I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is at all connected to the prison system and is at all interested in how we as a society deal with those deemed to have broken the law.

Vincent Schiraldi comes to us from an interesting point of view, as he used to head the probation system in New York City. You would think he would be pro-parole and probation, but he instead is extremely critical of the system as a whole and believes it does not do what it was created to do.

This book is dense, and it is hard to review it simply because of that. While Schiraldi writes a lot from the New York perspective, he does a great job of discussing numerous other jurisdictions to show that this is a system-wide issue and not specific to any one area.

If you're already abolitionist-minded, this book will just add a lot of information for you to pull out when discussing the negatives of our carceral state with others. Highly recommend.

Thank you to The New Press and NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I highly recommend this book. Vincent Schiraldi presents data and arguments with clear expert level knowledge in a digestible manner. Schiraldi manages to tie in his experiences in the system he’s describing and critiquing — while acknowledging the role he played — data, history, and stories of many who have been affected by this system to create a compelling argument and portray a comprehensive view of the faults in our current, and past, probation and parole systems.

Obviously, this book relies on the perspectives of the author and potential readers who can not see the benefits of at least partial abolition of parole may not find this read as enjoyable. Although I do think it would still be a beneficial read to these readers.

Overall, I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in criminal justice reform.

Thank you to The New Press and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Mass supervision by Vincent Saraldi talks about probation and parole and their drawbacks and downfalls. He claims the system we have just helps to make poor people poorer mr. Saraldi wants us to take into account the things that in my opinion the person breaking the law should take into account before deciding to do so. I do agree that minors who break the law shouldn’t have high penalties and should Hevave their environment looked out for the best course of action but I don’t think a community-based program would be any more effective than the program already in place because the office of the mayor, councilman or any small town government position is a community-based program of sorts and wherever you put someone in power who shouldn’t be there’s going to be problems any time a human is running something there’s room for a faulty outcome. I do think the author has a few great ideas but I don’t think mothering the world is going to help. He comes with lots of experience working in the juvenile parole and probation and he does have a great question but I do think in my opinion we should continue working on the answer. They do have some really interesting stories as well as tragic ones and if you like reading nonfiction that makes you feel then you’ll definitely like Mass Supervision by Vincent Saraldi it is a book I definitely recommend and thoroughly enjoyed I want to thank the author and NetGalley for my free arc copy please forgive any mistakes as I am blind and dictate my review.

'Rise Of The Warrior Cop' - For Probation And Parole. A decade ago this summer, one of the best books on policing I've ever encountered was released. A year before Michael Brown's murder and the American people becoming aware of a group called "Black Lives Matter". That book traced the history of policing from its earliest roots in the British legal system through its then most modern incarnations in the US legal system, and offered a few modest proposals on how to correct its worst current abuses.

This book does largely the same thing, but with the concepts of probation and parole, rather than policing itself. At 30% documentation, it is reasonably well documented, and the author claims to have worked in several relevant areas and appears to currently be an activist within this space. He is also clearly a New York Liberal Elite... and this flavors his overall discussion quite heavily. Still, that is a more "your mileage may vary" level, and like with the more libertarian bent of Rise of the Warrior Cop... you need to read this book anyway, no matter your politics, if you truly want to be informed of the scope of the actual problem here. Yes, the "solutions" tend to essentially be "take money from prisons/ courts and give it to these other areas" or even simply "give more money to these other areas", as one would expect from a New York Liberal Elite, but there are also quite a few realistic and useful approaches, such as Schiraldi's discussion of having his offices switch from in person check-ins to computerized check-ins that both saved money and allowed a greater opportunity for those under his supervision to comply with the relevant controls.

Overall a mostly solid overview of this particular area, though it does gloss over several other realities better discussed in other works, and it does in fact focus on the "black men are disproportionately affected" statistics based lie that belies the reality that more white people are supervised under these programs as an actual whole. But there again - New York Liberal Elite. So this is expected. Read this book. Learn some things (assuming you weren't already familiar with this space - and even there, there is likely *something* here for you to learn). And go and do.

Very much recommended.

