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Flipping the “New Penology” Script: Police Misconduct Insurance, Grassroots Activism, and Risk Management–Based Reform

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 December 2021

Abstract

Through a multi-method qualitative case study, I examine the failed 2016 ballot campaign of the Committee for Professional Policing (CfPP), a police accountability group in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In attempting to make Minneapolis the first city nationwide to require police to carry professional liability insurance, the CfPP turned the logic of Malcolm M. Feeley and Jonathan Simon’s “new penology” paradigm onto police. Their thesis argues that a contemporary penal shift occurred away from rehabilitation toward managing aggregates of dangerous criminal categories through risk management approaches. I extend their thesis in a new direction by examining how—in the emerging age of “algorithmic risk governance”—social movement organizations, like the CfPP, are starting to invert the new penology onto criminal justice personnel. In flipping the script, the CfPP called for a new private insurance market using mandatory police misconduct insurance to manage aggregates of dangerous police officers. After highlighting how the CfPP developed new penological objectives, discourses, and technologies, I discuss the implications of grassroots groups adopting and redefining traditional penal logics and propose future research avenues.

Type
Articles
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Bar Foundation

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Footnotes

This study received funding support from the University of Minnesota’s Interdisciplinary Doctoral Fellowship and Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship programs and received initial Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval on December 29, 2015 and subsequent annual IRB renewal. I thank Malcolm M. Feeley, Edward G. Goetz, Philip Goodman, Veronica Horowitz, Ethan Johnson, Stephen Rushin, Christopher W. Schmidt, Joanna C. Schwartz, Jonathan Simon, Christopher Uggen, and Robert Werth for their supportive and helpful feedback and Stacy Belden, Andrew Martineau, Breck Radulovic, Willa Sachs, and Scott Uhl for editing and research assistance.

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