#utopia of classification

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"The prison attempts to do four things.

First, it still tries to exact an equivalent in pain and trouble from the perpetrator of the crime. This is the old idea of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

Secondly, it is hoped that confinement in a prison will offset any advantage that might possibly be derived from the crime. This is an appeal to the intellect of the prisoner, an effort to prove to him that, as the popular saying goes, crime does not pay.

Thirdly, the prison provides a place for the secure confinement of dangerous men who for one reason or another can neither be scared into good behavior nor reformed by what might be called Christian methods.

Lastly, the prison has as one of its purposes the reformation of the criminal.

It would be untrue to say that the prison attempts to carry out all these four avowed or implied goals in dealing with each individual that is forced to abide within its walls. On the other hand, it cannot be said that the prison applies only one of these four aims to a given individual. There is much confusion and it is generally quite impossible to decide whether a prisoner is feeling the effect of all four treatments or of only one. .... A prison is, it must be recognized, an unnatural place for a man to live. No animal that was not bred in captivity likes to be shut up. A prison is a cage for men and very, very few would stay in it voluntarily. ... The necessity of preventing or reducing homosexuality, of making the prison escape-proof, and of seeing to it that the weaker types of prisoners are not used by strong cunning ones for their own evil purposes makes it almost impossible for prisoners to live in an atmosphere of normal social relationship.

The advice which a prisoner gets from a warden is "pull your own time." In other words, keep your natural human sympathy to yourself. One must remember, of course, that each prisoner is surrounded entirely by other prisoners all of whom are where they are on account of acts which society deems injurious to itself - men whom one would not normally pick out to be companions for a friend in trouble. There are few adult first offenders in prison, fewer now than in the past, for the gradual extension of probation means inevitably that first offenders unless convicted of some revolting crime will ordinarily be placed on probation. Thus, there are perhaps good reasons for warning a new prisoner not to get mixed up in the lives and doings of other prisoners.

... The good prisoner in the eyes of the prison staff is the man who cheerfully obeys all the rules. Outward conformity is essential to a peaceful life in prison. The man who is "prison-wise" gets along the best. The prison reward for the man who has experienced an inward change is not apparent. Only the Federal Government and a few of the individual states have loosened the grip of the spoilsman on prison jobs. There are good men, no one will deny, among those appointed by political favor but the number of inexperienced and incapable prison officials is distressingly large, for which the spoils system is unquestionably to blame. These are, roughly, the most important of the persistent factors of prison life in the United States forming an ever present social miasma in which all prisoners live.

it is now agreed by most people that prisoners should be reasonably well housed and fed and that they should receive such medical attention as their condition demands. Do these improvements make for the reform of the criminal? In a negative way, they do, for the prisoner will go out with less accumulated bitterness over his treatment in prison. It is doubtful, however, if they exert any positive influence toward reformation, unless the prisoner's crime can be definitely traced, a rare situation in my opinion, to some physical defect or weakness. ... Classification, to which so much attention is now directed, has a little but not much to do with any of the aforesaid purposes of a prison. It relates directly to the cost of housing and guarding prisoners. Minimum, medium and maximum security could be also expressed as low, medium and high cost of building accommodations. To be sure, a man kept under minimum security conditions would have greater freedom of movement and less oversight than if he were quartered with some who might take the first chance they got to run off. But those classified as minimum security risks are not necessarily the best types of men. Some may even be weak-minded or petty but persistent offenders who haven't the energy or courage to make a break. Classification also simplifies somewhat the warden's difficulty of guarding prisoners. Fitting regimes can be devised for the three classes of prisoners with the result that the man who has no notion of trying to escape does not have to endure the restrictions necessarily imposed on those who will try it when opportunity presents. Classification is therefore a useful prison administrative device but the reformatory element in it is small. I would not deny that the reformatory element is present but I feel that its importance in classification has been greatly exaggerated by loose talk of its importance in prison management. It does definitely, however, strengthen the third purpose, namely, providing a secure place in which men addicted to serious crimes may be held. It can be considered the necessary first step in group treatment. ... The organization of prison administration which I shall discuss later is at the present time the stumbling block to their endeavors. Briefly, the presence [of psychiatrists, psychologists, classification and parole officers] on the staff of prisons adds nothing to the idea of exacting an equivalent in pain nor of taking the gain out of crime but it does assist in determining which are the bad actors among the prisoners and is, or could be, of great value to the fourth aim of detention in prison by giving clear, or at least clearer, ideas of the direction that reformation must take, in place of the vague commonplaces usually uttered by those who think reformation to be a compound of salvation, sweetness and light.”

