Doctoral Dissertation Research: Understanding Local Legal Compliance in a Potential Era of Prison Downsizing

博士论文研究：了解监狱缩小规模的潜在时代中的当地法律合规性

• 批准号: 1535511
• 负责人: Mona Lynch
• 金额: $ 2万
• 依托单位: University of California-Irvine
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2015-09-01 至 2016-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1535511&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Understanding; Local

Despite vast expenditures on prison construction in the late 20th century, infrastructure has not kept pace with the dramatic growth of incarceration in the U.S. As a result, extreme prison overcrowding has led to humanitarian, legal and fiscal emergencies nationwide. These emergencies are especially pronounced at the state level, where the Great Recession most directly affected and severely curtailed public spending; today, more than a third of state prison systems exceed institutional capacity. In the present policy environment, rather than investing scarce capital on building more prisons, state-level legal reforms aimed at downsizing the prison population are widely seen as the more prudent solutions. Little is known, however, about the diffusion and implementation of these laws among local criminal justice actors and their effects at the county level of practice, where the incarceration process begins for most inmates. Without a more sophisticated understanding of the complexities of local compliance, laws designed to downsize prisons risk unintended consequences and, ultimately, failure. This project examines how differences in local organizational culture shape the meaning of law on the ground in ways that bolster or undermine the reform goal of decarceration. The research focuses on two questions: (1) how do local criminal justice actors comply with, shape, and resist prison downsizing laws; and (2) what effect do these responses have on decarceration as a key metric of institutional change? The purpose is to identify the processes and conditions under which such reforms result in either decarceration or the mere relocation of incarceration in local jurisdictions. This knowledge will practically enhance state governments' heretofore largely frustrated attempts to systemically address overincarceration by sensitizing the architects as well as the implementers of legal reform to the predictors of and barriers to local compliance. It will also stress the need for organizational change programs in successful prison downsizing innovations that avoid trans-institutionalization. Ultimately, this project will leverage the lessons learned to national reform strategies by generating a typology of local receptivity to decarceration, which will inform targeted rather than one-size-fits-all interventions. This project uses the recent "realignment" of California's prison system -- one of the nation's and western world's largest -- as an empirical window to examine the above questions. A combination of group-based trajectory modeling and institutional ethnographic methods are used to assess the proposition that local organizational culture mediates the implementation of prison downsizing laws and that variation in county organizational culture explains differences in the outcome of decarceration. These multiple methods enable to the study to: (1) specify the measures of local variation most salient in predicting decarceration; (2) identify the processes by which local organizational culture mediates law, as well as variations in these processes across counties; and (3) relate these variations to the outcome of decarceration. The overarching goal of this research is to help solve the problem of prison overcrowding by identifying its local variants, each with a distinct etiology and progression, to inform carefully tailored, evidence-based interventions.

尽管20世纪末在监狱建设上投入了大量资金，但基础设施却跟不上美国监禁人数急剧增长的步伐。结果，监狱极度拥挤，导致全国范围内出现人道主义、法律和财政紧急情况。这些紧急情况在州一级尤为明显，大衰退最直接影响并严重削减了公共支出；如今，超过三分之一的州监狱系统超出了机构容量。在目前的政策环境下，人们普遍认为，旨在缩小监狱人口规模的国家级法律改革，而不是投入稀缺资金建造更多监狱，是更为审慎的解决方案。然而，人们对这些法律在当地刑事司法行为者中的传播和实施以及它们在县一级实践中的影响知之甚少，大多数囚犯的监禁程序都是从县一级开始的。如果对当地合规的复杂性没有更深入的了解，旨在缩小监狱规模的法律可能会带来意想不到的后果，并最终失败。该项目研究了当地组织文化的差异如何以支持或破坏非监禁改革目标的方式塑造当地法律的含义。研究重点关注两个问题：（1）当地刑事司法行为者如何遵守、制定和抵制监狱缩小规模的法律； (2) 作为制度变迁的关键指标，这些应对措施对减刑有何影响？目的是确定此类改革导致监禁或仅在当地司法管辖区重新安置监禁的过程和条件。这些知识实际上将增强州政府迄今为止在很大程度上受挫的尝试，即通过提高法律改革的设计者和实施者对当地合规性的预测因素和障碍的敏感度来系统地解决过度监禁问题。它还将强调在成功的监狱精简创新中实施组织变革计划以避免跨机构化的必要性。最终，该项目将通过建立当地对减刑的接受度类型，将吸取的经验教训运用到国家改革战略中，这将为有针对性的而非一刀切的干预措施提供信息。该项目利用最近对加利福尼亚州监狱系统（美国和西方世界最大的监狱系统之一）的“重组”作为研究上述问题的实证窗口。基于群体的轨迹模型和机构民族志方法相结合，用于评估当地组织文化调节监狱规模缩小法律的实施以及县组织文化的变化解释了监禁结果差异的命题。这些多种方法使研究能够：（1）指定在预测减刑中最显着的局部变化的测量； (2) 确定当地组织文化调节法律的过程，以及这些过程在各县之间的差异； (3) 将这些变化与监禁的结果联系起来。这项研究的总体目标是通过识别当地的变异（每种变异都有不同的病因和进展）来帮助解决监狱过度拥挤的问题，从而为精心定制的、基于证据的干预措施提供信息。