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.

20世纪后期，尽管美国在监狱建设上投入了巨额资金，但监狱基础设施跟不上监禁人数的急剧增长。结果，监狱极度拥挤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尤为明显，大衰退对该州的影响最为直接，并严重削减了公共支出；今天，超过三分之一的州监狱系统超出了机构能力。在目前的政策环境下，与其投资稀缺的资金建造更多的监狱，还不如州级的法律改革，旨在减少监狱人口，这被广泛认为是更为谨慎的解决办法。然而，关于这些法律在地方刑事司法行为者中的传播和执行情况，以及它们在县一级实践中的影响，人们所知甚少，县一级是大多数囚犯的监禁程序开始的地方。如果对当地遵守法律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产生意想不到的后果，并最终失败。本项目考察了地方组织文化的差异如何在当地塑造法律的意义，从而支持或破坏去中心化的改革目标。研究主要集中在两个问题上：(1)地方刑事司法行为者如何遵守、塑造和抵制监狱精简法律；(2)作为制度变迁的关键指标，这些反应对去中心化有什么影响？目的是查明这种改革导致解除监禁或仅仅将监禁转移到地方司法管辖区的过程和条件。这一知识将切实加强州政府迄今为止在很大程度上受挫的尝试，通过使法律改革的设计者和实施者对地方合规的预测因素和障碍敏感，系统地解决过度监禁问题。它还将强调在成功的监狱减员创新中需要组织变革方案，以避免跨机构化。最终，该项目将通过形成当地对去碳接受程度的类型，将吸取的经验教训用于国家改革战略，这将为有针对性的干预提供信息，而不是一刀切的干预。本项目利用加州监狱系统（美国和西方世界最大的监狱系统之一）最近的“重组”作为检验上述问题的经验窗口。本文结合基于群体的轨迹模型和制度人种学方法，评估了地方组织文化中介监狱减员法实施的命题，以及县组织文化的差异解释了监狱减员结果的差异。这多种方法使研究能够：(1)明确在预测脱碳中最显著的局部变化度量；(2)确定地方组织文化调节法律的过程，以及这些过程在不同国家之间的差异；(3)将这些变化与脱碳化的结果联系起来。本研究的总体目标是通过确定其本地变体（每种变体都有不同的病因和进展）来帮助解决监狱过度拥挤的问题，从而为精心定制的循证干预提供信息。