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The Law-Before: Legacies and Gaps in Penal Reform

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Anjuli Verma
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Abstract

This article introduces the law-before as an analytic tool for enhancing explanations of legal reform. Based on an integration of neo-institutional law and organizations studies and punishment studies of local variation in penal policy, I define the law-before as the past organizational practices and power arrangements that precede law-on-the-books and shape present day implementation. I utilize the law-before as a heuristic to investigate the legacy effects of variations in local practice on the implementation of the prison downsizing law, AB 109, or “Realignment,” in California. I analyze organizational documents produced by county practitioners in the aftermath of AB 109's enactment in 2011 as empirical windows into how actors shape the meaning of law in local settings. I find that practitioners in counties with divergent historical imprisonment patterns enact four processes (overwriting or underwriting law, selective magnification, and selective siting) to arrive at distinct interpretations of AB 109 as mandating system-wide decarceration or the relocation of incarceration from state prisons to county jails. Although my data do not speak to the ultimate implementation of AB 109, the processes revealed have practical implications for the reform goal of decarceration by rationalizing distinct resource allocations at an early stage in the implementation process.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 49 , Issue 4 , December 2015 , pp. 847 - 882
Copyright
© 2015 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

Author's note: The preparation of this article was made possible with support from UC Irvine's Center in Law, Society and Culture and its Microsemi/Peterson Fellowship. The author extends special thanks to the Law & Society Review editors and reviewers for their careful feedback. This manuscript also received extensive comments from Mona Lynch and students in the winter 2012 “Analyzing Documents in Sociolegal Research” methods seminar, Valerie Jenness, Carroll Seron, Shauhin Talesh, Jonathan Simon, Margo Schlanger, Geoff Ward, Bryan Sykes and participants in the National Science Foundation-sponsored Realigning California Corrections workshop (October 2014) and UC Irvine's Socio-Legal Studies Workshop. The author also wishes to acknowledge W. David Ball for publishing the “Tough on Crime” dataset and Allen Hopper at the ACLU for help obtaining the documents analyzed. All errors are the author's alone.

References

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Cases Cited

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Statutes Cited

Assembly Bill No. 109 (2011) Public Safety Realignment, California Assembly 2011-2012 Regular Session, Ch.15. See also, California State Penal Code.Google Scholar
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