Extreme Punishment examines the erosion of the legal boundaries that traditionally divide civil d... more Extreme Punishment examines the erosion of the legal boundaries that traditionally divide civil detention from criminal punishment. This collection of empirical studies illustrates how the mentally ill, non-citizen immigrants, and enemy combatants are treated as criminals in three of the world's oldest and wealthiest democracies: Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. Each chapter relies on unprecedented access to the administrative black holes that increasingly characterize punishment. Together, the contributors explore how punishers exert power and how the punished experience that power. The book demonstrates that, through consolidated administrative power, new laws nominally focused on managing risk and preventing harm produce new criminal categories and newly criminalized people.
This article presents a rare longitudinal analysis of solitary confinement use in one state priso... more This article presents a rare longitudinal analysis of solitary confinement use in one state prison system: spanning 2002–2017 in the Washington Department of Corrections (DOC). An ongoing partnership with DOC officials facilitated methodological and conceptual improvements, allowing us to construct a dataset that provides a rich description of who is in solitary confinement, for how long, and why. Operationalizing solitary confinement as the intersection of the most serious custody status with the most restrictive housing location, we describe significant changes in ethnic composition and behavioral profiles of people in solitary confinement and in frequency and duration of solitary confinement use. These results suggest how particular policy interventions have affected the composition, numbers, and lengths of stay in solitary confinement. Combining longitudinal analysis and iterative engagement with DOC officials, we provide a roadmap for better understanding solitary confinement u...
Concrete, steel, artificial light, complete technological automation, near-complete sensory depri... more Concrete, steel, artificial light, complete technological automation, near-complete sensory deprivation, and total isolation-these are the basic conditions of supermaximum security prisons in the United States. "Supermax" prisoners remain alone twenty-three to twenty-four hours a day, under fluorescent lights that are never turned off. Meals arrive through a small slot in an automated cell door. Prisoners have little to no human contact for months, years, or even decades at a time, save brief interactions with correctional officers, who place hand, ankle, and waist cuffs on each prisoner before removing him from his cell. Prisoners only leave their cells four or five times per week, for showers or for brief, solitary exercise periods in "dog runs"concrete pens with roofs at least partially open to natural light. In sum, supermax prisons across the United States detain thousands in long-term solitary confinement, under conditions of extreme sensory deprivation. They are prisons within prisons, confining the prisoners correctional administrators deem a threat to the general prison population. Arizona opened the first supermax, in 1986, and California opened the second, in 1989. Over the subsequent ten years, almost every state, along with the federal prison system, either built a supermax or retrofitted an existing facility to create a supermax unit. This dissertation examines the birth of the supermax in Arizona and California, and the spread of the institutional innovation across the United States. The research presented here draws on three major categories of data: archival materials, including legal decisions and case files, local news reporting, and legislative records; oral history interviews with more than thirty key informants, including correctional administrators, legal professionals, architects, and former prisoners; and quantitative data maintained by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. This is the first study specifically focused on unearthing the administrative and political processes that underwrote the supermax. The dissertation begins with an overview of the idea of solitary confinement and the term "supermax," leading to a working definition of supermaxes as institutions that are: bounded in time, administratively overseen, characterized by extremely restrictive conditions, and large in both scale of beds and durations of confinement. Chapter Two uses this definition to create a working list of supermax institutions in the United States. Chapter Three frames supermaxes as a product of mass incarceration, and introduces the core region (the Sunbelt) and core case study (California) on which 2 the dissertation will focus. Chapters Four through Six document how and why correctional administrators decided to build California's first supermax, Pelican Bay State Prison. These chapters trace how socio-political changes in the 1970s-including structural changes to sentencing laws; race-based social organizing, both in and out of prison; and increasing judicial attention to prisonspaved the way for the supermax innovation in the 1980s. Chapter Four argues that critical power shifts between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government left a power vacuum, which correctional administrators quickly filled, in part through building supermaxes. Chapter Five describes the legislative process that nominally underwrote the supermax, and argues that California legislators ceded both planning and moral authority to state correctional administrators. Chapter Six describes the processes of architectural design and technological innovation that created the physical supermaxes themselves. Curiosity led me to tutor in prison as an 18-year-old college freshman; discovering that my elder "students" were human transformed curiosity into passionate interest. Correctional administrators have similarly disrupted my expectations, by seeming thoughtful, politically engaged, and genuinely motivated by public service. I am grateful to the many correctional administrators and other, associated experts who have welcomed me into their offices, candidly assessed their proud and less-proud moments, and helped me to understand that no individual, office, or group is wholly responsible for the many ways our criminal justice system goes wrong.
