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Rita Shah, The Meaning of Rehabilitation and Its Impact on Parole: There and Back Again in California

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
Published date01 December 2019
DOI10.1177/1462474519830387
AuthorGil Rothschild-Elyassi
Date01 December 2019
Subject MatterBook reviews
SG-PUNJ180024 523..541 Book reviews
645
Rita Shah, The Meaning of Rehabilitation and Its Impact on Parole: There and Back
Again in California, Routledge: New York, 2017: 173 pp. (including index); ISBN:
978-1138202191, $88 (cloth), $51 (pbk)
In the concluding chapter of Rita Shah’s book, The Meaning of Rehabilitation and
Its Impact on Parole: There and Back Again in California, the author quotes the
following statement from a 2009 presentation for Parole Officers’ week in
California, entitled “The Rehabilitation Pinball”: “Over the past 100 years
parole has bounced back and forth from enforcement to Rehab, many times just
dusting it off and re-using the same old model” (p. 145). This characterization
echoes two ostensibly contradictory trends in penal historiography that run
throughout the book. On one level, the history of California parole appears to
emblematize the “pinball” or “pendulum” model of penal change, rhythmically
oscillating between punishment and rehabilitation. On another level, continuity
rather than change emerges as a foundational feature of parole.
In many ways, Shah’s book is a historical inquiry of parole in California that
“studies its creation and evolution throughout the centuries” (p. 10). As such, it
joins a substantial body of work on the topic (e.g. Lynch, 1998; Messinger et al.,
1985; Simon, 1993) and engages contemporary conversations on penal historiog-
raphy (e.g. Goodman et al., 2017; Hutchinson, 2006; Robinson, 2008). This his-
torical inquiry, however, is not strictly concerned with the past for its own sake.
Rather, it is decidedly rooted in the present moment of crisis wherein bipartisan
circles are (again) proclaiming rehabilitation as a promising paradigm for penal
reform. Employing a Foucauldian genealogy, Shah notes that “[u]nderstanding
modern conceptualizations of rehabilitation requires an understanding of prior
contexts in which rehabilitation played a key role and the contexts in which reha-
bilitation fell from favor” (p. 149). History, then, becomes a...

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