Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms

Prison by Any Other Name asks a question obscured by the consensus around “criminal justice reform”: does reducing the number of cells actually reduce state control? Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law find that as the legitimacy of mass incarceration weakens, electronic shackles, house arrest, extended probation, locked drug treatment, mandated psychiatric care, and data-driven risk assessment are marketed as humane and inexpensive alternatives. They may move some people out of prison buildings while bringing others who would never have been incarcerated into continuous supervision, extending prison functions into homes, neighborhoods, schools, and clinics.

“Net widening” is the central concept. A conventional prison has visible walls; an alternative disperses punishment through conditions, applications, tests, appointments, and automated alerts. Arriving late, losing electricity to a device, crossing a geofence, being unable to pay a service charge, or missing a drug test can count as a violation and return someone to jail. Freedom is no longer determined by a steel door but divided among requirements almost impossible to satisfy perfectly. Official measures may record fewer people behind bars without showing how many now inhabit a longer and less visible chain of punishment.

The authors use investigative reporting, policy research, and extensive testimony rather than treating every noncustodial measure as equivalent. They distinguish voluntary, exit-able support controlled by participants from a program compelled under threat of imprisonment. Technology or treatment is not inherently the problem; power is. Who sets a person’s range of motion, gathers the data, profits from devices and fees, and turns an ordinary difficulty into a risk event? Private contractors and nonprofits that assume supervision can acquire quasi-penal authority under the name of “community services” without receiving even the limited scrutiny directed at prisons.

House arrest makes the gendered costs especially visible. Moving confinement home does not eliminate its labor; it transfers guarding, transport, food, equipment maintenance, and crisis response to family members, most often women. A monitored person may be unable to collect children, care for relatives, attend medical appointments, or change work shifts, while location tracking and forced presence can worsen control inside an abusive relationship. For trans people, disabled people, pregnant people, migrants, and those without stable housing, the assumption that everyone has a safe home, dependable connectivity, and a flexible job is itself a classed and ableist fiction.

The book also follows punitive logic into schools, child welfare, mental health, and drug treatment. Replacing police with disciplinary software, prison with a treatment center one cannot leave, or a sentence with indefinite “risk management” can preserve coercion’s core. A well-intended reform may create a new gateway: conduct that once produced no arrest can now trigger assessment, case management, and interagency data sharing. The relevant comparison is therefore not only whether a program feels better than prison, but whether it brings people under control who would otherwise have faced no coercive intervention.

This is not an argument against every incremental change. Schenwar and Law offer criteria akin to non-reformist reform: does a measure reduce the number and duration of people under supervision, eliminate fees and technical violations, limit data collection, restore freedom of movement and decision, and transfer budgets to unconditional housing, health care, income, education, and care? Genuine alternatives also include mutual aid, survivor support, transformative accountability, and crisis responses led by affected people. Their defining feature is that resources are supplied because people need them, not awarded for compliance.

The book’s panoramic range is also a limitation. Electronic monitoring, drug policy, psychiatry, child welfare, and school discipline each have complex histories that cannot receive equal depth; programs vary, and readers should not equate every service involving therapy or data with prison. Most evidence comes from the United States, while devices, privacy law, and welfare systems differ elsewhere. Since 2020, facial recognition, generative risk scoring, and smartphone location tracking have further developed, requiring the framework to be extended into an even more commercial surveillance ecology.

For each proposed “alternative,” make a power table: is entry voluntary, what happens upon exit, who owns the data, who defines violations, who carries fees and care labor, and does the participant leave with more material resources? Pair the book with Decarcerating Disability on coercive treatment and facility closure, and with No More Police on whether reform contracts police power. Its practical contribution to FemRes is an editorial discipline that refuses to be reassured by names: judge a reform not by its distance from steel bars, but by the degree to which a person can move, refuse, live, and receive support without threat.