Author(s): Reiter, Keramet A. | Abstract: In 1989, California opened Pelican Bay State Prison, eq... more Author(s): Reiter, Keramet A. | Abstract: In 1989, California opened Pelican Bay State Prison, equipped with 1,056 cells explicitly designed to keep California’s alleged “worst of the worst” prisoners in long-term solitary confinement, under conditions of extreme sensory deprivation. The 8 x 10 foot cells of the Pelican Bay SHU, or Secure Housing Unit, are made of smooth, poured concrete. They have no windows. Instead, there are fluorescent lights, which stay on 24 hours per day. For at least twenty-two hours every day, prisoners remain in their cells, looking out through a perforated steel door at a solid concrete wall. Food is delivered twice a day through a slot in the cell door.
Prisoner's rights are those rights that individuals retain after they are found guilty of a c... more Prisoner's rights are those rights that individuals retain after they are found guilty of a crime and sentenced to a term of confinement in a prison or jail. In the United States, prisoner's rights include both positive rights, such as the right to challenge a criminal sentence and the right to challenge conditions of confinement within prison, and negative rights, such as the right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment and the right to be free from discrimination.Most prisoner's rights are civil rights, meaning that a prisoner must file a lawsuit against a specific individual or agency and seek a particular remedy, such as a change in policy or a payment for damages suffered. In such cases, prisoners often represent themselves (pro se), initiating and pursuing their own legal challenges. The development of prisoner's rights in the United States can be divided chronologically into roughly three different eras of progress: limited rights in the early republic a...
... Halevi, Sharon. 1999. The premier body: Sarah Netanyahu, Nava Barak, and the discourse of wom... more ... Halevi, Sharon. 1999. The premier body: Sarah Netanyahu, Nava Barak, and the discourse of womanhood in Israel. NWSA Journal , 11(2): 7281. [CrossRef], [CSA] View all references; Nira Yuval-Davis 1980100. Yuval-Davis, Nira. 1980. ...
Keramet Reiter looks at the use of solitary confinement in American prisons and examines the work... more Keramet Reiter looks at the use of solitary confinement in American prisons and examines the work of activists in trying to end it. She examines the case of Ashker v. Governor of California, a class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of 500 prisoners in California who had each been housed continuously in solitary confinement for ten years or more. She also examines whether the case repudiated the practice of solitary confinement, “consigning it to legal infamy.”
In this testimony, I will discuss, in turn, three aspects of solitary confinement in the United S... more In this testimony, I will discuss, in turn, three aspects of solitary confinement in the United States on which I have a particular expertise: (1) the history of the practice as an administrative (rather than legislative or judicial) innovation, (2) the lack of evidence that the practice promotes safety, either in prisons or in communities; and (3) the unprecedented scale of the practice – in terms of both numbers of people confined and durations of confinement.Statement of Keramet A. Reiter, J.D., Ph.D.Before the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Right
The chapter showcases California’s prison bureaucracy where correctional bureaucrats pioneered th... more The chapter showcases California’s prison bureaucracy where correctional bureaucrats pioneered the development of the “supermax” high-level-security prison, or “prisons within prisons.” Drawing on forty oral history interviews with prison administrators, lawyers, prison architects, and reformers, the chapter demonstrates how correctional bureaucrats initiated solutions to address local problems without political scrutiny. By focusing on local control through correctional bureaucrats, the chapter argues that bureaucrats acted as more than policy implementers but as “policy initiators” who reacted to fears over mounting prison uprisings, gang strife and racial violence, and prisoners’ rights lawsuits by redesigning the prison scheme to arrive at their “solution” of architectural cell isolation. In contrast to the top-down federal narrative of mass incarceration, this chapter reveals that correctional bureaucrats had near total control when advocating for the holistic redesign of the e...
In 2011 the US Supreme Court declared healthcare in California’s prison system constitutionally i... more In 2011 the US Supreme Court declared healthcare in California’s prison system constitutionally inadequate under the Eighth Amendment and upheld an order to reduce the prison population by almost one- third. This article examines the initiation and trajectory of the Brown v. Plata litigation, California’s effort to “realign” state prisoners into county facilities, and recent legal challenges to conditions in jails. Plata must be understood not just as a symbolic critique of mass incarceration, but as an example of (a) the persistent power of administrative discretion and political resistance to reform and (b) the challenges of devolving punitive power to increasingly local decision-makers. Rather than reducing California’s reliance on mass incarceration, Plata may have simply initiated fragmentation of mass incarceration into local jails, which are both less visible and more resistant to federal judicial control than state prison systems.
