5.625 × 8.75 SPINE: 1.0625
“ From the kinds of injustices I experienced on probation and the #FreeMeek movement that resulted in my release, to the experiences of millions of Americans who are tormented by the supervision-to-prison pipeline, Vinny Schiraldi chronicles the rise of probation and parole, and the birth of the movement to reform these practices, directing us to the hard work remaining to free men and women still unjustly trapped by mass supervision.” — ROBERT “MEEK MILL” WILLIAMS, recording artist, entrepreneur, and co-founder of the REFORM Alliance
VINCENT SCHIRALDI is secretary of the Maryland Department of Juvenile Services. He has served as director of juvenile corrections in Washington, DC, commissioner of the New York City Department of Probation, and commissioner of the New York City Department of Correction. He has also been a senior research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and is co-founder of the Columbia University Justice Lab and founder of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice and the Justice Policy Institute. He has written extensively for outlets ranging from the New York Times to The Marshall Project. He lives in Maryland and this is his first book. BRUCE WESTERN is professor of sociology and social justice and co-founder (along with Schiraldi) and director of the Justice Lab at Columbia University. He is the author of Homeward and Punishment and Inequality in America and co-editor (with Jeremy Travis) of Parsimony and Other Radical Ideas About Justice. He lives in New York City.
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“ W hen I hired Vinny Schiraldi to run New York City’s probation department, I wanted someone who would shake up a broken system—and that’s exactly what we got. He played a critical role in helping our administration reduce both incarceration and crime to record lows, and the experiences and insights he shares in Mass Supervision hold lessons for the whole country.” —MICHAEL BLOOMBERG, mayor of New York City (2002–2013) and founder of Bloomberg and Bloomberg Philanthropies “ Vinny Schiraldi combines the rare gifts of a memoirist and a reformer calling our attention to the mass casualties of our broken probation and parole systems. Anyone in search of sanity and solutions must read this book.” —KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD, professor at Harvard Kennedy School and the Radcliffe Institute “ The iron grip of mass incarceration reaches far beyond the walls of American prisons and jails, and Vincent Schiraldi shines a light on the millions of Americans who are surveilled and ‘supervised’ by the government in a way that neither respects their humanity nor leads to greater public safety. This paradigm-shifting look at an unexplored aspect of our criminal legal system is a must-read.” —PIPER KERMAN, author of Orange Is the New Black “ Vincent Schiraldi asks us all to consider what it means to be on ‘papers,’ that colloquial term for being under state supervision. Schiraldi knows what the rest of us don’t about probation or parole from its history to all its present disasters. But more than this, Schiraldi offers a pathway forward, to less supervision and more freedom and more safety.” —REGINALD DWAYNE BETTS, founder, Freedom Reads, author of Felon “ A masterful account of probation and parole by someone uniquely situated to write it. Mass Supervision explores the history and fairness of these systems from the perspective of a government official who actually ran them, a scholar determined to study them, and an advocate determined to change them. It should be required reading for everyone in the criminal legal system.” —HONORABLE NANCY GERTNER, former U.S. district judge and senior lecturer, Harvard Law School
MASS SUPERVISION VINCENT SCHIRALDI
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MASS SUPERVISION
“Paradigm-shifting . . . a must-read.” —PIPER KERMAN, author of Orange Is the New Black
Probation, Parole, and the Illusion of Safety and Freedom
VINCENT SCHIRALDI With a foreword by Bruce Western
current affairs & politics
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$29.99 u.s.
e’ve heard a lot about the 2 million people currently incarcerated in American prisons and jails, but what about the approximately 4 million more who are on probation and parole— monitored by the state at great expense and at risk of being sent to prison at the whim of a probation or parole officer for the least imaginable infraction? Vincent Schiraldi was New York City probation commissioner under Mayor Bloomberg, supervising a system charged with monitoring 30,000 people on a daily basis. In Mass Supervision, he combines firsthand experience with deep research on the inadequately explored practices of probation and parole, to illustrate how these forms of state supervision have strayed from their original goal of providing constructive and rehabilitative alternatives to prison. They have become instead, Schiraldi argues, a “recidivism trap” for people trying to lead productive lives in the wake of a criminal conviction. Highlighting examples from New York, Wisconsin, California, Georgia, and Pennsylvania, Schiraldi deftly charts the transformation of probation and parole from their hopeful beginnings into their more punitive iterations, illuminating the racial inequities infecting both systems, compiling data that reveal the two systems to actually be “criminogenic” — causing more crime than they reduce—and documenting mass supervision’s role as a feeder of mass incarceration. Schiraldi illuminates the lived impact on the people, families, and communities who are the primary targets of mass supervision as the system itself becomes privatized, as well as current reform efforts, ending with an argument for replacing probation and parole with programs that reinvest the savings into more meaningful and effective ways of addressing public safety.