Chapter 4 in Democracy in Captivity: Prisoners, Patients, and the Limits of Self-Government (University of California Press, 2023)

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Chapter overview

This chapter reconstructs the rise and fall of “community control in custody” during the crisis years of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when prison rebellions and broader urban unrest prompted reformers to experiment with participatory governance inside prisons. Drawing on debates surrounding the War on Poverty and the principle of “maximum feasible participation,” the chapter analyzes three institutional designs—multilevel grievance procedures, prisoner councils, and prisoner unions—as efforts to democratize custody through decentralization and local control.

Rather than dismiss these reforms as naïve or celebrate them as lost democratic breakthroughs, the chapter identifies a shared “family resemblance” among them: a belief that prison pathologies stem from prisoners’ exclusion from governance. It then evaluates practical objections (security, administrative capacity, political backlash) and philosophical objections (abolitionist and technocratic critiques), arguing that neither decisively refutes participatory reform. The deeper limitation, the chapter suggests, lies in reformers’ tendency to locate both problems and solutions within prisoners themselves, leaving wider structures of power intact. The result is a recurring cycle in which democratizing gestures stabilize custodial authority even as they invite more radical visions of prison democracy—setting the stage for the Walpole rebellion that follows.

Core contributions

  • Provides a synthetic account of prisoner councils, grievance procedures, and prison unions as a coherent reform discourse rather than isolated experiments.
  • Introduces the idea of a “family resemblance” among community control models centered on decentralization, localism, and participatory governance.
  • Clarifies competing interpretations of community control: power sharing, policy coordination, consultation, and interest-group formation.
  • Engages major critics (security-first, technocratic, and abolitionist) while showing why practical and philosophical objections do not settle the democratic question.
  • Identifies a structural limit: reformers’ focus on prisoners as both problem and solution risks reaffirming the exclusion thesis and reproducing custodial authority.
  • Bridges historical and contemporary debates about prison democratization, restorative justice, abolition, and mass incarceration.

Where this chapter fits

The chapter connects scholarship on prison governance, democratic participation, and the politics of the War on Poverty to contemporary debates about mass incarceration and abolition. It engages work on participatory institutional design, technocratic insulation, and community empowerment, situating prison reform within broader struggles over public opinion, legitimacy, and decentralization. By revisiting the 1970s crisis of custodial authority, the chapter clarifies what the later punitive turn was a turn away from—and why the conceptual terrain of community control continues to shape current reform movements.

Keywords

community control; prison governance; prisoner councils; grievance procedures; prison unions; decentralization; democratization; War on Poverty; maximum feasible participation; prison rebellion; Walpole; legitimacy crisis; mass incarceration; technocracy; abolition; participatory reform

How to cite

Chicago (author-date)

Berk, Christopher D. 2023. “Community Control in Custody.” In Democracy in Captivity: Prisoners, Patients, and the Limits of Self-Government. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.