- Louis M. Robinson, "Contradictory Purposes in Prisons," Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology Vol. 37, no. 6 (1947): 450-454.

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"Plea for Prison Reform Wins Contest for Girl," Toronto Star. May 14, 1935. Page 10. ---- Brampton, May 14. - "All prison procedure should aim to assist the criminal to become a useful member of society." declared Miss Ilda Steele, in oration which won for her the Walker Oratorical contest. She pointed out that punishment and levying of fines never reformed the offender.

"Our prisons are removing every atom of initiative, the last trace of responsibility, and all individuality," she claimed. "All are treated alike-men of good background, as well as the scrapings from the slums; first offenders as well as old repeaters. All are thrown into the prison melting-pot. We spice the mixture with a sprinkling of idleness, shiftlessness, over-crowding, and produce the habitual criminal.

"Prison management should strive for reformation rather than revenge. Instead of 'making the punishment fit the crime.' it should seek to make the treatment suit the individual."

Miss Steele represented St. Paul's United church. The other three contestants were Miss Edith Lougheed of the Baptist church, Ernest Clark of the Presbyterian church and Pat Henry of Grace United church.

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This is the story of Canada’s attempt to build its own Alcatraz-like prison - why it was planned, and why it was never built. It is also a story of prison reform in Canada, and the authoritarianism often emergent in elite reform projects. Buckle in, it’s a long one. The Archambault Report of 1938, the published findings of the Royal Commission to Investigate the Penal System of Canada, is held by many criminologists, penologists and federal corrections as the foundation of Canada’s liberal, reformist, rehabilitation-focused, criminal justice system. Penal reformers in the 1940s and 50s treated it like a blueprint of sorts: its vision of liberalized parole, specialized training, a greater focus on education and psychiatric care, treatment for addictions, professional staff training, organized inmate recreation, a grievance process, and the erection of low security institutions was more or less followed until the 1960s. 

Much less heralded by later day criminologists and penologists are the Report’s preoccupations with punishing homosexuals, correcting ‘the moral failings of the age’, contempt for, and a desire to discipline, the working class that supposedly birthed the criminal class, and hostility to the inmate activism – a wave of massive riots, strikes and protests from 1932 to 1937 - that had led to the calling of the Royal Commission in the first place. “Nothing could be more injurious” than to let inmates organize for penal reform, and so the good reformer must do everything to pre-empt complaint. Keep this in mind later when we move from recommendation to implementation.  In this regard, the Royal Commission report is a document typical of the Mackenzie King-era civil service and of mid-twentieth century Canada (and operant still in many aspects of Canadian popular ideology): conflict should be resolved by a moderating technocratic elite who can manage competing factions through expert guidance and intervention. 

The Report identified a number of serious issues afflicting the penal system, with one of the most serious the persistent, recidivist or habitual criminal. An entire chapter was dedicated to this ‘problem population’ whose existence demanded the most severe treatment by even the most progressive penal reformer. The Commissioners concluded that “there will always remain a residue of the criminal class which is of incurable criminal tendencies and which will be unaffected by reformative efforts.” Prison held “no terrors” for them and they were “the costly worthless dregs of society” that must be isolated “so that their contaminating influence will be reduced to a minimum both in prison and out.” 

After discussing how preventive detention would work legally – any person convicted of a third indictable offense could (read: should) be given an indeterminate, or life, sentence ended only by parole or pardon – the Report moves on to envisaging what kind of facility should be used to house these prisoners. Its primary aim would be to “segregate the lawbreaker from society…[and] provide for safe custody by maximum security” and “should be erected remote from any other penal institution.” This was absolutely in keeping with modern penology, and the Commissioners praised British and French experiments to that end. Taking Alcatraz as the best example, the Commissioners suggested the use of Grosse Isle, an island in the St. Lawrence River near the city of Quebec, and formerly used as a quarantine station for immigrants – where thousands had died from cholera and other communicable diseases in the 19th century. The similarities between quarantine and penitentiary discipline were long ago pointed out by Foucault, but it’s rare to see the connection between containing disease and containing people made so obvious in actual practice.

When the Royal Commission said ‘habitual criminal,’ the officials of the Dominion Penitentiaries heard ‘agitators.’ They consistently considered the segregation and isolation of agitators to be their most urgent need. This was not a misunderstanding of the Royal Commission’s recommendation - they were really looking at the problem from both sides of the coin. A new Inspector of Penitentiaries, George Shortt, secretary to the Royal Commission, a Queen’s and McGill grad, and future urban planner, took up the task of creating this maximum security isolation prison. Shortt agreed with the conclusions of penitentiary officers that the convict revolts of the 1930s had been precipitated by a small number of agitators who exploited “legitimate grievances” to “incite others to create disturbances.” He wrote in an August 1939 memo that only segregation could “eliminate” the “disruption of ordinary penitentiary routine…and reformative influences.” Also planned by Shortt were a dedicated facility for treating prisoners with addiction problems and another for prisoners with psychiatric issues or ‘sub-normal mentality,’ also intended to relieve disciplinary issues.

