The new article, ‘Keep Them on the Straight and Narrow’: Understanding, Selecting and Governing Subjects Through Intensive Supervision Units by Garrett Lecoq (Department of Law and Legal Studies, Carleton University) Dr. Dale Ballucci (Department of Sociology, University of Western Ontario) and Dr. Dale Spencer (Department of Law and Legal Studies, Carleton University) was recently published in in The British Journal of Criminology.
This paper examines decision-making practices and monitoring techniques of Canadian Intensive Supervision Units (ISUs) managing high-risk individuals in the community and argues that ISU subjects are hyper-individualized through their unique conditions of release, contesting notions that actuarial risk assessments have eclipsed individual understandings of dangerousness in risk, correctional and policing literature. Using Foucault’s disciplinary, pastoral and confessional dispositifs, this paper highlights how ISU agents make subjects active participants in their own punishment, and additionally illustrates how dispositifs not only allow ISU agents to understand, select and govern subjects but also, more problematically, transform subjects into ostensibly dangerous entities reifying and necessitating escalating criminal justice interventions under auspices of protecting the community from potential—not guaranteed—harm.