“A Prison in Your Community”: Halfway Houses and the Melding of Treatment and Control

In the 1960s and 1970s, the United States built an enormous infrastructure for community treatment: more than sixty-five thousand beds in halfway houses and similar small-scale residential facilities. By promising to displace prisons and to establish forms of intervention that were less expensive, less restrictive, less dependent on institutional confinement, more effective in rehabilitation, and more humane, halfway houses became linchpins of criminal and juvenile justice systems, drug and alcohol treatment, and other court-ordered interventions. Nationwide zeal for community treatment caused the number of correctional halfway houses to explode from fewer than twelve in 1960 to more than two thousand in 1978. That year, more than two hundred thousand people spent time in residential treatment facilities, as common a fixture of 1970s American life as roller-skating rinks. The total capacity of all U.S. halfway houses rivaled the number of prison beds in California, New York, and Texas combined.1 Despite...