In all this correspondence, the agitator remained undefined, a sort of prison bogeyman. Unlike recidivism, which could be measured, the agitator was always somewhat shadowy and amorphous as a ‘type.’ Agitators were often considered synonymous with incorrigible, recidivist, and habitual prisoners, but this was not a given. An agitator might be a ‘jailhouse lawyer’ who knew the laws of Canada and the prison regulations well, from long acquaintance, but this was not always so. The agitator could be a lifer or long termer, but not always – and young, first time penitentiary prisoners (but with previous reformatory terms) were often at the forefront of strikes and protests in the 1930s. Agitators were also not coterminous with types of crimes – though ‘holdup men’ and armed robbers were often listed as agitators. What was clear to penitentiary officers was that agitators were charismatic, intelligent, politically aware, and capable of influencing others to take action – that is, they were leaders within the fractious, always changing inmate community. Isolation would, essentially, decapitate prisoner unrest. Identifying and isolating “the agitator class” became a pressing issue as unrest grew in the penitentiaries in the late winter and spring of 1939. A new Penitentiary Act was set to be debated in Parliament in March, the implementation of (some) Royal Commission recommendations was eagerly awaited inside prisons, and some prisoners were prepared to use protest to remind the politicians of their demands for humane treatment. At the same time that mass hunger strikes and work stoppages broke out in July and August 1939 at Saskatchewan, Kingston and St. Vincent de Paul Penitentiaries -  sparked by parsimonious royal clemency granted during the Royal Visit but really about recreation, radio, work conditions, food - Inspector Shortt was compiling lists of agitators, submitted by senior penitentiary officers across Canada. 

A total of 341 prisoners were identified as being transferrable to this projected isolation prison on Grosse Isle, with the majority incarcerated at Kingston and St. Vincent de Paul in Laval. All federal institutions had nonexistent or inadequate facilities for segregation within their own walls – inadequate mostly because men in segregation cell blocks could still get messages to their supporters in what we would now call general population. And of course, there were no such thing as maximum or medium or minimum security in 1939 - all federal prisoners, no matter their crime or conduct, laboured and lived together in one big house. By this point, initial planning for the new prison at Grosse Isle was already underway, and Shortt envisioned, in a July 1939 memorandum to Minister of Justice Ernest Lapointe, equipping this new facility with “tear and nauseating gas and gas masks…search-lights…police dogs for each yard officer on night duty…to warn against ambush in the darkness…special enclosed cells.” A new disciplinary routine, far more severe than the one in place at existing penitentiaries, would be instituted “specially adapted to the agitator class…giving the convicts plain food and exercise, but no privileges.” The workshops, dedicated only to exhausting labour like canvas working and sand making, would be equipped with steel cages “to isolate ‘bad actors’ in the population” during potential unrest, and a machine gun was planned to be mounted at the entrance. A preliminary survey of Grosse Isle had been made in early 1939 by Earl O’Leary, another Inspector of Penitentiaries, and the buildings at the old quarantine station were found to be in good condition and suitable for upgrading to cell blocks “if [prison] labour can be secured.” The only problem: the Immigration Department had no interest in giving up its facilities on the island, even if they were no longer in use.

Stymied in this regard, Shortt turned to Stony Mountain Penitentiary in Manitoba, which was isolated enough from Winnipeg to serve well as a new maximum security prison. Shortt even drafted a tentative staff transfer list, full of officers who had been condemned as unsuitable by the Royal Commission but whose “severity” and “martial discipline” would suit them well for controlling a refractory population. However, resistance from existing penitentiary staff and surrounding villages to this plan stymied it in the planning phase. 

