Mass Supervision: Probation, Parole, and the Illusion of Safety and Freedom

by Vincent Schiraldi

With a foreword by Bruce Western

The most comprehensive critique of probation and parole—and a provocative and compelling argument for abolishing both—from the former Probation Commissioner of New York City

Imagine if probation didn't exist. And I came to you with $80 million and 30,000 people the courts considered troubled and troubling. And you could do anything you wanted with that money to make New York City safer and help people turn their lives around. Would you go out and hire a thousand civil service-protected bureaucrats to supervise people as they piss in a cup once a week, and to tell them to go forth and sin no more?
—Vincent Schiraldi’s Job Interview with NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg
We’ve heard a lot in recent years about the nearly 2.1 million people 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.

Schiraldi offers the first full and up-to-date account of these two key aspects of our criminal justice system, showing that these practices increase incarceration, have little impact on crime rates, and needlessly disrupt countless lives. Ultimately, he argues that they should be dramatically downsized or even abolished completely.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, History, Social Issues, Crime, Sociology, Social Justice

352 pages, Hardcover

Published September 12, 2023

Reviews

[Taylor Brystol · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was… interesting. But not in a way that made me want to keep going. I went in knowing next to nothing about parole and probation. I am not sure I am any better informed. A large part of my hesitation is the author is so clearly biased. Yes, there are massive inequities and the system is deeply broken. The case could have been made while still addressing the validity of the arguments for the “other side.” That opportunity was ignored however. What Vincent Schiraldi didn’t ignore was any opportunity to insert himself in the narrative. The study I did, in my experience, when I was ____, I instructed my executive team, and on and on. I actually laughed out loud when he referenced (yet again) a particular job he held… for seven months. Dude. I wouldn’t be bragging about a job I was only in for seven months. I dislike that type of ego. Let the issues, the arguments, the data, let all of that be the center of attention. Be a PART of the solution, rather than insisting on time in the spotlight. After a while it felt like just another politician on a partisan soapbox. Yawn.

I will seek out some other material on probation and parole. Hopefully I will find something balance elsewhere.

[Bea · Rating 4 out of 5]

A little too preachy about how he is great and what he did, but overall a very important reflection and overview of the broken system of probation.

[Ashley · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Julie · Rating 2 out of 5]

The only thing I agree with this guy on is that a supportive, trusting relationship between the client and the PO are paramount to the client’s success, and there are not enough POs who take this heavy responsibility seriously. Most everything else he says is laughable and/or insulting.

The history included was interesting, but I can’t get past the fact that, as far as this guy is concerned, there’s no need for laws, because the enforcement of them in any manner is nothing short of unnecessary. He is actually proud of himself for instigating the blind quashing of warrants for thousands people who absconded from probation or parole in NYC and hadn’t been found for years, reasoning that surely they all must have mysteriously seen the light and gone the route of law abiding, notwithstanding being on the run, of course. Seriously?

So many of the blanket claims he makes are easily found to be false with a little research, justified by rows and rows of statistics that he points to as proof that correlation is the same as causation. His answer to everything: abolish supervision, give people vouchers to spend as they wish on whatever services they think they need as they leave incarceration, and whatever you do, do NOT require people to follow the law. It’s apparently just too hard for us people of color to do.

[Madison ✨ (mad.lyreading) · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Allison · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mass Supervision is an informative book about community supervision (aka probation and parole). Often misunderstood as an alternative to prisons, community supervision actually extends surveillance to twice as many people. The author's main argument is that this system of supervision is meant to reduce incarceration and make the community safer, but it has accomplished neither of these aims. It's an expensive but ineffective system that actually feeds incarceration because a quarter of prison admissions are for "technical violations" for those under either probation or parole.

The author includes a history of how both these forms of supervision began. "Father of Probation" John Augustus started bailing people out in the 1840s in Boston, and he supported them until their hearing in an effort to turn their lives around, which he thought was preferable to them sitting in a correctional facility for that same period of time. It was meant as a charitable act on his part. Augustus was heavily involved in the temperance movement, and his first case was helping someone who'd done a minor crime connected to intoxication. From the start, some detractors thought it was too light a punishment for criminal behavior. Police also opposed it because it cut into their bonuses if people weren't imprisoned as a result of their arrests. Probation expanded by the 1920s with the increase of guilty pleas. Plea bargains grew in popularity as a way to expedite the judicial process, and probation was/still is offered as an enticement for people to choose the guilty plea rather than risking prison in a trial. Unfortunately, probation is not the gentler option that its detractors claim and that the pressured people imagine when they choose it over defending themselves in court.

Parole began as a way of rewarding good behavior in confinement with earlier release. It was tested in Australia and arrived in the United States by way of Ireland in the early 20th century. Parole was paired with indeterminate sentences to leave space for deciding the length of incarceration based on prisoner behavior. Lacking rehabilitation and a way to identify where rehabilitation has been successful, the system was not fully functional from the start. Now, it actually extends time spent under supervision, and all the rules of parole make it easy to get sent back to prison via technical violation.

