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世纪后期在监狱建设方面支出了巨大的支出，但基础设施并没有跟上美国的监禁急剧增长，因此，极端监狱的人满为患导致了全国范围内的人道主义，法律和财政紧急情况。这些紧急情况在州一级特别明显，大萧条最直接受到影响和严重削减的公共支出；如今，超过三分之一的州监狱系统超过机构能力。在当前的政策环境中，与其投资稀缺的资本建造更多的监狱，不如将旨在缩小监狱人口缩小尺寸的法律改革被广泛视为更谨慎的解决方案。但是，关于这些法律在当地刑事司法行为者中的扩散和实施及其在县实践层面的影响，在大多数囚犯开始的县级实践中，这些法律的扩散和实施鲜为人知。没有对当地合规性复杂性的更复杂的理解，旨在缩减监狱的法律风险意外后果，最终是失败的。该项目研究了当地组织文化中的差异如何以加强或破坏脱爪的改革目标的方式塑造法律的含义。该研究重点是两个问题：（1）当地刑事司法行为者如何遵守，形成和抵制监狱裁员法律； （2）这些反应对脱爪有什么影响作为制度变化的关键指标？目的是确定此类改革导致脱渣或仅搬迁监禁的过程和条件。实际上，这些知识将通过使建筑师和法律改革的实施者对当地合规性的预测指标和障碍，从而增强州政府的迄今为止沮丧地解决过度审查的尝试。它还将强调成功监狱缩减避免跨机构化的创新的组织变革计划的需求。最终，该项目将通过产生当地接受的类型来利用所学到的教训来为国家改革策略，这将为有针对性的而不是一定大小的干预措施提供信息。该项目将加利福尼亚州监狱系统（美国和西方最大的监狱系统之一）的最近“重组”作为研究上述问题的经验窗口。基于群体的轨迹模型和机构人种学方法的结合用于评估以下主张，即当地组织文化介导监狱裁员法律的实施以及县组织文化的变化解释了脱斑的结果的差异。这些多种方法可以使研究能够：（1）指定局部变异的度量最为明显，以预测脱爪； （2）确定当地组织文化调解法律的过程，以及跨县的这些过程的变化； （3）将这些变化与脱斑的结果相关联。这项研究的总体目标是通过确定其当地变体，每个人具有独特的病因和进步，以告知精心量身定制的基于证据的干预措施，以帮助解决监狱过度拥挤的问题。