabilitation. Correctional work is now guided less by moral teaching or interpersonal interaction, and more by standardized procedures, measurable indicators, and routine assessments (Garland, 2001; Simon, 2007). In this shift, personal transformation is no longer shaped by emotion or belief, but becomes something to be calculated, recorded, and verified (Rhodes, 2004). China has moved in the same direction, but rehabilitation is organized around ideological education with strong standardization, documentation, and incentive linkages—digital scoring, behavior checklists, and structured evaluations (Li, 2022; Yang, 2023).
However, whether rehabilitation works has long been debated. Early studies questioned its effectiveness altogether (Martinson, 1974), while later research argued that structured, risk-based approaches could produce meaningful results (Andrews and Bonta, 2010). More recently, scholars have drawn attention to a different concern: that surface-level signs of compliance may not reflect meaningful internal change, but rather strategic adaptation to institutional demands (Crewe, 2007; Hannah-Moffat, 2005; Liebling, 2011). Classic sociology shows how institutions shape conduct through roles and discipline (Foucault, 1977; Goffman, 1961), and newer work details how indicator regimes make persons legible and comparable (Chantraine and Scheer, 2020; Hull, 2012; Merry, 2016). In this frame, debates around rehabilitation have shifted: the core concern is less whether inner transformation has truly taken place, and more how evidence of such change can be demonstrated. Against this backdrop, we cast it as a tension between being efficient—smoothly translating practice into auditable forms, scores, and files—and achieving effectiveness, namely substantive transformation that the record can only ever partially register.
The Chinese case makes this tension especially clear. Routine ideological classes, written reflections, and incentive-linked scoring are organized into measurable, archivable units (Espeland and Stevens, 1998; Power, 1997; Trevaskes, 2010). On the one hand, observable behavior offers a practical basis for evaluation; on the other hand, official discourse continues to stress moral conviction. This creates a mismatch between administrative practice, which depends on what can be recorded, and stated aims that point to inner assurance. Using a high-security prison in South China as a field site, this article asks: What happens when “ideological transformation” must be performed, displayed, and recorded? How do inmates live with a system that rewards visible conformity but leaves inner change undefined? Drawing on 6 months of fieldwork, the analysis shows a pattern that favors strategic compliance over deep reflection. The goal is not to claim Chinese exceptionality, but to use this setting to illuminate mechanisms of broader relevance.
Framing the problem: Performance, measurement, and the contradictions of penal transformation
This study draws on three strands of literature to frame the analysis of ideological reform: the performative nature of compliance, the rise of technocratic governance, and the lived experience of navigating institutional contradictions. These perspectives are interrelated. Together, they help explain a core tension: how a system designed to change inner belief ends up relying on visible behavior, and how that shift creates tensions between stated goals and everyday practices.
Performing transformation: Visibility and legitimacy
What does it mean to show that one has changed? In many prison systems, transformation is made visible through records, assessments, and routinized displays. Participation in classes, written reflections, and correct responses in moral or legal quizzes create a documentary trail of progress. This visible record serves as more than just a pedagogical tool—it is also a mechanism of institutional evaluation (Grieshofer née Tkacukova, 2021; Ryan, 2023). As Hull (2012) and Merry (2016) have noted in other contexts, modern bureaucratic institutions often rely on documentation and measurable indicators to assess complex, interior processes. In this logic, transformation becomes a matter of producing the right signs: appropriate speech, participation records, and compliant behaviors. These signs are not merely expressive; they are performative, carrying institutional consequences and shaping how individuals are treated.
In this setting, incarcerated individuals learn to navigate institutional expectations through careful, often strategic forms of engagement. This includes not only visible acts of participation, but also the crafting of language and affect. As Warr (2019) argues, prisoners engage in narrative labor—producing stories of transformation that are shaped by what institutions expect to hear. Similarly, Zhang (2023) shows how inmates in Chinese prisons adopt formulaic moral scripts in their repentance letters, using emotionally charged language and standardized expressions to demonstrate sincerity and compliance. These practices reflect more than passive submission; they involve active interpretation, adjustment, and the strategic performance of self (O’Brien and Li, 2006). Prior research has similarly examined such forms of calculated compliance and moral signaling in carceral settings, showing how prisoners manage institutional demands while maintaining degrees of agency (Bosworth, 1999; Crewe, 2009; Liebling and Arnold, 2004; Ugelvik, 2014). Together, these studies highlight the complex positionality of prisoners as both subjects and strategic agents within systems of observation and evaluation.
