Michael Musheno

Street-Wise Social Policy: Resolving the Dilemma of Street-Level Influence and Successful Implementation

Street-level influence over the delivery of social policy is paradoxical; it promotes flexibility and innovation, yet allows indifference and abuse. Even in highly bureaucratized human service organizations, policy implementation requires policy adaptation (Mashaw 1983). Streetlevel workers who are close to problems and clients are likely to know what works in local environments and for particular groups (Handler 1986). Street-level workers are an important a source of innovation, yet most have little formal authority to make programmatic decisions. Their good ideas are often ignored by those higher up. Street-level adaptations of policy are not always positive, however. Many street-level workers use their influence over policy implementation to serve their own interests; they change policy to make their work easier and safer or to thwart policy with which they do not agree rather than to serve the needs of clients or the public (Hogwood and Gunn 1984; Levine, Musheno, and Palumbo 1980). Street-level influence over policy implementation is, therefore, both a prerequisite for justice in the delivery of human services and a source of considerable abuse. Street-level influence

Educational Attainment, Job Satisfaction, and the Professionalization of Correctional Officers:

This article analyzes the impact of an administrative effort to increase the educational attainment of correctional officers employed in a medium security facility department of corrections in a western state. Following an era of riots and judicial intervention, higher educational qualifications have been a major component of attempts to professionalize prison security staff. Three competing expectations regarding the relationship between educational attainment and job satisfaction are evaluated: (1) higher education increases job satisfaction; (2) higher education leads to greater dissatisfaction; and (3) work environment negates the importance of worker educational background. Educational attainment is found to be negatively associated with correctional officer job satisfaction even when other important determinants are held constant.

The internal crisis of corrections: Professionalization and the work environment

Criminal justice policymakers and managers have viewed professionalization as a favored solution to the current crisis in correctional systems across the country. Utilizing case study data drawn from a state correctional system located in the western United States, we find that upgrading line correctional staff was a strategy used by top administrators to improve the image of their agency and maintain the autonomy of their prison system in the face of a threatened take-over by the federal court. However, in mandating the professionalization of their personnel, these managers failed to confront deeper organizational problems. Instead, they argued that an educated staff was the cure for acknowledged operational problems—including corruption and inhumane treatment. The failure to combine staff upgrading with more comprehensive organizational reforms merely heightened the frustrations within the workforce of the states correctional institutions. In essence, these professionalization strategies represent a pr...

Telling Tales in School: Youth Culture and Conflict Narratives

This study departs from mainstream criminology to approach youth conflict and violence from a youth-centered perspective drawn from cultural studies of young people and sociolegal research. To access youth orientations, we analyze experiential stories of peer conflict written by students at a multiethnic, low-income high school situated in an urban core of the western United States. We argue that youth narratives of conflict offer glimpses into how young people make sense of conflict in their everyday lives, as well as insights as to how the images and decisional bases embedded in their storytelling connect to adult-centered discourses found in popular media and formal education. Our analyses identify a range of story types (tales), each marked by a different narrative style, that students fashion as they write about peer conflict: action tales, moral tales, expressive tales, and rational tales. In our study, students wrote a majority of stories in the action-tale narrative style. We propose three alternative explanations for this pattern using class code, moral development, and institutional resistance perspectives. Finally, we discuss the theoretical and policy implications of our work and raise questions for future research

New Directions in the Study of Justice, Law, and Social Control

In the spring of 1986, we invited several distinguished scholars to write these essays on justice, law, and social control. In part, we initiated this project to reflect on the directions of our interdisciplinary Ph.D. program, which focuses on law and justice in society. More fundamentally, our goal was to encourage research on justice and injustice that could be integrated with the study of law and society or inquiry that focuses on social control, social change, conflict, and its resolution.

Community Corrections as an Organizational Innovation: What Works and Why

The contemporary emphasis of criminal justice policy on incapacitation of felony offenders has ironically opened up a window of opportunity for the expansion of alternatives to incarceration, including community corrections. This study analyzes the organizational diffusion of state-mandated community corrections policy in Connecticut, Colorado, and Oregon. Specifically, we measure the degrees of implementation in each state and analyze the organizational conditions that contribute to successful implementation. Also, we present a model of transformative rationality that points to the theoretical underpinnings of successful implementation. It identifies organizational conditions that are necessary to maintain a commitment to the fundamental premises of policy while simultaneously encouraging constructive adaptation of the policy to local environments.

Prostitution policy and the women's movement

Feminists have consistently viewed prostitution as a social problem and opposed state regulated or legalized prostitution. However, feminists in different eras have taken conflicting policy stands on the problem. Progressive era feminists and their organizations supported severe state suppression of prostitution. In contrast, contemporary feminist groups join prostitutes in support of decriminalization. Through historical analysis that compares feminist thought and organization of the two eras, this paper offers an explanation of this contradiction in policy positions based on shifts in feminist thought about the role of the state, particularly criminal sanctions, in addressing prostitution, and changes in the organizing strategies of feminists. The paper also offers important insights to contemporary feminists contemplating policy stands which rely on legal sanctions as a strategy and facilitate alliances with moral crusaders to redress social problems.

Legal consciousness on the margins of society: Struggles against stigmatization in the AIDS crisis

This study compares how two groups of people, situated at the margins of society, position themselves differently with regard to the law: the HIV‐infected women see themselves as objects of surveillance, while the gay men with HIV imagine themselves as rights‐bearers. At the same time, both groups are influenced by a core liberal presupposition embedded in the American legal order that promotes individualism. Both groups express the conditions of their lives as a product of individual choices, and as a consequence, turn stigmatization, trouble, and injury back upon themselves in the form of self‐blame. This expression of self‐blame is most pervasive among the female injection drug users, in that it is reinforced by moral and therapeutic discourses associated with drug addiction.

Street-Level Law

The distinction between codified law and living law, although visible in the abstract and ascertainable in the study of traditional societies, has subtle ramifications in the policies and activities of lawmakers and of those who implement and enforce the law in modern urban societies. For example, beginning in 1966, state governments as well as Congress, spurred to action by court decisions, demonstration projects, lobbying efforts of a coalition of reform groups, and media publicity, passed laws that led to widespread decriminalization of public drunkenness. Rather than jailing public inebriates, police and others involved in the implementation of laws were dealing with a number of alternatives, including treatment and detoxification centers, some compulsory for the inebriate and some voluntary. This led to research that increased our awareness of the distinction between &dquo;law on the books&dquo; and &dquo;law in action&dquo; as it applies to different

Teaching with Stories: Engaging Students in Critical Self-Reflection about Policing and In/Justice

In a course entitled “Policing and In/Justice” we elicited stories about police-citizen encounters through a narrative-based writing assignment. The assignment required students to identify competing perspectives of the storys events. Building on these perspectives, students engaged in assessment and evaluation of police decision-making. We suggest similar assignments may be relevant to courses with students anticipating or engaged in policing careers. The growing emphasis on community policing raises expectations that officers be creative problem-solvers, not just law enforcers. In addition to establishing the significance of the assignment, we explain how we accomplished it, and report on what students gained from it.