Feeley, Malcolm and Jonathan Simon. "The New Penology: Notes on the Emerging Strategy of Corrections and its Implications". Criminology, Vol.30, No.4 (1992): 449-474.

Feeley, Malcolm and Jonathan Simon. "The New Penology: Notes on the Emerging Strategy of Corrections and its Implications". Criminology, Vol.30, No.4 (1992): 449-474.

• The authors describe the trends in penal thought since the 1970s as a 'new penology'. This conception is based on the replacement of discourses on rehabilitation with a focus on actuarial justice, an increased focus on measurable indicators of efficiency in the penal system, and the end of individualized approaches to reform (449-450).
• The largest manifestation of this phenomenon of new penology comes from the massive increase in the size of prison populations in the West since the 1970s during a period of minor increase in crime rates and lower proportions of the population reported as victims of crime (450).
• The author holds that 'old penology' was focused on individual guilt and motivation, and ultimately the rehabilitation of that individual. This ethos is still reflected in American criminal law (451).
• In contrast, the new penology is extremely de-individualized, with conceptions of individual treatment, responsibility, or moral culpability no longer making an impact in penal decisions. The focus is now managerial, about identifying and controlling dangerous groups (452).
• The central change in discourse about criminality has been a shift from discussions of morality to those of actuarial justice and the management of risk. Rather than considering the individual and their motivations, the focus is now on the public interest and minimizing the likelihood of recidivism (452-453).
• This has manifested in prisons being increasingly run like businesses, with managerial experience becoming the dominant feature of administration, which is organized around set goals and statistical collection to measure the achievement of those goals (454).
• "The new penology is neither about punishing nor about rehabilitating individuals. It is about identifying and managing unruly groups. It is concerned with the rationality not of individual behavior or even community organization, but of managerial processes" (455).
• Rates of recidivism have become increasingly unimportant since the 1970s, partially as the system shifts away from rehabilitation of convicts to control of crime. Rates of recidivism are extremely high, with half of all convicts re-offending within 3 years, leading to a greater focus on being able to arrest these offenders rather than prevent the offense (455).
• This reconceptualization of the penal system, as a tool of control rather than reform, greatly lowers public expectations for criminals, and allows obvious failures in recidivism be repainted as success for controlling the population (455).
• The goals selected by penal institutions and other aspects of the criminal justice system reflect their new institutional priorities. Rather than focusing on external social factors like crime rates or recidivism, correctional institutions will focus on internal factors like response times or efficiency of management, allowing them to ignore larger questions of their institutional role and producing data demonstrating 'success'(456-457).
• The possibility for reform of criminals is increasingly marginal in discourse, with a far greater focus being placed on controlling and managing permanently dangerous populations. Parole and probation have fit into this context, as they are no longer marketed as ways to reintegrate felons, but as a low-cost method of controlling dangerous groups (456). 
• The combination of the penal system abandoning the goal of rehabilitation and increased pressure to increase cost-efficiency has resulted in the introduction of new programs like electronic monitoring systems, low-security prison facilities, and new statistic techniques to predict crime. While not providing any rehabilitation services, these programs all cut costs while controlling and monitoring dangerous groups (457).
• Since the goal of these programs is not the shaping of prisoners into 'normal' law-abiding citizens, their success cannot be measured in recidivism or other social goods. Instead, the markers for access are technical abilities to maintain surveillance or detect escape, indicators which are measurably and fit within a bureaucratic framework (459).
• The sentencing decisions of courts during this period have also experienced changes towards a new penology, including an explicit endorsement of incapacitation as a rationale in the sentencing process in 1982 (458).
• A range of ways in which prisoners can be incarcerated have been created following the introduction of new penology, with the goal of allowing for the reduction of cost by identifying the risk posed by different groups and categorizing them accordingly. This range reaches from high-cost maximum security prisons to low-cost probation (459).
• Probation and parole have expanded at an equal or faster rate than general rates of imprisonment and constituted the majority of convicts. Those who violate their parole are sent to prison and those who behave well in prison are returned to parole. This new flow between parole and prison reflects the new lack of conceptual distinction between the entities; whereas previously prison had been a place of reform, now they are both just methods of controlling convicts (460-461).
• Increasingly punitive responses to the use and trafficking of drugs has contributed to the massive increase the US prison population. Although control of drugs had always been an important element of prison policy, the recognition of their danger in the 1980s following the introduction of crack cocaine introduced stricter response to the drug problem (461-462).
• The approach of new penology is drug use is based around a risk management approach, using drug-related crimes as a marker for dangerous individuals and a prescriptions for special methods of incapacitation (462).
• A number of innovations have occurred in prison policy in the 1980s, one of which were 'boot camps', or minimum security facilities for young first-time offenders designed to replicate military life and instill youth with pride and discipline. The authors predict it will fail because it does not fit the needs of modern society, collapsing for the same reason that similar military penal programs failed in the 19th Century and were replaced with hard labor (463-464).
• Changes in the penal system towards actuarial approaches have been reflected in the criminal justice and law enforcement system, with maximizing protection of the public as interpreted through statistics becoming the primary goal. Whereas previously criminological strategies focused on reducing social dislocation and managing environmental factors, modern criminology is divorced from individuals and focused on managing and reducing criminality through control (466).
• The development of the new penology has been posited as a reaction to the development of an American 'underclass', composed mainly of poor Blacks and Hispanics in inner cities, who are w/o jobs, education, or skills, and will likely never be integrated into the workforce or broader society. This permanent underclass is collectively dangerous and thus society has created a new penal system designed to manage the permanent risk it poses (467-468).
• Other accounts of this phenomenon view the penal system as a recourse for social services or a societal method of the dealing with this underclass in the wake of the retreat of social policies following the welfare state's collapse (468).