While this body of work has shed important light on the performative dimensions of reform, it tends to emphasize either the institutional logic or the agency of prisoners. What remains underexplored is the unstable space in between—where institutional expectations are known and enacted, but not necessarily believed. This tension is not only conceptual, but also lived: Prisoners must learn how to perform belief in ways that are legible to the system, even when those performances diverge from internal conviction. Such moments of alignment or misalignment between appearance and intention reveal more than individual strategies; they reflect deeper shifts in how power governs through visibility, repetition, and documentation.
Governance by indicators: Standardization and legibility
As discussed earlier, the emphasis on visible belief rather than genuine conviction reflects a broader shift in how prisons manage transformation. Complex human processes are increasingly organized through formal rules, numeric evaluations, and standard forms. This performative structure is reinforced by a broader logic of technocratic governance. Modern institutions increasingly rely on standardized procedures, numerical scores, and performance indicators to evaluate complex human processes. Power (1997) describes this as the rise of an “audit society,” where systems of monitoring and verification become central to institutional legitimacy. Merry (2016) calls this “governance by indicators”: a way of translating uncertain social goals into measurable outcomes. Hull (2012) similarly argues that bureaucratic systems seek to make people legible through documents and assessments, producing not only records but compliant subjects.
In prison studies, this logic is reflected in the growing use of written assessments, behavioral checklists and psychological tests to evaluate change (Liebling and Arnold, 2004; Hannah-Moffat, 2000). These tools can improve consistency and accountability, but they also narrow attention to what can be counted or archived. Inmates learn to meet expectations by following procedures, while officers are often judged by how well they maintain the required documentation (Crewe, 2009; Hannah-Moffat, 2005).
Technocratic governance reshapes more than the procedures of rehabilitation, it also alters what reform is understood to be. As several scholars have noted, systems of measurement and documentation tend to redefine the meaning of complex social goals by focusing on what can be tracked and verified (Merry, 2016; Power, 1997; Shore and Wright, 2011). In this process, internal change becomes secondary to visible compliance, and the appearance of transformation takes precedence over its substance. Reform is increasingly understood not as a personal process, but as a set of external behaviors aligned with institutional formats. This logic creates a tension between the language of moral development and the daily routines that allow institutions to function smoothly—a tension that has been observed in prison contexts elsewhere (Liebling and Arnold, 2004), but remains underexplored in the case of China.
Navigating contradiction: Subjective disjunctures and strategic participation
While institutional procedures and visible performance frame how ideological reform is managed in prisons, they do not fully explain how inmates experience or respond to these demands. To explore this gap, this study uses institutional ethnography (Smith, 2005)—a perspective that traces how everyday activities are shaped by institutional texts, routines, and expectations. Scholars argue that institutional ethnography is particularly useful for understanding how people navigate complex systems of governance and regulation (Malachowski et al., 2017; Pence, 2001; Reddy, 2019), such as criminal justice or social service institutions (Doll and Walby, 2019; Nichols, 2018; Shaw et al., 2023).
In practice, inmates engage with rehabilitation routines in diverse ways. Some participate with sincerity, aiming for moral insight or institutional approval. Others comply without internal buy-in, and some interact only minimally to avoid negative consequences. Individual strategies are shaped by a mix of familiarity with the system, personal background, and pragmatic concerns. These behaviors resonate with prison ethnography that emphasizes emotional self-regulation and strategic performance under surveillance (Crewe, 2009; Ugelvik, 2014). The divergence between institutional ideals and lived realities can produce a tacit coordination between staff and prisoners. In such settings, transformation is presented and read through compliant conduct, prescribed speech, and ritual participation. Ethnographic studies suggest that these documented signs do not necessarily map neatly onto inner change; rather, they function as workable proxies in a system organized around visibility and verification. Inmates learn to signal progress in legible ways, and staff, under audit and accountability demands, rely on these cues as evidence of reform (Crewe, 2009; Liebling and Arnold, 2004; Warr, 2019; Zhang and Dong, 2019). The issue is not falsity but a structural gap between what can be recorded and what is lived, and the practical accommodations that emerge around that gap.