In January 1940, Shortt, in desperation, suggested that the federal government buy the newly completed and very costly provincial jail in Gatineau-Hull to use as a “recidivist prison” but almost immediately after an approach was made, the jail was taken over to serve as an internment facility for political prisoners. After this, with the war on, and prison unrest subsiding, any further plans for a segregation prison were put on hold, and no serious efforts were made to build a prison in this style until the opening of Millbrook Reformatory in 1959 and the Special Correctional Unit in Laval in 1965-66. There is a question as to whether this plan would have worked as intended (or if any kind of control unit, special handling unit or super-maximum on these lines does). For one, it dramatically underestimated the scale of inmate resentment during the 1932-33 and 1939-40 waves of protest – they were definitely not the work of ‘an agitator class’ nor of ‘habitual criminals.’ (Indeed, the experiences of that first wave of riots probably formed the agitator class) Removing agitators from a prison is not necessarily a solution, as Stanley Cohen has pointed out – paradoxically, if you remove the worst behaved 5% from a population, replacements to fill that gap will soon arise. As Donald Clemmer identified in 1940, and well known by prisoners of this period, individuals with long experience inside can actually have a stabilizing or restraining influence on younger inmates. Undoubtedly, as David Ward’s work on Alcatraz shows, the vast majority of prisoners who ended up at this segregation prison would have been young men who were disciplinary problems being dumped by other prisons, and undoubtedly the agitators and habitual prisoners would have quickly been outnumbered. 

As it was, the preventive detention outlined by the Royal Commission was never fully implemented on the vast scale they envisaged - only fifty-six men between 1950 and 1960 were given indeterminate sentences. Even this was considered too many by legal experts of the time - especially because many of the men thus convicted, while agitators and troublemakers in the 1930s and 40s, were non-violent drug dealers and break & enter men, and middle aged to boot by 1960. Image is Grosse Isle, Quarantine Station, c. 1905-1910. Library and Archives Canada.

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“Asks ‘What Am I?’, ‘Czech’, Says Court,” Toronto Star. March 17, 1939. Page 33. ---- London, Ont., Man Thought ‘European’ Closest He Could Come --- Special to The Star London, Ont., March 17. - Mike Jugoda presented a puzzle to Magistrate C. W. Hawkshaw today. Filling out the court record after convicting him of theft, Magistrate Hawkshaw asked him his nationality. Mike, hesitated, and finally ventured ‘European’. ‘That’s no good, I must have the country,’ his worship said. ‘Well,’ Mike said,’ when I was born it was Austria; when I left for Canada, it was Czecho-Slovakia; now...(with a helpless gesture), I don’t know what it it is.’ His worship entered him as Czech.

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TOWARDS THE CLASSIFIED SOCIETY

“Let me return to those original early nineteenth-century transformations. But now, instead of seeing state centralization, segregation, mind control or professionalism as the crucial changes, imagine the enterprise of classification to be the centre of power.

The great projects of discipline, normalization, control, segregation and surveillance described by the historians of this transition were all projects of classification. Foucault's version of this history conveys this element most clearly. His theory is curiously close to functionalism, labelling theory and to Illich's notion of iatrogenic growth: the system is non-rational and non-utilitarian in that it creates and classifies deviance rather than seeks to eliminate it. Foucault, indeed, greatly exaggerates this irony: the prison system has nothing to do with turning offenders into honest citizens; it simply manufactures new criminals, drives offenders deeper into criminality and recruits them to the criminal class. The regrouping of delinquents into a 'clearly demarcated card-indexed milieu' is seen by Foucault as a typical episode in the mechanics of power: the prison falls, so now there takes place 'a strategic utilization of what had been experienced as a drawback'. There is no need, however, to accept all the implications of this rather crude type of left-functionalism to see how the emerging control system neither prevented nor eliminated crime but translated it into different terms. The unorderly and inefficient world of eighteenth-century crime control gave way to a regulated, ordered universe. The bifurcatory form became theorized and formalized: the criminal to be separated from the poor, the poor to be divided up into deserving and undeserving, the criminal then to be divided into bad and mad. The asylum, the closed institution, performed the initial sorting out. This was the roughest filter. Then, within the asylum, all sorts of elaborate and intricate systems of classification began to evolve. Students of nineteenth-century prisons describe institutions in which up to 29 separate categories of inmate were worked out. The logical end of the process was solitary confinement - each individual in his own category. In the idealized panopticon, each one of these cells could be observed totally by a few unseen people. The exposure to cognitive passion was absolute - the smallest gestures, the merest words could be observed, described, classified and compared. Eventually these elaborate systems inside broke down because of their sheer complexity. But the passion for classification remained, to be redefined and made scientific by the twentieth-century enterprise of scientific testing. The elaborate systems inside the prison are duplicated by the equally elaborate systems outside - the new 'continuum of community corrections' with all its fine gradations and notations.

The obsession with classification is truly baroque, something like the life work of a mid-European lepidopterist. And the whole enterprise is largely spurious, not just because of the difficulty of matching people to methods, but because changes in control policy keep demanding new schemes of classification. Each part of the system starts with its own selection criteria to accommodate the 'right' client around whom the regime or service was designed and for whom a particular professional specialism exists. But if there are not enough 'right' clients, that is who fit the selection criteria for the diversion agency, community correctional centre, half-way house or prison - then the norm changes. Other clients are admitted, the regime is altered accordingly and a new technology of selection has to be devised.

