The Irony of Decarceration: Prisons Given the Death Penality

• In Event: Insider/Outsider Perceptions of the Justice System

Abstract

The purpose of the research is to conceptualize the criminal justice system as a multidimensional system incorporated in a multidisciplinary theoretical framework that links the sociological literature, emphasizing state- and county-level characteristics, with the organizational literature that accentuates local and internal organizational features to understand the dynamic prison closure process. This approach, employing a multilevel structural analysis, would appear to be an appropriate depiction of the CJS. The state government (depending on the state) appropriates funding, appoints judges, members of the parole board, and has powerful influence over sentencing policies. Similarly, individual counties demonstrate substantial variability as well. Counties have varying degrees of population density and dissimilarities in which resources are available to them, affecting the capacity to absorb the closing of a prison. Conjoining empirically tested antecedents to prison population changes identified by sociologists with concepts developed in the fields of organizational demography and neoinstitutionalism provide a comprehensive strategy to explain organizational prison failure. There are two goals:update the distribution of prison closures and openings since this research began in 2012. Second, a multilevel non-parametric cure model predicted the timing of closed prisons, as well as estimated an additional parameter representing the probability of event failure (many prisons remained opened).

Author

• Jarred Anthony Williams, Washington State University