Strategizing About Organizational Change: Perspectives from Prison Monitors on Healthcare Consent Decrees

• In Event: Correctional Health Care in Crisis

Abstract

When courts oversee negotiated settlement agreements about health policy and practice in notoriously insular and opaque spaces, like prisons (Armstrong, 2014; Delaney et al., 2018), how do they monitor compliance? While the federal judiciary plays an active role in institutional reform of prisons (Feeley & Rubin, 200), judges are not the sole relevant policy actors. Consent decrees “develop out of the complex interplay of the judges’ promotion of settlement and the parties’ expectations as to the outcome of litigation and varying stakes and information” (Schlanger, 1999, pg. 2013). Multiple parties are involved in formulating agreements and take steps in the implementation process. This creates a complex situation where a variety of policy actors with contradictory interests, different toolsets, and varying levels of influence all seek to influence the process of turning law on the books into law action.

In this dissertation chapter, I present the results of qualitative interviews with actors involved in implementing prison healthcare consent decrees, specifically special masters appointed to monitor reforms. This project explores (1) how the implementation process following consent decrees/settlement agreements has impacted prison healthcare organization; and (2) what the facilitators and barriers to improving consent decree implementation have been.

Author

• Bryant Jackson-Green, University of California, Irvine