Like methods of punishment or treatment themselves, these classification systems mayor may not 'work'. The category might be too broad or too narrow, the wrong candidate might be selected. Sometimes these mistakes can prove fatal, particularly at the output end where an offender might be classified as 'safe’ so to be released, but turns out to be dangerous. But these "forms of failure are perfectly suited for the crime-control system. Unlike the failure of a correctional measure itself, the 'failure' of a classification system rarely evokes troublesome ideological questions and never threatens professional interests. It simply calls for more and better classification - an agenda which can be followed with total agreement from everyone. Liberals and conservatives, reformers and managers, psychologists and guards, all are committed to seeking further refinements to whichever bifurcation they are concerned with - soft or hard, treatable or untreatable, safe or dangerous. The non-contingent nature of these refinements matters not at all.

Nor do fads and fashions in penal philosophy matter very much. At first sight, the just-deserts movement and the attack on rehabilitation seem to threaten the whole edifice of individual classification. But the various judicial modes within classicism and the disciplinary or treatment modes within positivism are more complementary than they appear. At one point, Foucault gives a pleasing explanation of the 'furious desire' of judges to assess, diagnose, receive reports and listen to experts (even the 'chatter of criminology'): it was as if they were ashamed to pass sentence. But as he shows, the need to classify runs deeper than this; I will try to simplify his tortuous and confusing 'history'.

The form of punishment in the great codification reforms of the eighteenth century simply refers the offence to a corpus of law which contains a single binary classification: the legal  opposition between permitted and forbidden, with prescribed categories of reaction.

Though it has to appear general and universal, a precisely adapted code, in fact, is aimed at individualization. Punishment has to be finely calibrated 'with neither excesses nor loopholes, with neither a useless expenditure of power nor with timidity.’ There was little psychological knowledge in the eighteenth century (tests, examinations, etc.) to supply this 'code-individualization link', so this Linnaeus-type taxonomy has to be found elsewhere. Criteria such as the repetition of the crime could be used to make the tactics of power more efficient. 

When the new disciplinary society emerges, so does a psychology of classification. The mind, not the body, the actor, not the act become the judicial object. The offender is examined, assessed and normalized - his 'soul' is brought before the court. This is not only to explain his action or to establish extenuating circumstances, nor to humanize the face of justice, but to re·-organize yet again the economy of punishment. The new methods of punishment and treatment (aimed at changing the offender) have to be legalized. The individualized classifications, that is, have to be reproduced in the system as legal forms.

The 'knowable man' now becomes the object of the human sciences. Inside and outside the court (but always sanctioned by the law) they begin testing, measuring, allocating each person to the correct space on which he can be differentiated. 

At every stage, classification is deeply lodged in the framework of punishment. It is no less important our current deterrence theory (punish Just enough to prevent repetition) or current just-deserts theory (punish just enough to redress the social balance). And even if they are not very good at matching, even if they are not too sure what works, and even if the court has a somewhat less than 'furious desire' to listen to them, the professional classifiers are still at work. In every judicial system we know, the number of social enquiry reports or recommendations submitted to the court grows incrementally. The soft/hard bifurcation makes the professional classifier even more important. As we move away from sentencing into the punitive apparatus itself, the urge to classify remains. In prisons, the magic wand of classification has long been held out as the key to a successful system. If only those who mess up the regime could be weeded out (sent to special prisons, units or isolation centres), the system could go ahead with its business. All that has changed over the last century is the basis of the binary classification. It used to be 'moral character', sometimes it was 'treatability' or 'security risk', now it tends to be 'dangerousness'. For example, at the end of the seventies, the Federal Bureau of Prisons set up a Task Force to investigate how to establish inmate 'custody level' in terms of dangerousness. They grouped the inmates according to 47 potentially significant factors from an initial list of 92 possibly relevant items, gahered from 329 staff. Institutions are grouped into a Security Designation Form according to 7 features, ending up with 6 security levels. Pertinent information is then teletyped to a central Designation Desk. Step-wise Multiple Regression is used to test validity. Each inmate has a Unit/Classification Team working with a Custody Classification Form. 