Rather than framing these behaviors as deception or resistance, it is more useful to ask how individuals practically navigate institutional expectations in everyday life. The appearance of transformation is not simply a performance for others; it is also a way of getting through the day, making sense of one’s position, and responding to layered forms of power. This research thus shifts focus from institutional design or prisoner resistance alone, and instead examines how individuals carry out reform in daily life—adapting, adjusting, or bypassing institutional expectations. Institutional ethnography allows us to connect formal structures with personal meaning-making: it shows how documents, scoring systems, and scheduled rituals shape subjective experience and emotional investment.
Taken together, these perspectives clarify how ideological reform operates in practice as a domain organized around visibility, standardization, and routinized participation. In this configuration, depth of internal change may not be directly observable and is often inferred from external signs; the analysis traces how that inference is produced and sustained in the setting examined.
Case background: Ideological reform in Chinese prisons
In the governance of Chinese prisons, ideological reform has always been treated as a central task of punishment. It is linked not only to the daily management of inmates, but also to key stages such as sentence reduction and parole. The basic logic is that behavior can be observed and measured, while thought must be shown through expression and record (Alduais et al., 2021; Li, 2022; Yang, 2023). As a result, reform work is usually organized around three levels: education, expression, and evaluation.
First, induction education marks the starting point. New inmates receive concentrated training on prison rules and legal knowledge. They are expected to admit guilt, accept discipline, and set goals for reform. This stage is designed to help them adapt to the prison environment and prepare for daily routines.
Second, in the daily stage, ideological reform is combined with cultural education and skills training. In addition to collective classes, prison officers conduct regular individual talks. Inmates are asked to show an attitude of repentance and compliance in labor, study, and daily life. At the same time, written statements—such as confessions, reflections, and self-reports—become important carriers (Zhang and Dong, 2019). These texts are treated as direct evidence of inner change and are kept in personal reform files.
Third, prisons operate a system of regular analysis and evaluation of inmates’ ideological condition. Officers combine daily observation with interview notes, written materials and work performance to form a judgment. The evaluation results affect reform grades, management level, and the possibility of sentence reduction or parole. In this sense, ideological reform is both an educational practice and a governance technique.
Compared with many Western systems of rehabilitation, the Chinese model has three main features. First, it gives more weight to written and institutionalized visible evidence—text records and quantitative scores carry high authority. Second, the reform goals focus more on changes in thought and attitude, while skill training or therapy also exist but take a lower priority. Third, the evaluation of reform is closely linked with judicial rewards, especially sentence reduction. Overall, this structure turns the outcome of reform into a form of evidence that can be checked, and it provides the background for our analysis of the tension between what is efficient and what is effective.
Research method
This study draws on approximately 6 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a high-security male prison in southern China. It investigates how ideological reform is experienced, performed, and interpreted by incarcerated individuals, as well as how institutional actors structure and assess this process. A total of 30 participants were interviewed, including 24 inmates and 6 correctional officers.
All incarcerated participants were serving long-term sentences following the commutation of death sentences with reprieve, under national judicial policy, the minimum custodial term is 15 years, even where numerous stringent conditions are fulfilled. This population was selected for several reasons. First, they are subjected to the most sustained and intensive forms of institutional reform, making them particularly relevant to questions of compliance, evaluation, and adaptation. Second, their long-term exposure to ideological routines allows for greater strategic engagement and deeper familiarity with institutional expectations. This enables a closer examination of how individuals manage the tension between formal compliance and personal belief. Third, focusing on inmates with relatively consistent sentence lengths helps reduce variation introduced by different stages of incarceration, thus improving comparability across participants.
