Michael Hallett

Backstage with “Cops”: the dramaturgical reification of police subculture in American crime “info‐tainment”

Examines the meanings of television programs for actor/police officers who acted in “reality TV” programs. Police engage in “legitimation work” to enhance public relations and achieve favorable publicity. The media is increasingly prominent in areas where previously it was unseen. Presents results of a questionnaire in which police actors give mixed reactions to the usefulness of infotainment. Concludes that police participation in the production of infotainment subverts the goal of promoting “realistic” public expectations of police work.

Religiously Motivated Desistance An Exploratory Study

This article examines the life-history narratives of 25 successful ex-offenders professing Christianity as the source of their desistance. Unstructured in-depth life-history interviews from adult male desisters affirm use of a “feared self” and “cognitive shifts” regarding perceptions of illegal behavior. “Condemnation scripts” and “redemption narratives,” however, differ radically from those uncovered in previous research. Stories of behavior change and identity transformation achieved through private religious practice and energetic church membership dominate the narratives. Findings suggest there are diverse phenomenologies of desistance and that by more narrowly tailoring research to explore subjectivities in the desistance process, important discrepancies in perceptions of agency and structure are revealed. Three prominent desistance paradigms—Making Good, Cognitive Transformation, and Identity Theory—are used to examine the narratives.

Bible College Participation and Prison Misconduct: A Preliminary Analysis

We analyzed whether a Bible college program had an impact on prison misconduct by examining 230 offenders in the Texas prison system. Findings suggest participation in the Bible college significantly improved offender behavior, reducing misconduct by one discipline conviction per participant. The results also showed that participation significantly decreased the risk of incurring a discipline conviction, lowering it by 65 percent for minor misconduct, 80 percent for major misconduct, and 68 percent for any misconduct. The findings are consistent with existing research, which has generally found that participation in prison-based programming, including educational and faith-based programs, produces better misconduct outcomes.

Religion and Misconduct in “Angola” Prison: Conversion, Congregational Participation, Religiosity, and Self-Identities*

Prior research tends to find an inverse relationship between inmates’ religion and misconduct in prison, but this relationship has lacked empirical explanation. We therefore propose the religion-misconduct relationship is mediated by inmates’ identity transformation on existential, cognitive, and emotional dimensions. To test the mediation, we conducted a survey of inmates at the Louisiana State Penitentiary (a.k.a. “Angola”). Controlling for inmates’ sociodemographic and criminal backgrounds, we estimated a latent-variable structural equation model of disciplinary convictions. Results showed that inmates’ religious conversion and, to a lesser extent, religiosity itself were positively related to existential and cognitive transformations as well as a “crystallization of discontent,” which were in turn associated with two types of emotional transformation in the expected direction. The crystallization of discontent and transformation in negative affect were related to disciplinary convictions as hypothesized, and their mediation of the effects of conversion and religiosity on misconduct were found to be significant.

The push for “truth in sentencing”: Evaluating competing stakeholder constructions: The Case for Contextual Constructionism in Evaluation Research☆

Abstract This article promotes the use of contextual constructionism in evaluation research. The article extends Palumbo and Halletts 1992 argument rejecting traditional models of evaluation which assume that “consensus” is reached among “key policymakers, managers and staff” regarding program goals. Palumbo and Hallett argue that “conflict” more accurately characterizes program evaluation, due to the existence of “multiple realities” among stakeholders. They advocate a constructionist grounding for evaluation research. In the present article, the call for “truth in sentencing” in Tennessee (and to a lesser extent, across the country) is used to further illustrate conflict and to promote the use of a “contextual constructionist” approach to evaluation research.

“First Stop Dying” Angola’s Christian Seminary as Positive Criminology

This article offers an ethnographic account of the “self-projects” of inmate graduates of Louisiana State Penitentiary’s (aka “Angola’s”) unique prison seminary program. Angola’s Inmate Minister program deploys seminary graduates in bivocational pastoral service roles throughout America’s largest maximum-security prison. Drawing upon the unique history of Angola, inmates establish their own churches and serve in lay-ministry capacities in hospice, cellblock visitation, tier ministry, officiating inmate funerals, and through tithing with “care packages” for indigent prisoners. Four themes of positive criminology prominently emerge from inmate narratives: (a) the importance of respectful treatment of inmates by correctional administrations, (b) the value of building trusting relationships for prosocial modeling and improved self-perception, (c) repairing harm through intervention, and (d) spiritual practice as a blueprint for positive self-identity and social integration among prisoners.

Why we fail at crime control

The problem, at least, is understandable: Rather than conceding that no combination of human genius or discipline has ever come close to solving the “crime problem,” criminology has instead endorsed approaches that serve the interests of established power, not the interests of those who are continuously victimized by crime. The problems of crime and violence are obviously too big for criminology. Instead, it resorts largely to the ad hominem labeling of certain people or groups as having flawed “characteristics” that lead them to crime. But we can do better. We must fundamentally reassess the goals of criminology and begin recognizing violence in all its forms. A peacemaking criminology would emphasize, in particular, the sources of violence that lie within state structures and institutions.

Imagining the global corporate gulag: lessons from history and criminological theory

This article explores the enabling pre‐conditions of global mass imprisonment from historical and criminological perspectives. Driven in part by Western first‐world anxieties about weakening economic supremacy, declining safety, declining standard of living, and increasing social isolation in a diaspora of strangers, this article explores the spread of penal populism beyond American shores, with a particular focus on the proliferation of privatized, for‐profit, punishment schemes. The expressive and instrumental functions of actuarial punishment schemes are noted.

Revisiting Anomalous Outcome Data from the “Breaking the Cycle” Program in Jacksonville

Abstract Results from the national evaluation of the Breaking the Cycle program indicated that the participants in the program re-offended less frequently than comparison group defendants in Birmingham, Alabama, and Tacoma, Washington, but not in Jacksonville, Florida. This paper seeks to re-examine the same BTC program in Jacksonville, using different samples, methodology, data and analysis. The study employs T-tests, logistic regression and CHAID to examine differences in re-offending among contemporaneous random samples of program participants and comparable untreated defendants (n = 100 for each group). Using State Attorney and BTC data, both samples were drawn from the population of program-eligible cases from October 1999-April 2001, the complete period of operation for BTC Jacksonville. Similar to the national evaluation, results indicate that BTC did not produce significantly lower rates of re-offending among its participants. The authors explore possible explanations for the no-difference finding including Jacksonvilles decision to link program participation to gaining pretrial release, the jurisdictions heavy reliance on cash bail, and the differential impact of individual risk factors. The analysis produces more questions than answers and highlights the need for additional research to fully understand the Jacksonville BTC experience.

Guns and roses on “cops”

“Peacemaking criminology” views both crime and punishment as a unified indicator of a societys overall level of violence. Instead of treating crime and punishment as a stimulus and response, as if they occupied autonomous categories, peacemaking criminology sees crime and punishment as symbiotic. Consistent with this theme, I recently completed a study of police officer attitudes about the portrayal of police work on “reality television” programs such as “COPS.” This research shows that officers who participate in producing such programs (in this case the Nashville episodes of “COPS”) view the portrayal as only partially “realistic.” Officers claim these programs are “the most realistic portrayal of police work there is,” yet also admit that such programs are still “entertainment.” While they believe that “COPS” episodes will enhance public awareness about the stress they encounter in their jobs, the officers resist the notion that the program accurately conveys their own understanding of the crime problem.