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，但基础设施并没有跟上美国监狱监禁人数的急剧增长。结果，极端拥挤的监狱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的容量。在目前的政策环境下，人们普遍认为，旨在减少监狱人口的州一级法律改革是更谨慎的解决方案，而不是投资稀缺的资本建造更多的监狱。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的影响，人们知之甚少，因为大多数囚犯都是在县一级开始监禁程序的。如果不能更深入地了解当地合规的复杂性，旨在缩小监狱规模的法律就有可能产生意想不到的后果，最终导致失败。该项目审查了当地组织文化的差异如何在当地塑造法律的含义，以支持或破坏解除监禁的改革目标。这项研究集中在两个问题上：(1)当地刑事司法行为者如何遵守、塑造和抵制监狱缩编法律；以及(2)作为制度变革的关键衡量标准，这些反应对去监禁有什么影响？其目的是确定在何种进程和条件下，这种改革会导致非监禁或仅仅是将监禁转移到地方司法管辖区。这一知识实际上将加强州政府迄今在很大程度上受挫的努力，即通过使建筑师和法律改革的实施者敏感于地方遵守的预测因素和障碍，从系统地解决过度监禁问题。它还将强调，在成功的监狱缩编创新中需要组织变革计划，以避免跨机构化。最终，该项目将利用从国家改革战略中吸取的经验教训，生成一种当地接受去腐化的类型学，这将为有针对性而不是一刀切的干预措施提供信息。这个项目使用了最近加州监狱系统的重新调整--美国和西部世界最大的监狱系统之一--作为检验上述问题的经验窗口。基于群体的轨迹建模和制度人种学方法相结合的方法被用来评估这样的命题，即地方组织文化调节监狱缩编法的实施，而县组织文化的差异解释了解禁结果的差异。这些多重方法使研究能够：(1)确定在预测去龋病方面最显著的局部差异的衡量标准；(2)确定地方组织文化调解法律的过程，以及这些过程在不同县之间的差异；以及(3)将这些差异与去龋病的结果联系起来。这项研究的首要目标是通过确定监狱人满为患的地方变种来帮助解决监狱过度拥挤的问题，每个变种都有不同的病因和进展，以提供精心定制的循证干预措施。