Making the Delegated Penal State: Violence Prevention in California, 1990-2005

• In Event: 30662 - Section on Crime, Law, and Deviance Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 1: Policy Issues

Abstract

This article argues that alternatives to policing have become easy to experiment with, but difficult to institutionalize. To explain this phenomenon, the paper examines the origins of contemporary community-based violence prevention programs in the 1990s using a mix of archival materials, comparing across two key cities in California. The paper tracks efforts of advocates and activists from subjugated communities to shift public resources from policing into community-driven programs to intervene in and prevent violence. Engaging and reformulating theories of policy delegation, the paper argues that structures of opportunity and exclusion embedded in the highly fragmented structure of the American state channeled the reform efforts into nonprofit pilot programs and demonstration grants. Over time, the result was to make it increasingly easy to experiment with alternatives to policing but difficult to institutionalize them. The paper points to the value for scholars of policing to attend to the social processes of reform and remaking, not simply cycles of repression. And it illuminates the double-edged nature of attempts to develop new models of public safety outside the state.

Author

• Isaac Dalke, University of California-Berkeley