July 27, 2023
ISSI Graduate Student Isaac Dalke is the author of a new article in Law & Social Inquiry based on computational and interpretive analysis of 9,842 parole hearing transcripts from California covering 2007-2010. "I Come before You a Changed Man: 'Insight,' Compliance, and Refurbishing Penal Practice in California" shows that demonstrating "insight" became essential for incarcerated people to be granted parole and argues that the concept of insight "came to constitute a new vocabulary of denial grounded in old rehabilitative language, while it created possibilities for commissioners’ decisions to be anchored in assumptions based on an incarcerated person’s race, class, and gender."