Andrew j. Dick

The Need for Theory in Assessing Peer Courts

Over the past decade, peer courts have become an increasingly popular way to divert first-time and status offenders from the juvenile court, with more than 875 programs nationwide in 2002. With their rise in popularity, some studies have examined peer courts’ effectiveness for reducing attendee recidivism, although none have employed social theory for these purposes. The goal of this article is to demonstrate why social theory is necessary for evaluating peer courts. The authors use three classical criminological theories—labeling, deterrence, and differential association—to provide a better understanding of peer court functions and efficacy.

Evidence-Based Decision-Making and the Rise and Fall of Rehabilitation in California’s Prisons 2005–2012

We went into this evaluation with the hope of doing a good job and providing the evidence “decision makers” need in order to make sound evidence-based decisions about curricula and vocational education. This, in turn, would be focused by the “criminogenic” needs detailed in the Expert Panel’s (2007) report (see Chap. 6, p. XX). During the evaluation, we became big fans of the many people who work hard to make vocational education work in prisons. Indeed we remain fans of the idea that rehabilitation works and should be part of any correctional program.

Vignette: Life Without Parole and “Could Be Worse”

This essay begins in February 2009 and picks up again in November 2011. In both months, I met and talked with prisoners in California who had been sent to prison with a sentence of “Life Without Parole” or LWOP in the acronym-plagued prison culture of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR). LWOP is the most severe penalty for murderers in California, exceeded only by the rarely used death penalty. It is a form of degradation California reserves for people who are convicted of particularly horrendous types of murder.

Structure and Thesis of the Book

This book reflects a favorite teaching strategy Bill learned from reading Richard Elmore (2011). At the end of a course, Bill likes to ask students to respond to the following prompt, “I used to think … and now I think ….” This kind of reflection becomes even more interesting when students reframe their current understanding of problems and issues to see events and actions through multiple frames of reference. In this situation, we, as authors and researchers, are also in the role of our students whose task is to answer “I used to think … and now I think ….”

Applied Research in California’s Prisons

This book is about an evaluation rooted in evidence-based research that failed. Not only did the evaluation fail, but the findings it was supposed to highlight never materialized, and the program we evaluated disappeared in the flurry of budget cuts that occurred following the recession of 2008–2009. However, one of the highlights of the 3-year evaluation was our presence as researchers at Corcoran State Prison in October 2010. While there, we attended a meeting where at least half of the teachers in the vocational education classes we were evaluating were laid off. In this context, our evaluation of a 6-year-long “experiment” in evidence-based research slowly but surely petered out.

Vignette: Educators Only Whisper in a Custody World

The passivity of the education administrators was at first striking, but I came to understand it as a normal response to a system where the concept of safety, as defined by custody officials, always holds sway. Custody was in charge and they held all information confidential. Lives could be at stake, they dramatically whispered.

Report: Vocational Education in California Prisons: A Comprehensive Evaluation of Twelve Courses

The first decade of the twenty-first century was challenging for corrections in California as prisons were caught in a paradox of using overcrowded facilities designed to punish criminal misdeeds, while at the same time they were charged to rehabilitate inmates in a fashion that reduces future law-breaking. Vocational education courses offered in prison were an attempt to achieve these two goals by offering inmates a chance to rehabilitate as they serve out their prison sentence.

Vignette: Shifting Bureaucratic Sands and Work Stoppages

Supervision of our research at the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) was assigned to a consultant from the Research Division, even though our project was under the Correctional Education Division. This, in effect, gave us two bosses at the CDCR, as well as a nominal third boss at UC Davis who handled the accounting between the CDCR and Chico State. We have already described the rocky start we experienced at the outset of the project when the consultant scolded us for not responding quickly enough to last minute changes in the request for proposal (RFP) (p. XX). This was just the first experience of what Andy called the “shifting sands” of decision-making that our project depended on. As it worked out, this was also the first of many supervising consultants for our project. By the end of the 3-year project, which included 10 months of work stoppages, we were on our fifth supervisor from Research because of several departures at the OCE due to retirement, transfer, and in one case death.

Vignette: Could the Prisoner be My Son?

Prisons are far from my life. My wife and I selected a place of immense natural beauty in Northern California to raise our family with many mountains, streams, and lakes that afford hiking, camping, canoeing, fishing, and skiing; all healthy and active things to do with children. I saw my children in a place of beauty every day. Their small town schools were inviting and encouraging environments to learn. Their grandparents, aunts, and uncles guided and nurtured them and their cousins as they played in a small mob they called “the lost kids,” where the youngest stretched to be old enough to join in and the eldest regressed to play the games and tell the make-believe stories.

Vignette: Denial of Love and the Birds of Desert Rose

One of the office services classes we observed was taught by an experienced instructor who combined excellent management skills and modeled the kind of professional relationship inmate students would find from a supervisor in a contemporary office setting. She had designed the classroom to take advantage of office technology as a key facet of curriculum and included a good number of inmate student tutors for instructional support. The classroom was rectangular with computer stations lining three of the four walls. Each station provided enough space for two students, one of whom could be a student tutor. The interior space of the classroom contained a permanent rectangular table. Computer workstations with space for both student and tutor lined all four sides of the table.