PS: Because I know some reader of this review is at some point going to want a list of other recommendations for other books within this space, here is a list of others I've read in and around this space over the years, in alphabetical order by title:

Free by Lauren Kessler.
In Their Names by Lenore Anderson.
Just Dope by Alison Margolin.
Pleading Out by Dan Canon.
Punishment Without Trial by Carissa Byrne Hessick.
Rise Of The Warrior Cop by Radley Balko.
The Plea Of Innocence by Tm Bakken.
The Shadow Docket by Stephen Vladeck.
Torn Apart by Dorothy Roberts.
When Innocence Is Not Enough by Thomas Dybdahl.
When We Walk By by Kevin Adler and Donald Burns.
Why The Innocent Plead Guilty And The Guilty Go Free by Jed S. Rakoff.

I read the eARC Mass Supervision by Vincent Schiraldi. Thank you, NetGalley and The New Press.

This book explores the way Probation and Parole have failed in their original goals of offering people a chance to get their lives to a point where they can be part of the community. The book starts in its prologue by telling you about probation and parole’s background and then goes on in other chapters to detail how both have moved to become more punitive and can catch those sentenced to them to end up longer in supervision than was originally sentenced, or even ending up going to prison. And not because they reoffended, but because of “technical” reasons. These can be anything from a random search uncovering drugs, to a person being unable to find a way to the space where they’re supposed to meet with their supervisor, to being unable to pay the fines or fees they’ve been saddled with.

Because yes, even this system has been taken over by the “for-profit” companies. This is made worse as supervisors are able to carry out their supervision with few guidelines, leading to these for-profit companies to do things like raise the fines their “offender” instead of “client” needs to pay, to forcing them to pay rent for the ankle monitor around their ankle, to even forcing them to pay for drug tests that their judge didn’t say they had to take. When this person is unable to make these payments, this effecting those in poverty, and often marginalized groups especially, the supervisors threaten to send them to jail, even though that is not supposed to be a reason they are given any prison time. There are so many ways that a person can “technically violate” the terms of their parole or probation, that a supervisor is easily able to abuse their position and give their client jail time “because they’ve had to break it some way”.

The book then goes on to talk about the author’s own activism where he worked within the system. He mostly talks about his time overseeing the supervision and changes to New York’s parole and probation system. Talking about how he sees probation and parole as so counter to supporting people that it has become a leash around those sentenced it, that at any moment they can find themselves in the still crowded prison system that it’s meant to alleviate.

While the author does name a few organizations within New York that he diverted funds towards, and how he put offices closer to the places where most clients came from, his overall talk here is very distant. One reason is that he doesn’t have a lot of data, so instead of going to these grassroots groups or the people who are supported and helped by these programs, he instead emphasizes that one of the reasons it worked so well in New York, was that these groups and advocates already existed, but bemoans the lack of this data, as I believe he’s had to needed to the data so much to get done the good he’s been able to do, that when he doesn’t have it, he also loses the ability to know how to make his case even in this case where his program appears to have worked so well.

If this is an area of interest for you, and you need a lot of data to back it up. This is a perfect read. I personally feel that after this book I need to read others for a more robust look at advocacy, but I can see where in this research, this book can be an important resource.

This was a quick easy read about an issue that hasn't really been addressed as prominently in the debate over mass incarceration. There is a lot of useful information about the role that parole, probation, and technical violations play in fueling the carceral state. The author is clearly well-informed and passionate about this issue, although the fact that he is himself implicated in the system through his long career in running supervision or incarceration regimes in a variety of locales definitely makes some of the chapters feel slanted and self-serving, especially when he talks about the successes he claims to have achieved in New York City. While I am sure he is proud of his work there, the lack of grassroots perspectives about his tenure and the fact that his upbeat account of the criminal legal system in New York City does not square with the fact that activists groups have consistently, and increasingly since 2020, calling for far more radical changes than the author envisions. The general lack of street-level perspectives is evident throughout but particularly glaring in the chapters that concern his own record; while he does have several quotes and anecdotes from people who have actually experienced probation or parole, the bulk of this book relies on quotes, evidence, or arguments supplied by academics, non-profit leaders, or government officials. This top-down bias is particularly evident in his concluding chapter on next steps and prescriptions for change which is quite literally addressed to a generic governor of a state rather than an ordinary member of the public. While I enjoyed learning from this book, more than anything it made me eager to seek out books or articles written by activists, community members, or other grassroots perspectives.