At the softer, community end, the classification business, as we have seen, lacks the rationality of models such as 'dangerousness', 'security risk' or ‘incapacitation' (which can all be empirically validated). There are just endless pitouettes between psychological characteristics (self-esteem, conduct impairment, hostility to authority); composite categories (risk, amenability, proneness); treatment modalities (reality theory, camping, behaviour contracting); and places (7.8 on the normalization scale?). Even cruder legal categories become shifting and uncertain. One official study commissioned to solve the problem of who were the 'status offenders' to be deinstitutionalized, found that 46 classifications were being used, and that, for the most part, these had no effect on the selection of target groups. This last project is an example of the convergence of academic with managerial and professional interests. There are workers who devise classification systems, others who operate them and meta-workers who classify these operations. Some professionals specialize entirely in the area. In one American enterprise, some 10 federal agencies, 31 task forces and 93 experts got together to study the impact of classification systems for children. To study the impact of classification systems though, is quite a different matter from joining the quest for the Golden Goose of systems that 'work'. For despite their apparently self-sealing logic, classification systems do indeed have an impact on the external world. Professional expansion is directed towards creating new categories of deviance and social problems, that is defining more people as belonging to special populations and then slotting them into one or other category. This is what labelling theory - correctly - means by the socially constructed nature of deviance. Professionals play a crucial role in making claims about the boundaries of the category and then ruling on who belongs to it. The logic of professionalism requires either that these boundaries be expanded to bring in new populations or that they be changed to relocate old populations. Types of deviance such as homosexuality, hyperactivity or drug abuse, the very nature of mental illness itself, categories such as dangerous, treatable or high-risk, have all been subject to this type of boundary adjustment. This is what happens in what sociologists variously call the 'politics of deviance', 'stigma contests', 'reality negotiations' and the 'power to criminalize'. But the real significance of classification lies in the form, not the content, the enterprise itself and not its end-results. The power to classify is the purest of all deposits of professionalism. This is what Orwell meant when he said that the object of power is power. And this is what Foucault meant when reminding us that power is not just a force which excludes and says 'No', but a form of creation: 'we should not be content to say that power has a need for such and such a discovery, such and such a form of knowledge, but we should add that the exercise of power itself creates and causes to emerge new objects of knowledge and accumulates new bodies of information.’“  - Stanley Cohen, Visions of Social Control. Crime, Punishment and Classification. Polity, 1985. p. 191-196.

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Cascading: The Construction of More Severe Forms of Control

“One of the central operational policies to emerge from the most recent change of vocabularies of penal motive is the practice of "cascading." Principally derived from the discourse of "rehabilitation," whether the treatment model or the opportunities model, cascading refers to the gradual reclassification of prisoners downwards through a series of security levels. Theoretically, prisoners with longer sentences begin serving them in a maximum-security institution. After a period of assessment and adjustment, if the prisoner shows "progress," she or he will be reclassified as medium-security and transferred to a medium-security institution.Once there,a similar process of evaluation may subsequently result in the prisoner's transferral to minimum security,finally to be released conditionally under some form of parole classification. Thus, cascading is designed to provide the incentive for prisoners to improve themselves arid to show that they represent a decreasing risk to prison authorities

To operationalize such a policy, there must be sufficient numbers of prisons classified at different security levels. Such was the official justification behind the intensive capital-building program launched in the late 1950s (Gosselin, 1982;MacLean, 1986).

This logic of classification emerged as a component of the rehabilitation model of corrections, particularly because of its emphasis upon community corrections. Yet what is the effect of such security-level expansion? Since the creation of lower-security institutions apparently arose from the desire to limit the extent to which we rely on prison as a punishment, one might expect to see a decrease in the prison population. Some observers have interpreted decarceration as a direct response to fiscal constraints (Scull, 1977), in which case one would expect to see an absolute or relative decline in prison populations. Others have suggested that the supposed alternatives have actually served as supplements to prisons, so that higher-security populations remain stable while lower-security populations increase. In other words, there is a "widening of the net" (Cohen, 1979, 1985; Hylton, 1981).

The Canadian Sentencing Commission (1987: 367) argued that net widening can be avoided if a new sanction is introduced "with the intention that it should be used in lieu of another sanction which is more severe" In other words, if alternatives rather than additions are devised, net widening will not occur. But is the process of net widening quite this straightforward? There are several senses in which net widening can occur. In his critique of Scull's (1977) decarceration thesis,Matthews (1979) observes that net widening in the postwar period has consisted of three interrelated processes: expansion, acceleration, and bifurcation.

Expansion refers to the growth of the prison population, the expanded construction of institutions in which they are housed, and the expansion in the number of persons staffing them. During the postwar period in Canada, the number of federal prisoners (persons serving sentences of two years or more) trebled from about 4,000 in 1945 to its current number of approximately 13,000. The number of federal prisons dramatically increased from 8 in 1945 to its current level of more than 60. Finally, the number of federal workers has expanded at an even greater rate from approximately 700 in 1945 to its current level of approximately 11,000 (CSC, 1990b: 5).

