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Conscience and Convenience: How Social Workers Pursue Rehabilitation in Chinese Community Corrections

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2023

Jize Jiang Open the ORCID record for Jize Jiang [Opens in a new window]  and
Xuan Chen
Jize Jiang
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor, School of Law, Tongji University, Shanghai, China. jiangjize1989@gmail.com
Xuan Chen*
Affiliation:
Lecturer, Department of Social Work, Zhejiang Sci-Tech University, Hangzhou, China.
*
chenxuan@zstu.edu.cn
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Abstract

The establishment of community corrections in China marks a restructuring of the Chinese penal field and a possibly differentiated arrangement of penal power. Social forces and community actors are now enabled and encouraged to participate in penal affairs and to share devolutionary penal power with the authoritarian state. Yet little research attention has been allotted to examine how these burgeoning social organizations, professional service providers, and community actors manage their participation in rehabilitative work and negotiate their rehabilitative aspirations with state ideologies and policy mandates as they work within Chinese community corrections (CCC). Drawing on observational data and in-depth interviews with social workers within CCC, we show the ways in which social workers actively create strategies to pursue their professional values of service and implement rehabilitative ideals and caring ethos while, at the same time, minimizing the risk of challenging state authority and jeopardizing penal policy priorities. Three devised approaches are presented, and their implications are discussed.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , First View , pp. 1 - 24
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Bar Foundation

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Footnotes

The authors would like to thank N. A. Weihe, Yi Han, and the four anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments and suggestions, and we are also grateful to the social workers, justice officials, and community actors for their agreement to share their participating experience with us over the research project. This work was generously supported by a grant from the Research Program of Zhejiang Soft Science (Grant no. 2021C35033).

References

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