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

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.