Joining a long-standing tradition of reflexive analysis in qualitative research, particularly in ... more Joining a long-standing tradition of reflexive analysis in qualitative research, particularly in closed institutions, this chapter examines our role as researchers from the United States in our in-depth study of punishment in Denmark. In this study we conducted ethnographic field research and in-depth interviews with prisoners, staff, and experts in the Danish prison system. Here, we critically examine the ways in which we were simultaneously perceived and treated as outsiders and insiders and the effects of these roles on the research study and, potentially, on the prison system more broadly. We found that our insider status as researchers and our outsider identities as US-based prison researchers facilitated enhanced access to the prison system. Furthermore, our perceived and adopted outsider identities as representatives of a failing US prison system may have also shored up the legitimacy of Danish prison policies and practices.
Solitary confinement has been a perennial tool of control in US prisons, despite its status as a ... more Solitary confinement has been a perennial tool of control in US prisons, despite its status as a repeatedly delegitimized practice. Although there have been significant changes in punishment over time, solitary confinement has remained, mostly at the margins and always as a response to past failures, part of an unending search for greater control over prisoners. This history raises the question of how a discredited penal technology can nevertheless persist. We locate the source of this persistence in prison administrators' unflagging belief in solitary confinement as a last-resort tool of control. To maintain this highly criticized practice, prison administrators strategically revise, but never abandon, discredited practices in response to antecedent legitimacy struggles. Using solitary confinement as a case study, we demonstrate how penal technologies that violate current sensibilities can survive, despite changing macro-level social factors that otherwise explain penal change ...
Bradley Ballard died of sepsis in May 2014 after he tied a rubber band around his genitals, smear... more Bradley Ballard died of sepsis in May 2014 after he tied a rubber band around his genitals, smeared his body with feres, and passed out in his Rikers Island. New York City jail cell. Ballard had been arrested tor assault and public lewdness in 2013; he had previously served six years in New York state prisons for assault charges. Ballard was known to be severely mentally ill; he had spent 38 days in a prison psychiatric hospital in the weeks before he died, in the last week of his life, he made a lewd gesture at a female officer and was subsequently placed in total solitary confinement. For several days, he was not allowed to leave his cell, nor was he given medications. Because he intentionally stopped up his toilet, the water line supplying his cell was shut off (Pearson 2014).
Objectives California has strict firearm-related laws and is exceptional in its regulation of fir... more Objectives California has strict firearm-related laws and is exceptional in its regulation of firearms retailers. Though evidence suggests that these laws can reduce illegal access to guns, high levels of gun violence persist in Los Angeles (LA), California. This research seeks to describe the sources of guns accessed by active offenders in LA, California and reports offenders' motivations for obtaining guns. Setting Los Angeles County Jail (LACJ) system (four facilities). Methods Random sampling from a screened pool of eligible participants was used to conduct qualitative semistructured interviews with 140 incarcerated gun offenders in one of four (LACJ) facilities. Researchers collected data on firearm acquisition, experiences related to gun violence, and other topics, using a validated survey instrument. Grounded theory guided the collection and analysis of data. Results Respondents reported possession of 77 specific guns (79.2% handguns) collectively. Social networks facilitate access to illegal guns; the majority of interviewees acquired their illegal guns through a social connection (85.7%) versus an outside broker/ unregulated retailer (8.5%). Most guns were obtained through illegal purchase (n=51) or gift (n=15). A quarter of gun purchasers report engaging in a passive transaction, or one initiated by another party. Passive gun buyers were motivated by concerns for personal safety and/or economic opportunity. Conclusions In LA's illegal gun market, where existing social relationships facilitate access to guns across a diffuse network, individuals, influenced by both fear and economic opportunity, have frequent opportunities to illegally possess firearms through passive transactions. Gun policies should better target and minimise these transactions.