Correctional officers in the study held both frontline and administrative roles, and had extensive experience in interacting with inmates. While female officers were typically assigned to educational and psychological work, male officers were more often involved in day-to-day unit supervision. Their perspectives offered important insights into how reform was implemented, evaluated, and narrated from the institutional side.
Data collection relied primarily on semi-structured and in-depth interviews, each lasting between 60 and 90 minutes. In addition, informal conversations and field observations were conducted during prison reform classes, assessment meetings, and institutional events. Special attention was paid to documents and standardized forms—such as reflection templates, scoring rubrics, and progress reports—which were analyzed not only as institutional tools but also as mediators of social meaning. Given the restricted nature of the field site, random sampling was not feasible. Instead, a maximum variation approach was used to capture a diverse range of inmate backgrounds in terms of age, education, previous occupation, and stage of incarceration.
To ensure ethical rigor and data security, all participants were clearly informed—verbally—about the purpose of the study, the intended use of the data, and their right to withdraw at any time. Participation was entirely voluntary. Due to institutional restrictions in Chinese prisons, written consent could not be obtained from incarcerated participants; instead, oral informed consent was given and reaffirmed at the beginning of each interview. All interviews were anonymized using pseudonyms, and identifying details were removed. Data were encrypted and stored securely for academic use only. While China does not have a centralized institutional review board system equivalent to those in Western academic contexts, this study was reviewed and approved by the academic committee at the author’s home university, which performs ethics oversight in Chinese social research. In addition, access to the prison site was formally approved and supervised by prison authorities, and the research was conducted in accordance with ethical standards applicable in the Chinese academic context.
Between belief and compliance: Inmates’ everyday navigation of reform
To examine how ideological reform is experienced in practice, the following analysis focuses on three interconnected dimensions: emotional expression, legal consciousness, and sentence contestation.
Emotions in translation
In the formal structure of China’s prison rehabilitation, emotional experience is rarely considered part of what counts as progress. From entry education to ideological instruction and labor tasks, inmates are evaluated based on their performance in visible, structured activities. These evaluations are documented through standardized forms filled out by correctional officers, who are tasked with converting the inmate’s words and behaviors into official representations. However, what is captured is not the full texture of the inmate’s experience, but only what the system deems relevant. For example, Officer Y from the Education Department mentioned: Some inmates like to have casual conversations, perhaps to relax or blow off some steam, but not every word is significant. It’s often just chatting, expressing frustrations, or complaining about various things. Writing all of that in the records doesn’t really serve actual utility.
Actual utility here refers to entries that align with institutional categories, such as whether an inmate is repentant, whether they follow rules, or whether they participate in activities. Emotions like sadness, confusion, or fear have no space in the logic of these forms. This selective inclusion matches what Campbell and Gregor (2004) describe as the institutional distancing of affect from documentation: once records must code and count, they produce an abstraction that is legible to the institution but distant from lived experience. Analytically, the mechanism is not that emotion is denied, but that it is translated into countable signals of compliance.
Consider Liang Hong, 38. Initially sentenced to death with reprieve, his sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment. At the time of interview he had served about 7 years. In interviews, he repeatedly voiced the emotional exhaustion brought on by his sentence: “Just thinking about my sentence makes me feel hopeless.” Despite this visible emotional weight, such expressions are often reframed in records as self-pity or negative attitude, terms which mark the inmate as struggling with reform. To address this, officers initiated individual counseling sessions. Yet, Liang Hong himself found the process ineffective: “They can’t really solve anything . . . Talking (to the officers) just adds more pressure.”
This response reveals a deep contradiction between institutional intent and inmate experience: While officers try to solve emotional problems through the administrative means of “more communication,” for the inmate, this very communication becomes a “pressure.” To reduce attention, he adjusted his behavior to appear cooperative: “I just try to behave well in other ways, so they don’t come talk to me.” But, his change was recorded as progress by officers. From the institution’s perspective, the intervention succeeded. But what had changed was not the inmate’s emotional state, only the way he presented himself. As Smith (2005) suggests, institutional texts often replace lived reality with a constructed logic that aligns with the system’s operational needs. The goal is not to reveal the truth of experience, but to produce an image that satisfies formal expectations.
