ABSTRACT
In attempting to capture this seemingly enduring contradiction, the metaphors of net-widening, wider and stronger nets, dispersal of discipline, transcarceration, minimum security society, maximum security society, and new penology have been used (i.e., Blomberg 1977; Austin and Krisberg 1981; Lowman, Menzies, and Palys 1987; Feeley and Simon 1992). In trying to account for this contradiction, one of several theoretical models has dominated the penal reform literature. Nonetheless, while these findings, metaphors, and theoretical interpretations have been helpful, we have yet to adequately grasp the full meaning of this seemingly unending cycle of reform and failure. Clearly, until we are able to grasp and understand this cycle of good intentions leading to bad consequences its repetition will continue. In fact, the metaphor of choice that is being employed in attempts to capture penal reform's current continuation of the intentions
form that several authors have suggested a different approach to its study. Matthews (1987), for example, argues that an additional issue emerging from the findings of net-widening and the dispersal of discipline is that while there are inherent dangers associated with the expansion of social control, simultaneous attention must be given to the positive outcomes that may result from penal reforms. Matthews elaborates that penal reforms involve complex processes that result in not one outcome or result but several potentially mixed outcomes or results. Consequently, to make sense of these reforms and their processes requires a more comprehensive "approach than is realizable through overgeneralization, directionless statistical manipulation, and the kind of relentless pessimism which characterizes much of the literature" (ibid.:356).
