A Neo-Institutional Account of Prison Diffusion

Abstract

Interest in legal innovations, particularly in the criminal law realm, often centers on an innovation's emergence, but not its subsequent diffusion. Typifying this trend, existing accounts of the prison's historical roots persuasively explain the prison's "birth" in Jacksonian-Era northern coastal cities, but not its subsequent rapid, widespread, and homogenous diffusion across a culturally, politically, and economically diverse terrain. Instead, this study offers a neo-institutional account of the prison's diffusion, emphasizing the importance of national, field-level pressures rather than local, contextual factors. This study distinguishes between the prison's innovation and early adoption, which can be explained by the need to replace earlier proto-prisons, and its subsequent adoption, particularly in the South and frontier states, which was driven by the desire to conform to increasingly widespread practices. This study further attributes the isomorphic nature of the diffusion to institutional pressures, including uncertainty surrounding the new technology, pseudoprofessional penal reformers and their claims about competing models of confinement, and contingent historical factors that reinforced these institutional pressures. This study illustrates the importance of distinguishing between the motivations that initiate criminal law innovations and those that advance their diffusion.

Punishment's Legal Templates: A Theory of Formal Penal Change

“…Many proponents emphasized the disciplinary effects of solitary confinement and labor and the palliative role of segregation; in practice, there were too few solitary cells to be used for any meaningful period (according to reformers and prison managers alike) and overcrowding and financial difficulties prevented regular labor or proper segregation. Guards and prisoners also widened the gap by subverting the rules; by the 1810s, an onslaught of fires, riots, escapes, and an apparent increase in the crime rate (attributed to the proto‐prisons) graphically illustrated the proto‐prison's failure to perform as expected (e.g., McLennan ; Meranze ; Rubin ).…”

“…To date, penal scholars have neglected diffusion in favor of innovation; but focusing on the “moment” of innovation has distorted our understanding of penal change (Rubin ). Scholars of American prison history, for example, explicitly or implicitly assume a somewhat staccato vision of penal change that generalizes from influential, innovative states.…”

The counter-revolution of criminological science: a study on the abuse of reasoned punishment

“…22 See Rothman (1980), McConville (1995), O'Brien (1995), Morris (1995), and Rubin (2015). D'AMICO / THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION OF CRIMINOLOGICAL SCIENCE VOLUME 10, ISSUE 1, SPRING 2017 20 Foucault (1975) argued prisons, though couched in humane rhetoric, secluded punishment from the effective constraint of public oversight.…”

The Path of the Law Review: How Inter-field Ties Contribute to Institutional Emergence and Buffer against Change

“…Even if technical considerations drive initial adoptions, legitimacy becomes the reason later actors adopt, which further reinforces legitimacy and institutional structures (Tolbert and Zucker 1983). For example, Rubin (2015) shows how early adopters of the state-prison model innovated to address local problems of deteriorated and overcrowded proto-prisons, but later adopters acted more to avoid criticisms of being backward and illegitimate.…”