The Reconstitution of Law in Local Settings: Agency Discretion, Ambiguity, and a Surplus of Law in the Policing of Hate Crime

An important yet poorly understood function of law enforcement organizations is the role they play in distilling and transmitting the meaning of legal rules to frontline law enforcement officers and their local communities. In this study, we examine how police and sheriff's agencies in California collectively make sense of state hate crime laws. To do so, we gathered formal policy documents called “hate crime general orders” from all 397 police and sheriff's departments in the state and conducted interviews with law enforcement officials to determine the aggregate patterns of local agencies' responses to higher law. We also construct a “genealogy of law” to locate the sources of the definitions of hate crime used in agency policies. Despite a common set of state criminal laws, we find significant variation in how hate crime is defined in these documents, which we attribute to the discretion local law enforcement agencies possess, the ambiguity of law, and the surplus of legal definitions of hate crime available in the larger environment to which law enforcement must respond. Some law enforcement agencies take their cue from other agencies, some follow statewide guidelines, and others are oriented toward gaining legitimacy from national professional bodies or groups within their own community. The social mechanisms that produce the observed clustering patterns in terms of approach to hate crime law are mimetic (copying another department), normative (driven by professional standards about training and community social movement pressure), and actuarial (affected by the demands of the crime data collection system). Together these findings paint a picture of policing organizations as mediators between law‐on‐the‐books and law‐in‐action that are embedded in interorganizational networks with other departments, state and federal agencies, professional bodies, national social movement organizations, and local community groups. The implications of an interorganizational field perspective on law enforcement and implementation are discussed in relation to existing sociolegal research on policing, regulation, and recent neo‐institutional scholarship on law.     

Supervision Intensity and Parole Outcomes: A Competing Risks Approach to Criminal and Technical Parole Violations

Recent scholarship about parole supervision indicates that higher supervision intensity is associated with an increased risk of parole violations. However, parole violations can take many forms—some minor and some serious—and theory suggests that supervision intensity might have differential effects depending upon the type of violation. We use “competing risks” survival models to identify supervision effects on five types of parole violations among 79,082 individuals released from prison in California: absconding, technical violations, drug use, violent offenses, and sexual offenses. We find that supervision effects are strongest for absconding violations. Past sexual offending also triggers significant supervision effects for technical violations, drug use violations, and violent violations. We conclude that parole violation patterns are influenced by parolee behaviors, the amount of attention the state is paying to those behaviors, and official markers of criminal dangerousness that are attached to particular parolees.     

Institutional responses to unemployment: A comparison of U.S. trends, 1948–1985

Previous studies that consistently find a direct effect of unemployment on imprisonment fail to consider other state policies that may be related both to unemployment and imprisonment. This ommission potentially biases in unknown ways the estimated effect of unemployment. This study uses postwar U.S. time series data to examine how the effects of unemployment on imprisonment are influenced by mental institutionalization, military enlistments and welfare rolls. No evidence of trade-offs in social control policies can be detected in these data, thus supporting the previous findings that unemployment directly affects prison admissions.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 39th Annual Meeting of the American Criminological Society, Montreal, November 12, 1987.