The Weight of Carceral Transparency

• In Event: Student Forum Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Roundtable 14: Criminal Justice

Abstract

When state prisons have publicly available use-of-force policies, do they experience lower mortality rates of incarcerated people? This paper examines whether prisons that make their use-of-force rules public cause their lower mortality rates to decrease in contrast to prisons that keep those rules out of view. By linking transparency to mortality, this study advances a theory of carceral governance in which visibility functions as a mechanism of accountability. Centering on the 2008-2019 years due to initial limitations on data acquisition, fixed effects regression analysis reveals that states with publicly available UOF policies experienced lower rates of mortality for incarcerated people. To analyze differences in mortality rates in state prisons even further across time, I propose to take a fixed effects regression based on use-of-force policy public availability, while factoring in the control variables from the 2008–2024 years. For the same years, I will then implement a staggered difference-in-differences design to estimate the causal effect of UOF policy transparency on mortality outcomes. I will use state-year data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ Mortality in Correctional Institutions (MCI) dataset from 2008 to 2019 and from the UCLA Behind Bars Data Project for the 2020–2024 years. The outcome is straightforward: the number of deaths per 100,000 incarcerated people in each state each year. The key independent variable is a binary indicator of whether a state’s UOF policy was publicly available online each year. Use-of-force policy availability was determined through systematic searches of correctional department websites and archived webpages using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Control variables include annual state correctional expenditures (U.S. Census Bureau), the proportion of incarcerated people aged 55 or older (Prison Policy Initiative), the proportion sentenced for violent offenses (BJS CSAT/NCRP), and prison capacity utilization (BJS).

Author

• Ashtan Grace Towles, Columbia University