InVisions of Social Control(1985) Stanley Cohen provided a typology of scholarly works on the punitive turn: “uneven progress,” “good intentions-disastrous consequences,” and “discipline and mystification.” This Essay applies these categories to recent punishment and society scholarship, finding a clear preference for the third category, arguing that current works do not merely point to systemic evils—they impute bad intent to individuals in the system. Against this current, I identify two works—James Forman’sLocking Up Our Own(2017) and Heather Schoenfeld’sBuilding the Prison State(2016)—and show the strengths of analyses that take individual actors on their own terms. Finally, relying on the recent example of the Ban the Box initiative—a well-intended but failed policy—I argue that flexibility in viewing actors’ motivations, rather than relegating them to the role of cogs in a system fraught by inherent flaws, is important not only for scholarly accuracy but for policy and strategic reasons.

中文翻译：

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“他们”在想什么，这重要吗？刑事司法改革中的结构性不平等和个人意图

在社会控制的愿景(1985) 斯坦利·科恩 (Stanley Cohen) 提供了关于惩罚性转向的学术著作类型学：“不平衡的进步”、“良好的意图——灾难性的后果”以及“纪律和神秘化”。这篇论文将这些类别应用于最近的惩罚和社会学术研究，发现了对第三类的明显偏好，认为当前的作品不仅仅指向系统性的邪恶——它们将不良意图归咎于系统中的个人。针对这种潮流，我确定了两部作品——詹姆斯·福尔曼的锁定我们自己的(2017) 和希瑟·舍恩菲尔德的建立监狱国家（2016 年）——并展示了以个体行为者自身条件进行分析的优势。最后，依靠最近的 Ban the Box 倡议的例子——一个善意但失败的政策——我认为在观察参与者的动机方面的灵活性，而不是让他们在一个充满固有缺陷的系统中扮演齿轮的角色，是不仅对学术准确性很重要，而且出于政策和战略原因。