Making Sense or/of Decisions? Collective Action in Early Release Process

In Belgium, since the 1st of February 2007, Sentence Implementation Courts (SIC) have been responsible for granting early release to prisoners serving a sen- tence of more than three years. Far from the traditional idea of a ritualised justice (Garapon 2001), this court “does not judge” but makes decisions. These decisions are not produced through the syllogistic reasoning of some judges mechanically applying general rules to specific cases (Beccaria 2006). They rather depend on complex organising processes, enacted by various professional groups: SIC mag- istrates, prison governors, prison clerks, Prison Psychosocial Team (PST), and Prison Central Administration (Halliday et al. 2009). Those professionals are pro- ducing and making sense of diverse documents (Freeman 2006).
This chapter looks at the process through which judicial decisions are made by the SIC. It aims at accounting for the cooperation between the stakeholders. The formal coordination between the professional groups will be depicted, as well as their concrete practices and interactions. In doing so, we will emphasise the importance of documents as “boundary objects” (Star and Griesemer 1989) supporting professionals’ cooperation. We will also analyse how “sensemaking” (Weick et al. 2005) underlies collective action across time and space along the sen- tence enforcement process.