'Do no harm': mass supervision and the ruse of carceral humanism.

This article examines reform efforts within the New York City Department of Probation (DOP) beginning in 2010, which aimed to reduce probation’s punitive role by decentralizing supervision into community-based storefront offices called the Neighbourhood Opportunity Network (NeON) and partnering with non-profit organizations. Despite adopting a carceral humanism approach—repackaging probation as a caring social service embedded in communities—the reforms largely failed to address the material conditions driving youth criminalization in the South Bronx and instead expanded systems of social control through probation and contracted non-profits. Ethnographic research reveals that probation officers and non-profit staff struggled to balance enforcement with supportive roles, while youth bore the primary responsibility for behavioral change amid persistent structural inequalities. The study highlights how community-based reforms can perpetuate carceral logics under the guise of care, underscoring the need for critical engagement with the evolving landscape of mass supervision and social control.