Visible homelessness is a complex and enduring issue that remains salient in policymaking and political realms. In response to homeless individuals living their lives in public spaces, many cities have enacted civility codes or laws that address quality of life concerns in an attempt to remove visible signs of homelessness...
Studies on prison contracting have typically focused on the privatization of entire facilities and carceral services offered to inmates. There has been limited research, however, as to how political ideology influences the extent to which state prisons contract out health care services. There also appears to be a need for...
Studies on prison violence have typically focused attention at individual level inmate-on-inmate assaults, however, there has been limited research into the rates of inmate-on-staff violence at the facility level. There also appears to be a need for further scholarship relating to the differences in various prison level predictors of inmate...
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...
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
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...
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...
The validity of educational programming in prisons has been extensively researched. Education can increase an offender’s likelihood of returning to legitimate work after being released, raise the opportunity costs of illegal behavior and change an inmate’s physiological responses to committing criminal acts. Reductions in recidivism not only help decrease prison...