Doctoral Dissertation Research: Governance and Networks of Coordination in Community Diversion Programs

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Major American cities have responded to rising incarceration rates with creative alternatives, such as Drug Courts and Mental Health Courts. These alternatives often depend on complex networks that connect municipal governments, not-for-profit organizations, and private service providers. The research supported by this award will examine the functioning and effectiveness of these coordinated collaborations. In addition, the researchers ask what effects decentralizing government has on outcomes, both for communities and for system clients. This is critical information for all stakeholders seeking to lower incarceration rates.The research will be undertaken in the city of Philadelphia by University of Pennsylvania anthropology doctoral candidate Tali Ziv, who is supervised by Dr. John L. Jackson, Jr. Philadelphia has been federally mandated to undertake efforts to reduce its large prison population. One response has been the Forensic Intensive Recovery (FIR) Program, a sentence reduction and community alternative program for substance abuse and minor mental illness. FIR engages two large nonprofit subcontracts and coordinates the jails, probation and parole, the courts, and nonprofit community based services; this makes it an ideal site for research on decentralized sentencing alternatives. The researcher will carry out ethnographic observations in the court room and in the community, document the daily work of FIR social workers, and interview judges, attorneys, counselors, clients, and criminal justice system representatives. In addition, she will collect data from archives to track the emergence of these novel institutional formations. Taken together, these data will allow her to understand the micro-processes through which coordination works, how the different layers of the criminal justice system and its community referrals build knowledge about one another, and what this means for understanding not only sentencing alternatives but also the nature of contemporary urban governance.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.