Although formal processes rarely treat emotion as evidence of progress, this does not mean that prison life is emotionless. At times, officers respond with small, discretionary gestures that feel human and supportive. Long Bo, a former drug offender, described how one officer gave him a cigarette and spoke with him privately during a difficult time. This small gesture made a strong impression on him. It was not part of any formal counseling or recorded progress, but it created a sense of being seen and understood.
These gestures are remembered not only because they felt personal, but also because in the Chinese prison context they occupied a space outside procedure. This environment creates sharp boundaries around what counts as legitimate practice (Bray, 2005; Evans, 2020; Jiang and Song, 2025), where interactions are tightly regulated and logged with clear lines of accountability. As a result, even minor informal acts may be perceived as carrying risk, pushing officers to compress emotional responses to the minimum feasible level. Precisely because they are rare and difficult to calibrate, such moments stand out strongly in prisoners’ memories, yet they seldom accumulate into everyday routines.
This dynamic appears particularly stark when compared with many Western systems, where relational work is built into structured, institutionally recognized containers such as scheduled counseling or group programs (Kloetzer et al., 2021; Liebling and Arnold, 2004). These formats provide officers with an authorized channel for expressing care. In China, by contrast, clearer boundaries and stronger responsibility structures amplify the gap between what can be institutionally absorbed and what inmates actually value. This intensifies the tension between official progress records and lived experience
The contradiction is therefore not simply between emotion and control, but between emotional absence and the selective crediting of emotional impact. Inmates may learn that sincerity is risky and must be managed, while officers who show empathy do so rarely gain formal recognition. The result is a system in which rare emotional moments—whether muted and redirected into recordable categories (as in Liang Hong’s case) or acknowledged through small, off-record gestures (as in Long Bo’s)—do not unsettle the structure; they are contained by it. In the first, feeling is managed toward legible signs; in the second, care remains informal and does not accumulate as recognized progress. Taken together, these cases show how emotional life is reorganized around what can be seen, recorded, or safely left outside the file. Consistent with work on governance by indicators, documentation can misrecognize meaning by substituting recordable signs for lived intention (Merry, 2016).
Placing the Chinese case within this broader picture clarifies scope and specificity. Many prison systems channel transformation through visible, auditable forms; China’s regime adds a particularly strong emphasis on written self-presentation and graded evaluation linked to sentence review, which narrows the corridor through which emotion can legitimately appear. The result is not the elimination of feeling, but its fragmentation: emotion persists in uneven relationships and small acts, yet these fragments seldom accumulate into a stable, recognized logic of transformation. Instead, they help keep the absence of a formal emotional register less visible.
“Deviant” legal consciousness
If institutional texts filter out emotion, they still attempt to reach what is considered more essential: prisoners’ legal consciousness. In the context of Chinese prisons, this is captured through the concept of “legal consciousness.” Among all the internal, less visible dimensions that prisons try to reshape, legal consciousness receives particular attention, because it is directly tied to the rehabilitative goal of turning inmates into law-abiding citizens. Internal educational documents at the research site, for example, note that “most crimes stem from a lack of understanding of legal knowledge and weak legal consciousness,” highlighting the need to “eliminate legal illiteracy and instill reverence for the law.” Although the term remains broadly defined, it usually refers to two aspects: using legal rules as a guide for decision-making, and demonstrating respect for the authority of law.
This framing suggests that inmates break the law due to ignorance or defiance. Yet many interviewees described their criminal actions as shaped less by legal illiteracy than by social conditions. Xiao Shuai, convicted of drug trafficking, knew his actions were illegal but described a social context where the law felt distant or selectively applied. Many people around him were involved in the trade, so that he “never thought it was that serious.” Similarly, Hua, who came from the same region, described how relational pressures and limited choices shaped his entry into the drug trade: he admitted greed but stressed that friends repeatedly asked him to carry goods, making refusal difficult. Such accounts show that offenders may know the law yet act within environments where legality is reinterpreted or appears selectively enforced. This echoes research on legal consciousness as a socially situated process, shaped by everyday interactions and structural conditions (Li, 2024; Nielsen, 2000). It also resonates with studies on how local norms can normalize law-breaking, producing what Ewick and Silbey (1998) call “narratives of legality,” in which law is acknowledged but reframed through community values.
