@article{16a2ba6fd9aa422c98066cc4033108df,
title = "Organizational Change, Politics, and the Official Statistics of Punishment",
abstract = "Most organizational researchers characterize politics as a force organizations experience from outside and administration as the practices managers adopt in response to the uncertain environment. To assess that approach, this paper examines a crisis that changed California criminal justice agencies' administrative practices and their communication of statistical information to outsiders. In 1976, managers and wardens supported conservative reform bills that effectively ended professional criminal rehabilitation and quantitative evaluation studies, and they shifted administration toward bureaucratic controls, using routine population counts. Changes in agency statistical activities clarify how members of government organizations act politically to maintain or change administrative practices.",
keywords = "Criminal sentencing, Government statistics, Organizational control structures, Organizational environment",
author = "O'Neill, {Karen M.}",
note = "Funding Information: The 1976 laws did not directly affect the statistical activities of the Youth Authority and Corrections Department, but through other actions during the next few years, reform-minded politicians and administrators changed statistical activities in ways that increased the insularity of the new punishment regime, according to several managers of research units. Support for vigorous social welfare programs of all types was already waning. Simon (1993:95) traces the decline in experimentation and research in the Corrections Department from 1968, when top administrators seeking to reduce the rehabilitation program made deep cuts in the research budget. Research staff members worked mostly on grants and temporary assignments after that, Simon notes. In interviews, several managers of research units also detailed later cutbacks. By 1975, Congress reduced grants given by the federal Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) that had encouraged state innovations in program design and research for a wide range of justice programs. The Youth Authority, Department of Corrections, and Department of Justice eliminated special research teams that had been supported by these grants. Then, in 1982, the California legislature and Governor George Deukmejian cut all criminal justice agency budgets, even while continuing to pass laws that increased sentence lengths for many crimes. According to managers of statistics units and managers of research units, administrators in all six agencies passed cuts on to their statistics units and research units. The Board of Prison Terms ended its small program of quantitative research to evaluate the reforms. Within a few years, the Department of Justice recovered much of its funding from the state government and sought out other sources of federal funding. Only in the Department of Corrections and the Youth Authority did the 1982 cuts results in permanent reductions of prominent programs in quantitative evaluation research, according to managers of several research units.",
year = "2003",
month = jun,
doi = "10.1023/A:1024039613338",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "18",
pages = "245--267",
journal = "Sociological Forum",
issn = "0884-8971",
publisher = "Wiley-Blackwell",
number = "2",
}