Corrections Administration and Penal Change

Session Submission Type: Complete Thematic Panel

Abstract

In many places across the country corrections administrators – appointed directors, assistant directors, and wardens – are being asked to do more with less, to re-orient to new metrics, and introduce new practices. This panel brings together scholars whose research addresses understudied questions about the role of leadership within prisons in nurturing or impeding penal change. How do corrections administrators’ goals align with other state priorities? How do they communicate rules and policy? How do prison administrators conceptualize risk? And how do their priorities, communication strategies, and concerns impact mid-level managers, line officers and inmates? Finally, how should we study prison administrators and how can they provide a window into prison life? Together the papers offer important new theoretical approaches, empirical findings, and methodologies on corrections administration.

Sub Unit

• Area VII: Criminal Justice Policy and Practice / 38: Corrections

Individual Presentations

• The Penal State Revisited: The Role of Prison Administrators in Agonistic Penal Change - Ashley Rubin, University of Toronto

• Code Grey: How Prison Leaders Frame, Navigate and Enforce Rules/Policy Within Six U.S. Prisons - Danielle S. Rudes, George Mason University; Shannon Magnuson, George Mason University; Brandy L. Blasko, Sam Houston State University

• Future-Proofing, Collateral Hardening and Decreasing Room for Error in Danish Prisons - Lori Sexton, University of Missouri - Kansas City; Keramet Reiter, University of California, Irvine; Jennifer Sumner, California State University, Dominguez Hills

• Building Bridges and Opening Doors: An Activist Scholar’s Path to Conducting Cooperative Research with State-level Prison Administrators in the Era of Mass Incarceration - Jay Borchert, Manhattan College

Chair

• Heather Schoenfeld, Northwestern University