Yet, within prison discourse, such explanations are often seen as avoidance of guilt. As Crewe (2007) notes, prison authorities expect inmates to display remorse and internalize responsibility. Rehabilitation assessments emphasize confession and acknowledgment of legal wrongdoing, assuming that internal change is both possible and necessary. This model tends to dismiss narratives rooted in social experience, reinforcing the idea that true reform must begin with individual submission to law.
A contrasting example is Lao Bu, a long-term inmate convicted of drug-related offenses. Previously a soldier, Lao Bu is now a group leader in the prison, widely regarded as a model inmate. His narratives reflect a full alignment with the language of ideological education. In our interviews, he explained: I had been in the army, but after I left, I was blinded by material desires. It was a problem of values and lack of legal reverence. I betrayed my own principles.
Unlike Xiao Shuai or Hua, Lao Bu frames his past as a personal moral failure rather than a social consequence. He consistently uses the institutional vocabulary of “values,” “respect for the law,” and “self-discipline.” Over time, his behavior and discourse have made him a trusted figure within the prison. He leads small groups, participates in educational activities, and is often mentioned in internal reports as a positive example. His status is not based on a single statement, but on the way his actions and words align with institutional expectations.
Placing these two orientations side by side shows that legal consciousness is not simply knowledge and attitude. It is a positioning practice between person and institution. When a speaker aligns with institutional language (as in Lao Bu), it converts readily into signs of progress in the file. When a speaker stresses social context and relational logics (as in Xiao Shuai/Hua), such accounts rarely enter as acceptable statements and may be logged as excuses or negative attitude. In short, what kinds of talk about law become visible and countable is not decided by understanding of law alone; it is decided by institutional legibility (Engel and Munger, 2003; Silbey, 2005).
This tension is not unique to China. International work on responsibility and audit has long noted that, once reform goals are standardized and textualized, complex legal understandings are compressed into checkable language and behaviors (Hannah and Moffat, 2000; Merry, 2016; Power, 1997; Shore and Wright, 2015). The Chinese case functions as a magnifier in two ways: first, the coupling between acceptable discourse and evidence of progress is tighter—written remorse and declarations of law-abiding intent are more directly linked to scoring, tiered reviews, and sentence reduction; second, the system is more risk-sensitive to ambiguous or out-of-frame expressions, pushing individuals to choose between recordable law-abiding language and life-world accounts of law. The result is a practical gap: the institution emphasizes internal legal transformation, yet in practice more readily recognizes aligned expressions, while having few channels to absorb contextual legal consciousness.
The point here is not to judge which narrative is more sincere, but to show a mechanism: legal consciousness is institutionally defined, shaped by recording tools, and filtered at the boundary of the visible and the non-visible. The contrast between Lao Bu and Xiao Shuai/Hua indicates that when legal consciousness overlaps heavily with institutional vocabulary, it is more easily read as “inner change”; when it draws on lived experience, it clarifies the local meaning of law but is harder to translate into evidence of progress. This pattern speaks to the article’s through-line: between efficient institutional visibility and effective inner understanding lies a space pulled by texts and scoring, yet never fully integrated.
Contested sentence length
In the discussion above, emotional experience is often thinned out once it enters institutional records, while legal consciousness becomes more visible only when it aligns with institutional vocabulary. Here, whether a person accepts the sentence brings this tension to the surface: It involves not only understanding the law, but also a moral judgment about whether the punishment is what it ought to be. Many people therefore file appeals or review petitions in the hope of being properly heard. Research on procedural justice shows that feeling heard and receiving explanations strongly shape perceptions of authority’s legitimacy and one’s willingness to comply (Tyler, 1990, 2003; Bottoms and Tankebe, 2012; Hollander-Blumoff and Tyler, 2008). Yet in highly institutionalized settings, the roles and authority limits of staff channel responses through the coordinates of evidence, documents, and procedure. This often sits at cross-purposes with prisoners’ sense of proportionality and experiential fairness rooted in everyday life (Ewick and Silbey, 1998; Liebling and Arnold, 2004).
