Brett C. Burkhardt

Law Enforcement Response to “Frequent Fliers”: An Examination of High-Frequency Contacts Between Police and Justice-Involved Persons With Mental Illness

This article examines a subset of justice-involved persons with mental illness who have repeated contacts with law enforcement officers. Previous work has alluded to this sub-population—often termed “frequent fliers”—but little research has empirically examined its size and nature. This study proposes a method of identifying frequent fliers that is based on the amount of time elapsed between multiple mental-health-related contacts with police. Using more or less stringent thresholds, the analysis defines several groups of frequent fliers, including rapid cyclers, those having very frequent contacts with police. In considering policy responses to the problem of justice-involved persons with mental illness, addressing the needs of the frequent flier population proves to be a way of targeting limited resources for the most impact.

Private Prisons in Public Discourse: Measuring Moral Legitimacy

New policies require legitimacy to survive. Prison privatization represents a policy challenged by initial perceptions of illegitimacy. In the 1980s, governments began to allow private firms to run correctional facilities, shifting an inherently coercive, traditionally governmental function—incarceration—to the private sector. With data from 706 articles in four major American newspapers spanning 24 years, this research uses Freudenburg and Alario’s concept of diversionary reframing to measure and track the moral legitimacy of prison privatization across time and place. Findings suggest that initially high levels of moral legitimacy facilitated some states’ adoption of private prisons, while initially low levels of moral legitimacy stunted the growth of privatization in other states. This study presents a novel way of measuring moral legitimacy, demonstrates how the concept may be used to help explain controversial public policy changes, and documents the cultural content of private prison debates in the United States.

Durkheim, punishment, and prison privatization

In a seminal statement, Emile Durkheim argued that punishment of crime has a salutary effect on society by reaffirming the collective consciousness. With few exceptions, Durkheim assumed that criminal punishment is done on behalf of society. With the rise of prison privatization, this assumption is increasingly called into question. For-profit firms carrying out punishment, though legally agents of the state, are motivated by private gain. This article asks: How might privatization modify the functional effects of punishment? It develops answers to this question by using insights from Durkheimian and neo-Durkheimian scholarship and the empirical case of modern privatized punishment in the United States. The article proposes three trajectories through which privatized punishment may (or may not) affect solidarity: Parity in Punishment, in which private and public punishers are seen as interchangeable; Public Interest, in which perceptions of greed and self-interest mar privatized punishment and sap it of its functional effects; and Sacred Transgressions, in which the private sector encroaches on sacred rites of punishment to the detriment of solidarity.

Judicial Intervention into Prisons: Comparing Private and Public Prisons from 1990 to 2005

ABSTRACT A mid-twentieth century prisoners’ rights revolution gave American prisoners unprecedented access to courts for exercising newly elaborated constitutional rights. The result was a tide of litigation brought by inmates and subsequent remedial court orders requiring corrections officials to improve conditions of confinement. It was in this context of aggressive judicial intervention into prison operations that the private prison industry emerged. Some early proponents of prison privatization claimed that the private sector could provide superior prison conditions and thereby reduce judicial intervention. This article assesses this claim empirically. It uses data on state and federal adult correctional facilities from the Bureau of Justice Statistics to compare the prevalence of reported court orders among public and private correctional facilities in the United States from 1990 through 2005. Results from a series of logistic regression analyses reveal that privatization has had little effect on the likelihood of judicial intervention into correctional facilities.

Who punishes whom? Bifurcation of private and public responsibilities in criminal punishment

Abstract Who holds the legitimate right to punish criminals? While previous work has identified several factors that influence states’ decisions to delegate punishment duties to the private sector, it has not considered variation in the level of security required to implement the punishment. Delegating coercive power challenges commonly held assumptions about the appropriate locus of coercive power, and resistance is likely to be strongest when delegating highly secure services that require the greatest levels of physical coercion. Using data on American adult correctional facilities from 1990 to 2005, this article describes the current bifurcation of correctional contracting, wherein private contractors house increasing numbers of inmates in less secure correctional settings (e.g., low-security, community-based facilities) and public authorities retain near-monopoly control over inmates in highly secure settings (i.e., medium- and maximum-security prisons). Multinomial regression analyses reveal that states’ decisions to privatize highly secure facilities were associated with ideological and economic factors. However, the decision to privatize lower security facilities has become commonplace, and as a result has grown irrespective of state-level factors. These results suggest that handing over low-security services to the private sector has become a legitimate policy option, while privatizing the most secure services remains shrouded in illegitimacy.