So what's the situation with these technical violations? For example, people under community supervision can be incarcerated for crimes they are eventually acquitted of if being accused of a crime is listed as a violation of parole. In some places, a person being approached by the police can be a violation, which, like any arm of the criminal justice system, leaves plenty of room for racist miscarriage of actual justice. Technical violations can also include missing appointments with a parole officer or falling behind on fees, which are especially exorbitant when outsourced to private companies. People who are on probation or parole find themselves making difficult decisions with the opportunity for failure and re-incarceration on all sides. If they miss work for an appointment, they might lose their jobs an/or fall behind on paying their fees, resulting in a technical violation. But if they miss an appointment to go to work, then that's a technical violation, too. A person signs a contract when leaving prison that they understand violations will return them to prison, so incarcerating someone by technical violation is a punishment that largely bypasses any sort of judicial process.

My main takeaway from the book is that community supervision is actually just widening the net of state surveillance à la Panopticon. It isn't benefiting our society but is instead costing us, broadly speaking, and costing people who find themselves in an endless loop of surveillance, especially. The author has a very clear and concise writing style, but some examples are used repetitively across chapters. It made me wonder if you just read one like an essay, if you could avoid that issue. I suspect that each one would make a perfectly serviceable article on its own, but it does make reading them all together as a continuous book a bit irritating. The author also walks a fine line when it comes to presenting his personal expertise. On the one hand, his involvement with criminal justice and community supervision, in particular, enhances his trustworthiness as an expert. But he also veers into the territory of name-dropping and touting his own successes in a way that actually dented that credibility for me. It made me wonder how much the book was meant to bolster his career versus providing information alone. It's worth noting, though, that regardless of intent, I was able to learn a lot about a topic I didn't know enough about before I picked this up. So if you'd like to rectify a blind spot in your own understanding, I'd still recommend giving it a try with those caveats. Thanks to The New Press for my copy to read and review!

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

'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.

[Janalyn, the blind reviewer · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Sophia Kittell]

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.

[Jordan Stockdale · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential reading for system leaders, advocates, and community members committed to real public safety and a smaller criminal legal system. Vinny Schiraldi makes a radical, evidence-based case for dramatically shrinking probation and parole. He argues that these systems should either be incrementally eliminated altogether or returned to their original purpose: as an alternative to prison, rather than a net-widening web of bureaucratic control. Blending rigorous data analysis with candid personal experience and Brooklyn plain-speak, he traces the systems’ noble beginnings, their sprawling and punitive expansion, and the perverse incentives that followed. He closes with concrete, workable reforms to make supervision smaller, smarter, and less punitive—while actually improving community safety.

[Kaelyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

A quick, informative read about the mass supervision epidemic in the United States, which is a critically understudied and less often discussed issue. As someone who studies community supervision, a lot of the information presented wasn’t necessarily new to me, but I really enjoyed the way the author presented his arguments and the data. I also personally liked that he reflected on his own professional career in probation. I plan to use this book in my community corrections course for graduate students this fall. I believe they will enjoy it as would anyone who is interested in this topic. It is not too technical and doesn’t have any crazy jargon. So, someone with no background in this book would likely find it accessible. I also think it would pair well as a buddy read with The New Jim Crow.

[Kayla · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting look at the probation and parole system in the United States. Each chapter focuses on different aspects of the system, such as how it affects the larger community and how it impacts mass incarceration.
I do feel like there are times when I feel as if I am reading the same data that I've already read earlier in the book. But overall I feel like I learned a lot about mass supervision in the US and where we should go from here to improve the system.

[sna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Author was commissioner of NY Dept of Corrections.

Lots of detailed examples, facts, figures on why probation on a whole has failed to live up to its promise to reduce the incarceration rate.

Has some concrete examples on what could replace it based on successes in different US cities including NYC.

[Jill Sakowitz · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was really interested in reading this after hearing Schiraldi speak following a screening the documentary film Paint Me A Way Out of Here, although the book covers a very different subject than the film. I really knew very little about parole and probation and am glad to have learned more about the topic, however the book is quite dry and academic.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love hearing the author's voice because he gives the vibe of yelling the most erudite sentence at someone and finishing it with "you dumb motherfuckah."

I think this is a good presentation of information, with studies and personal experience. Additionally, there is a call to action at the end of the book, so it's not like we are presented with problems and left high and dry.

[Joce · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good book on a section of our criminal justice system that I didn’t know much about. Better read as a book than listened to on audio as there are charts and graphs referenced. It is quite a dry read, so I definitely preferred reading it at a slower pace.

[Justin Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

Effectively organized and thoroughly researched, this call for “incremental abolition” of probation and parole was eye-opening and compelling. The author simultaneously demonstrates how to use one’s role as an insider within a broken system to earn trust, build a team, and make a difference.

[Genesis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Important book, well written and researched.

[Michelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nonfiction is sometimes a slog for me! This was informative, depressing, but also I appreciated information about potential solutions

[Tedi Beemer · Rating 3 out of 5]

I will legitimately be using this on cross exam