Acceleration refers to the process by which people who are classified into the lower-security levels of the system move ever more rapidly through the different classifications to the point at which they are discharged. The result is that a greater proportion of people can be cycled through the system, thereby allowing an expansion of the number of people with criminal records. Also, acceleration means that every level of classification will be filled to capacity.

Bifurcation refers to the tendency for every new classification of lesser severity to be accompanied by the development of one of greater severity. The logic is that there must always be a more restrictive set of conditions into which a prisoner can be thrust when she or he does not "respond well" in a less restrictive setting. Seen from this perspective, what appears to be a move toward less restrictive prison regimes and more humane settings is actually complimented by a move toward more restrictive regimes and less humane settings. In Canada in the 1960s, cascading originally meant expanding the one classification of maximum-security prison into the three categories of maximum, medium, and minimum. In the 1980s, a system of institutional classification with seven security levels was adopted (there are now six). On the less secure end, work camps and community correctional centers have been added. "Super" maximum-security, or Special Handling Units (SHUs), have appeared at the other end of the security scale. Besides the classification of the type of institution, the process of bifurcation has also resulted in a variety of parole classifications at the lenient end,while at the severe end various forms of administrative segregation have also appeared. A fourth process not identified by Matthews (1979), but clearly related to expansion, acceleration, and bifurcation, is what we call proliferation. Proliferation refers to the process by which new classifications of control and treatment require new sets of rules and codes, the violation of which are sanctioned. Thus, a population that has already demonstrated some difficulty in following codes of conduct is subjected to ever increasing spheres of control, each with its own specific set of rules and punishments.More and more status offenses are thus constructed, such that their violation is virtually guaranteed. In this way, proliferation is a process by which higher levels of official criminality, deviance, and rule-breaking are constructed in concert with expansion, acceleration, and bifurcation. Through the process of proliferation, a double delinquency is forged. For us, the recognition of the processes of bifurcation and proliferation is particularly relevant to any assessment of likely "trouble spots" in the Canadian federal correctional enterprise. While expansion and acceleration are also relevant, "cascading" refers precisely to bifurcation - an increasing number of kinds of classifications - with proliferation, an increasing number of status offenses, occurring in the process. At one moment of this process, prisoners are moved downward along a continuum of security classifications reflecting their perceived rehabilitation progress. This is the"rehabilitative moment." In the other moment of the process, however, prisoners are moved upward along the continuum as a form of punishment and control in response to their perceived lack of progress toward rehabilitation. In this moment, prisoners are liable to be classified according to expanded categories of deviant behavior, the violation of which is punished by reclassification toamore secure prison. This is the "punitive moment."

In theory, the threat of reclassification and transfer acts to control prisoners; in practice, however, once set in motion, the logic of bifurcation and proliferation leads to the expanded need for institutions of increasingly greater security along with the further segregation of certain prisoners. Once these greater security classifications are put inplace, they serve to construct and reproduce the very control problems theyare intended to correct. The proportion of the population housed in higher-security institutions is proof enough of this.”

- John Lowman and Brian MacLean, “Prisons and Protest in Canada.” Social Justice Vol. 18, No. 3. (45), Attica: 1971—1991 A Commemorative Issue (Fall 1991) pp. 143-146.

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“Segregation Limit Reached,” Toronto Star. October 25, 1938. Page 19. ---- ‘I think we have gone as far in segregating young first offenders from hardened criminals as is possible,’ declared Hon. Harry Nixon, provincial secretary, today. His comment arose from a suggestion of Rev. T. W. Barnett of St. Clement’s church, Riverdale, that inmates of Ontario institutions should be still further segregated according to age and criminal experience.

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(D) Classification Serves as a Guide to the Development of Education, Training and Recreational Programs “Closely allied to the function of classification as an aid to the extension of opportunities for employment in prison is its utility as a guide to the type of educational and industrial program that is appropriate to the particular institution. Included on the Classification Committee are the director of education and the head of the recreation and training activities. These specialists have made studies of the degree of education which each prisoner has attained, his interest in further development and his capabilities for utilizing the period of prison incarceration as an opportunity for general or special instruction. When this material is brought together through the classification procedure, the type of vocational training, the extent of correspondence school and related reading and other activities can be intelligently developed. More and more students of penology are coming to realize the essential place that constructive hobbies and leisure time activities have in community life. Prison administrators have recognized the possibilities of developing outlets of this type under institution conditions. As a product of the thoughtful use of classification material we have many striking examples of the possibility of developing these areas under competent leadership. (E) Classification as an Aid to Jail Inspection and Improvement In some jurisdictions it has been found possible to apply the experience of the classification procedure to problems at the county jail level. If we recognize that classification is more than a procedure and represents a really fundamental point of view, we naturally turn to it as a guide in problems related to those of penal and correctional institutions. The examinations made by physicians, identification officers and others help to develop an evaluation of individual offenders and this same material, although in elementary form, is frequently available in connection with surveys, studies and inspections of the local jails. While the jails in New Jersey do not generally employ the classification technique as a routine, the Division of Jail Inspection includes studies of prisoners in custody, their offenses, their length of sentence and related material, and brings these data together for the benefit and understanding of those concerned with jail management. The findings of these studies are made available to local officials. In several such institutions routines have been established to exclude certain classes of offenders from the local jails. Jail populations in some counties have been drastically reduced, while in others checks have been instituted on the local committing magistrates. A review of all jail sentences by the presiding judge of the county is a good insurance against abuses common in sentencing to local institutions. It may be safely said that classification is thus guarding  against indiscriminate commitments to institutions of this sort.

