Research Summary: Private correctional firms are political actors. They work to create favorable conditions to market their services. At the same time, they are constrained by external political forces, including political parties, social movements, and public opinion. This article reviews what we know about the reciprocal relationship between the private...
Market rationality suffuses many areas of modern criminal justice. Prison privatization is one area in which market rationality is particularly salient. This paper presents a case study of how market rationality was deployed in public discourse on prison privatization. It answers four questions: (1) Who shaped public discourse on prison...
Who is in private prisons? This seemingly straightforward question has received surprisingly little attention in the United States. This paper analyzes national prison data to provide demographic profiles of prisoners and workers in private prisons in the United States and to compare them to prisoners and workers in state and...
This is an author's peer-reviewed final manuscript, as accepted by the publisher. The published article is copyrighted by Taylor & Francis and can be found at: https://doi.org/10.1080/0735648X.2016.1174619
This is an author's peer-reviewed final manuscript, as accepted by the publisher. The published article is copyrighted by Sage Publications and can be found at: https://doi.org/10.1177/2329496515604641
In 2012, heads of local law enforcement agencies in Benton County, Oregon, contacted researchers at Oregon State University to discuss a problem: a sharp rise in the amount of contact between police and suspects displaying symptoms of mental illness. This initial contact led to an ongoing collaborative examination of the...
A mid-20th century prisoners' rights revolution gave American prisoners unprecedented access to courts for exercising newly elaborated constitutional rights. The result was a tide of litigation brought by inmates and subsequent remedial court orders requiring corrections officials to improve conditions of confinement. It was in this context of aggressive judicial...
This article examines a subset of justice-involved persons with mental illness who have repeated contacts with law enforcement officers. Previous work has alluded to this sub-population—often termed “frequent fliers”—but little research has empirically examined its size and nature. This study proposes a method of identifying frequent fliers that is based...
A great deal of research has documented racial disparities in imprisonment rates in the United States, but little work has been done to understand the process by which inmates are assigned to individual correctional facilities. This article extends research on racial disparities in imprisonment rates to consider racial disparities in...
New policies require legitimacy to survive. Prison privatization represents a policy challenged by initial perceptions of illegitimacy. In the 1980s, governments began to allow private firms to run correctional facilities, thereby shifting an inherently coercive, traditionally governmental function—incarceration—to the private sector. With data from 706 articles in four major American...