Visible body and invisible mind: Bureaucratic performance, self-rehabilitation, and the machinery of Chinese community corrections

Based on a recent ethnographic study of community corrections in two large Chinese cities, this study examines how the rehabilitation work, as the cornerstone of Chinese community corrections, is deployed as a people-processing apparatus that counts offenders’ bodies but almost excludes their agency. In practice, offenders are instrumentalized and disciplined to make up the Chinese community corrections machinery, whose subjectivity is either completely muted or selectively mediated. Given justice actors’ adherence to bureaucratic hierarchy and preoccupation with administrative requirements, offenders are mostly marked as counts and treated more as penal objects utilized to fulfill intricate metrics-related requirements. Justice agents’ formalistic pursuit of, rather than substantive investment in, the well-being of offenders renders their participation in Chinese community corrections symbolic and strenuous. It further breeds offenders’ commitment to self-rehabilitation, a process of relying on self-discipline and personally discovered resources for compliance and reintegration. We contend that the current operation of the Chinese community corrections apparatus, under the rehabilitative guise, exacerbates offenders’ structural disadvantages and reinforces their stigmatized identities. Policy and research implications of this study are discussed.