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

尽管在20世纪后期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禁人数的急剧增长，因此，监狱过度拥挤导致全国范围内的人道主义，法律的和财政紧急情况。这些紧急情况在州一级尤为突出，大衰退最直接地影响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过了机构能力。在目前的政策环境下，人们普遍认为，与其将稀缺的资金投资于建造更多的监狱，不如在州一级进行旨在减少监狱人口的法律的改革，这是更为谨慎的解决办法。然而，人们对这些法律在地方刑事司法行为者中的传播和实施情况及其在州一级实践中的影响知之甚少，因为大多数囚犯的监禁过程都是从州一级开始的。如果不对当地合规的复杂性有更深入的了解，旨在缩小监狱规模的法律就有可能产生意想不到的后果，最终失败。本项目考察当地组织文化的差异如何以支持或破坏去监禁的改革目标的方式塑造当地法律的意义。该研究集中在两个问题：（1）当地刑事司法行为者如何遵守，形状，并抵制监狱缩编法律;（2）这些反应有什么影响decarceration作为制度变革的关键指标？其目的是确定在何种程序和条件下，这种改革会导致解除监禁或仅仅将监禁转移到地方司法管辖区。这方面的知识将实际上加强州政府迄今为止在很大程度上受挫的尝试，系统地解决过度监禁的敏感的建筑师以及法律的改革的实施者的预测和障碍，以地方遵守。它还将强调在成功的监狱精简创新中需要组织变革方案，以避免跨机构化。最后，该项目将通过形成一种地方对解除监禁的接受程度的类型，将吸取的经验教训用于国家改革战略，从而为有针对性的而不是一刀切的干预措施提供信息。这个项目使用最近的“调整”加州的监狱系统-一个国家和西方世界最大的-作为一个实证窗口，以检查上述问题。基于组的轨迹建模和机构人种学方法相结合，以评估的命题，即当地的组织文化介导的监狱缩编法律的实施，并在县组织文化的变化解释decarceration的结果的差异。这些多种方法使研究能够：（1）指定最显着的地方变化的措施，在预测decarceration;（2）确定的过程中，当地组织文化调解法律，以及这些过程中的变化在各县;和（3）将这些变化与decarceration的结果。这项研究的总体目标是通过确定其当地变体来帮助解决监狱过度拥挤的问题，每个变体都有不同的病因和进展，为精心定制的循证干预措施提供信息。

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.