Xiao Bai’s experience is telling. Convicted of drug transportation, he was first given a suspended death sentence and later commuted to life imprisonment. Since entering prison, he has repeatedly appealed on the ground that he “did not know” what was in the car. In daily life, this stance spills over into practice: he often refuses or withdraws from formal activities—classes, writing tasks, small-group sessions—and he is reluctant to engage in routine education requirements. As he put it: “No one here will believe you. As soon as you appeal, people think it’s ‘unreasonable.’” The prison officer, by contrast, emphasized procedural thresholds: “I won’t say wrongful convictions never happen, but inside prison you have to appeal by the rules, and you need new evidence. Just saying it’s wrong isn’t enough.”
What Xiao Bai seeks is a judgment about whether the punishment fits the situation he describes; what the prison responds to is whether the strict procedural thresholds for review or retrial have been met. His appeal runs on an axis of felt proportionality and lived context, while their reply runs on an axis of compliance and documentary predicates. The two evaluative grammars do not directly speak to each other, creating a gap in being heard—a gap where what counts as justice for the inmate is not commensurate with what counts as action for the institution (Calavita, 2010; Hollander- Blumoff and Tyler, 2008).
In contrast, Xiao Hu (convicted of intentional homicide, sentenced to death with reprieve) framed his case through the common-sense logic of “a life for a life”: . . . I didn’t plan to kill her. I just wanted to teach her a lesson. But when I saw them together, I lost control. I acted out of anger . . . Now I’m sentenced to a suspended death sentence. I accept that. Even if they had given me the death penalty, I wouldn’t have objected. I may not understand all the laws, but I know that if you kill someone, you pay the price. That’s how it’s always been.
His admit–accept punishment script closely mirrors the institution’s emphasis on remorse and legal obedience, making it easier to be read as evidence of internalized reform. This does not mean his understanding is somehow more correct, but it shows that when moral intuition overlaps with institutional vocabulary, it more readily translates into visible signs of progress. Juxtaposed with Xiao Bai, the contrast makes the disjuncture clearer: for prisoners, whether a sentence feels excessive or proportionate is often judged through lived context, relational networks, and perceptions of risk; for prison staff, whether a case can move forward depends on procedural criteria—whether new evidence or new facts exist, whether statutory requirements are met.
This points to a different operational logic: in matters of sentencing, the prison’s role lies mainly in procedural transfer and material review, not in substantively reopening decided facts. What can be made visible and archived are the confessional expressions already aligned with official discourse. Narratives that appeal to context or proportionality, unless translated into new evidence or new facts, struggle to enter the chain of institutional recognition. For incarcerated people, the need to be properly heard is often framed through proportionality and case context; for administrators, lawful processing must rest on verifiable criteria. Both positions have legitimacy, but in practice, they slide past one another (Bottoms and Tankebe, 2012; Ewick and Silbey, 1998; Hollander- Blumoff and Tyler, 2008).
Seen across the article’s three lenses—emotion, legal consciousness, and sentence contestation—the same tension persists: The more an account can be embedded in existing documentary language, the more it becomes “efficient” evidence of governance; the more an appeal rests on proportionality and lived context, the more likely it is to sit outside the file. This mechanism is not about who is right or wrong, but about which kinds of speech are easier to render legible, and which concerns are left blank. The pattern is widely noted in penal systems that privilege documentation and indicators; the Chinese prison context makes it especially visible because procedural boundaries are drawn more tightly and confession-based scripts couple more directly to review and clemency pathways. In this document-shaped middle ground, efficiency and effectiveness pull apart: records accumulate smoothly, while the substantive issues that matter to prisoners—proportionality, context, and being heard—remain hard to register as institutional facts.