(F) Classification as an Aid to the Courts in Sentencing There have been a number of important studies which have thrown light upon sentencing practices and indicated that the sentences imposed by various courts show wide variation. Among the suggestions that have been made for improving this situation have been those of establishing sentencing tribunals which could make studies of individuals who have been tried and, prior to sentence, could offer recommendations as to the type of correctional treatment that should be undertaken. Recently we have had the recommendations of the Youth Correction Authority developed by a committee of the American Law Institute, which has recommended a very comprehensive program along this line, directed primarily to young men of the ages sixteen to twenty-one. While the possibility of realizing many of these suggestions seems somewhat remote, classification prior to sentence is within the range of possibility and in some jurisdictions the probation departments are already making available through the clinical studies and social investigations much of the material which should be in the hands of the sentencing judge. 

An excellent illustration of the possibilities of utilizing classification as an aid to sentencing is afforded by the experience under the provisions of a New Jersey statute enacted in 1935, Section 2:192-1.1 of the Revised Statutes. Under this procedure the Court before determining on the treatment to be accorded a convicted offender may send him to an institution designated by the Commissioner of Institutions and Agencies for thorough-going classification study. Under this statute a number of institutional centers are designated in New Jersey to which the judges send the prisoner for a period not to exceed forty-five days. Here he is carefully studied by specialists in accordance with the classification procedure and a comprehensive report and recommendations supplied to the judge so that when the prisoner is returned the judge has the benefit of these classification findings in order that he may consider them in connection with the responsibility for treatment. Thus the benefit of the classification procedure is made available to the judge prior to sentence and the court is in possession of full and comprehensive, expertly gathered information as to the offender, as well as to the circumstances of the offense. Such a plan puts a great deal of responsibility upon the Classification Committee, which must do a thorough and painstaking work. In New Jersey this facility is utilized chiefly for problem cases for the courts sitting in rural counties where facilities for clinical study are not otherwise available. These medical, psychiatric, psychological and other studies, supplemented by careful social investigations and other routine checks, provide the judge with a type of information which is essential if he is to make the most effective use of the various facilities for correctional treatment that are at his disposal. Thus those persons who in the judgment of the classification procedure can be adjusted through probation are recommended for suspended sentence or probation, and in this way considerable expense involved in institutional commitment can be avoided. (G) Classification .as a Prerequisite for Parole and Release Consideration In many jurisdictions a major responsibility rests upon the warden or superintendent for making recommendations as to men who are applying for consideration for release on parole. Intelligent and impartial handling of these applications is essential in order to maintain morale, in order to protect the paroling authority, and to assist those responsible for later supervision of the parolees. This function is doubly important in reformatories and other similar institutions where the indeterminate sentences prevail and where institutional parole committees act upon applications for release to the community. The classification procedure, properly developed, produces a practical result in that it tends to build up confidence on the part of the local staff and institutional officers. The prisoner also knows that release is not made on any basis of individual favoritism or capricious judgment, but is based upon the findings of a group of persons who are interested in his successful adjustment on parole. The law enforcement officers, also, are assured that the decision is based on careful appraisal of factual material, and this is an added assurance in the public relations of the reformatory or other correctional administration. In New Jersey the classification procedure has developed to such a point that within the past two years the Constitutional Court of Pardons, with unlimited authority to release men under confinement, has incorporated in its procedure the provision that before passing on any applicant for pardon or parole, the prisoner must have been reviewed by the Classification Committee, and its recommendation serves as an important and essential basis for the deliberations of the Pardon Court.” - William J. Ellis,  Commissioner, Department of Institutions and Agencies, Trenton, N. J.,   “Practical Results of the Classification Program.” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Vol. 32, No. 1 (May - Jun., 1941), p. 76-79.