University Researcher and Law Enforcement Collaboration Lessons From a Study of Justice-Involved Persons With Suspected Mental Illness

In 2012, heads of local law enforcement agencies in Benton County, Oregon, contacted researchers at Oregon State University to discuss a problem: a sharp rise in the number of contacts between police and suspects displaying symptoms of mental illness. This initial inquiry led to an ongoing collaborative examination of the nature, causes, and consequences of the rise in police contacts. In this article, the authors describe this collaboration between researchers and law enforcement officials from the perspective of both parties, situating it within the context of mental illness in the U.S. criminal justice system. The collaborators draw on firsthand experiences and prior collaborations to discuss the benefits of, challenges in, and recommendations for university–police research collaborations. Although such collaborations may pose challenges (related to relationship definition, data collection and analysis, outputs, and relationship maintenance), the potential benefits—for researchers and law enforcement agencies—are substantial.

Where Have All the (White and Hispanic) Inmates Gone? Comparing the Racial Composition of Private and Public Adult Correctional Facilities

A great deal of research has documented racial disparities in imprisonment rates in the United States, but little work has been done to understand the process by which inmates are assigned to individual correctional facilities. This article extends research on racial disparities in imprisonment rates to consider racial disparities in inmate populations across prisons. Specifically, it examines the racial pattern of inmate placement in privately operated and publicly operated correctional facilities. Analysis of American adult correctional facilities reveals that, in 2005, White inmates were significantly underrepresented (and Hispanic inmates overrepresented) in private correctional facilities relative to public ones. Results from multilevel models show that being privately operated (as opposed to publicly operated) decreased the White share of a facility’s population by more than eight percentage points and increased the Hispanic share of a facility’s population by nearly two percentage points, net of facility- and state-level controls. These findings raise legal questions about equal protection of inmates and economic questions about the reliance of private correctional firms on Hispanic inmates.

Ideology over strategy: Extending voting rights to felons and ex-felons, 1966–1992☆

Abstract The disenfranchisement of felons and ex-felons has long served to restrict the practice of democracy in the United States. In the late 20th century, a number of states allowed increasing numbers of felons and ex-felons to vote. Previous work has noted that Democrats are often associated with extensions of voting rights to felons and ex-felons. If this is the case, what accounts for their support for re-enfranchisement? In this paper I conduct a series of event history analyses of voting rights policy changes at the state level. I argue that Democratic support was not based on expected electoral benefits that might derive from changes in the composition of the electorate. Instead, analyses suggest that would-be reformers—often Democratic, but also Republican—were importantly constrained by the ideological climate among a states population. Thus, policy liberalism appears to have trumped crass partisan strategizing in encouraging restoration of voting rights to felons and ex-felons. Results also confirm claims that local patterns of racial domination were relevant in decisions to re-enfranchise or not.

Contesting Market Rationality: Discursive Struggles over Prison Privatization

Market rationality suffuses many areas of modern criminal justice. Prison privatization is one area in which market rationality is particularly salient. This paper presents a case study of how market rationality was deployed in public discourse on prison privatization. It answers four questions: (1) Who shaped public discourse on prison privatization? (2) How frequently were market-rational themes invoked in the public discourse?, (3) Who employed (and who avoided) market-rational themes in the discourse?, and (4) Why did rates of market-rational discourse change over time? To answer these questions, the paper analyzes public discourse in four major American newspapers from 1985 to 2008. It employs a series of descriptive statistics and regression analyses, as well as an underutilized method—formal decomposition analysis. The research contributes to historical knowledge of the development of prison privatization, methodological techniques for analyzing textual data, and theoretical understanding of how public actors engage in discursive struggles over the meaning of criminal justice policies.

Agency Correlates of Police Militarization: The Case of MRAPs:

In 2014, protests in Ferguson, Missouri (MO), and the subsequent law enforcement response, shined a light on police militarization—the adoption of military styles, equipment, and tactics within law enforcement. Since 1990, the U.S. Department of Defense has transferred excess military equipment to domestic law enforcement agencies via the federal 1033 program. This article examines transfers of mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles or MRAPs. Designed to withstand explosive blasts during U.S. military occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, surplus MRAPs have been shipped to more than 800 domestic law enforcement agencies. This article uses national data on law enforcement agencies and on 1033 program transfers to analyze the pattern of MRAP distribution. The results show that MRAPs are disproportionately acquired by agencies that have warrior tendencies and rely on asset forfeiture to generate revenue. This pattern of militarization is consistent with a model of governance that views citizens as both opportunities and threats.