Discussion and conclusion
This article has examined three dimensions of reform—emotional expression, legal consciousness, and perceptions of sentencing—to show how rehabilitation operates between what can be recorded and what resists documentation. In the case of emotions, genuine feelings are not absent, but they more easily enter the archive when they can be expressed in normative language. In the case of legal consciousness, statements that align with institutional discourse are more likely to be read as signs of progress. And in the case of sentencing, appeals often stall if they cannot be translated into admissible procedural grounds. This overall picture resonates with existing discussions of visibility, standardization, and legibility in institutional settings (Crewe, 2009; Foucault, 1977; Goffman, 1961; Liebling and Arnold, 2004; Merry, 2016; Power, 1997). But the contribution here is to bring these three strands together under one mechanism: prison rehabilitation is assessed from the standpoint of what can be made visible. Through a chain of filtering, reorganization, and archiving, complex inner processes are translated into evidence that can be managed, and it is through this translation that effectiveness is presented and recognized.
On this basis, the discussion shifts from asking whether inmates’ words are sincere or whether their transformation is real, to asking which forms of expression are more likely to enter the record and count as effective. Forms, scores, and documents are not neutral containers. They are the very nodes through which “effectiveness” is produced. Effectiveness does not directly correspond to inner change; rather, it is organized in the gap between what is visible and what remains invisible. Expressions that align with institutional vocabulary, or that pass procedural thresholds, are amplified and accumulated; experiences that cannot be standardized are more easily left outside the file. This way of producing effectiveness from operability explains why rehabilitation can appear efficient in process, yet also why those most in need of deeper engagement—such as those whose legal understanding is unsettled—are the least likely to be institutionally absorbed.
The Chinese material works as a magnifier. It does not stand apart from international patterns, but it makes them more visible. Written statements and quantitative scores are closely linked to rewards such as sentence reduction, and boundaries around what counts as acceptable expression are tightly drawn. Officers must balance care with compliance, but their discretion is strongly shaped by documentary evaluation. This allows us to observe with unusual clarity how the line between seen and unseen is maintained in daily practice (Hull, 2012; Shore and Wright, 2011). The case is therefore not about China as an exception, but about China as a context where global trends of indicator-based governance and prison power become more tightly coupled and thus easier to analyze (Crewe, 2009; Liebling and Arnold, 2004; Merry, 2016). This article shows how the tension between efficiency and effectiveness is continually reshaped through the mechanisms of visibility and evidential organization in daily prison practice.
While grounded in rich interview data from long-term incarcerated individuals, this research is inevitably shaped by the constraints of its field site. As the research was conducted within a single prison under institutional supervision, the findings may reflect context-specific dynamics not generalizable to other correctional settings. In addition, access to legal documents and appeals processes was limited, which restricts the ability to triangulate inmates’ narratives with judicial records. The reliance on verbal consent, though ethically appropriate in the Chinese penal context, also prevents longitudinal follow-up. Finally, as with any interpretive research, the analysis is influenced by the researcher’s positionality, which warrants continued reflection.
While this study has unpacked how prison rehabilitation operates through the selective recognition and shaping of emotions, legal consciousness, and sentencing perceptions, it leaves open several lines of inquiry. One such area is the long-term impact of rehabilitation discourse on post-release identity reconstruction—especially how institutional narratives are internalized, resisted, or reinterpreted after inmates return to society. In addition, future studies could explore how prison actors themselves understand and negotiate their roles in moral transformation, and how their professional beliefs evolve over time. More comparative work, across institutions or jurisdictions, may also reveal what aspects of “effective” transformation are culturally or structurally contingent. These questions point to the need for deeper engagement with both the institutional logic and individual subjectivities that shape the trajectory of punishment.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors are deeply grateful to all interviewees for generously sharing their stories. This research was supported by the Fellowship Program of the Joint Center for Advanced Studies “Worldmaking from a Global Perspective: A Dialogue with China,” jointly organized by scholars at the universities of Göttingen, Heidelberg, Munich, and Würzburg, and funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). Additional support was provided by the “Zhuoyuan Xingdong” Talent Development Initiative of the Social Work Division, Chongqing Municipality.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Chongqing Municipal Social Science Planning Project (2024BS053), Chongqing Municipal Education Commission Humanities and Social Sciences Research Project (25SKJD071).
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.