Extreme Punishment examines the erosion of the legal boundaries that traditionally divide civil d... more Extreme Punishment examines the erosion of the legal boundaries that traditionally divide civil detention from criminal punishment. This collection of empirical studies illustrates how the mentally ill, non-citizen immigrants, and enemy combatants are treated as criminals in three of the world's oldest and wealthiest democracies: Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. Each chapter relies on unprecedented access to the administrative black holes that increasingly characterize punishment. Together, the contributors explore how punishers exert power and how the punished experience that power. The book demonstrates that, through consolidated administrative power, new laws nominally focused on managing risk and preventing harm produce new criminal categories and newly criminalized people.
This article presents a rare longitudinal analysis of solitary confinement use in one state priso... more This article presents a rare longitudinal analysis of solitary confinement use in one state prison system: spanning 2002–2017 in the Washington Department of Corrections (DOC). An ongoing partnership with DOC officials facilitated methodological and conceptual improvements, allowing us to construct a dataset that provides a rich description of who is in solitary confinement, for how long, and why. Operationalizing solitary confinement as the intersection of the most serious custody status with the most restrictive housing location, we describe significant changes in ethnic composition and behavioral profiles of people in solitary confinement and in frequency and duration of solitary confinement use. These results suggest how particular policy interventions have affected the composition, numbers, and lengths of stay in solitary confinement. Combining longitudinal analysis and iterative engagement with DOC officials, we provide a roadmap for better understanding solitary confinement u...
Concrete, steel, artificial light, complete technological automation, near-complete sensory depri... more Concrete, steel, artificial light, complete technological automation, near-complete sensory deprivation, and total isolation-these are the basic conditions of supermaximum security prisons in the United States. "Supermax" prisoners remain alone twenty-three to twenty-four hours a day, under fluorescent lights that are never turned off. Meals arrive through a small slot in an automated cell door. Prisoners have little to no human contact for months, years, or even decades at a time, save brief interactions with correctional officers, who place hand, ankle, and waist cuffs on each prisoner before removing him from his cell. Prisoners only leave their cells four or five times per week, for showers or for brief, solitary exercise periods in "dog runs"concrete pens with roofs at least partially open to natural light. In sum, supermax prisons across the United States detain thousands in long-term solitary confinement, under conditions of extreme sensory deprivation. They are prisons within prisons, confining the prisoners correctional administrators deem a threat to the general prison population. Arizona opened the first supermax, in 1986, and California opened the second, in 1989. Over the subsequent ten years, almost every state, along with the federal prison system, either built a supermax or retrofitted an existing facility to create a supermax unit. This dissertation examines the birth of the supermax in Arizona and California, and the spread of the institutional innovation across the United States. The research presented here draws on three major categories of data: archival materials, including legal decisions and case files, local news reporting, and legislative records; oral history interviews with more than thirty key informants, including correctional administrators, legal professionals, architects, and former prisoners; and quantitative data maintained by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. This is the first study specifically focused on unearthing the administrative and political processes that underwrote the supermax. The dissertation begins with an overview of the idea of solitary confinement and the term "supermax," leading to a working definition of supermaxes as institutions that are: bounded in time, administratively overseen, characterized by extremely restrictive conditions, and large in both scale of beds and durations of confinement. Chapter Two uses this definition to create a working list of supermax institutions in the United States. Chapter Three frames supermaxes as a product of mass incarceration, and introduces the core region (the Sunbelt) and core case study (California) on which 2 the dissertation will focus. Chapters Four through Six document how and why correctional administrators decided to build California's first supermax, Pelican Bay State Prison. These chapters trace how socio-political changes in the 1970s-including structural changes to sentencing laws; race-based social organizing, both in and out of prison; and increasing judicial attention to prisonspaved the way for the supermax innovation in the 1980s. Chapter Four argues that critical power shifts between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government left a power vacuum, which correctional administrators quickly filled, in part through building supermaxes. Chapter Five describes the legislative process that nominally underwrote the supermax, and argues that California legislators ceded both planning and moral authority to state correctional administrators. Chapter Six describes the processes of architectural design and technological innovation that created the physical supermaxes themselves. Curiosity led me to tutor in prison as an 18-year-old college freshman; discovering that my elder "students" were human transformed curiosity into passionate interest. Correctional administrators have similarly disrupted my expectations, by seeming thoughtful, politically engaged, and genuinely motivated by public service. I am grateful to the many correctional administrators and other, associated experts who have welcomed me into their offices, candidly assessed their proud and less-proud moments, and helped me to understand that no individual, office, or group is wholly responsible for the many ways our criminal justice system goes wrong.
Author(s): Reiter, Keramet A. | Abstract: In 1989, California opened Pelican Bay State Prison, eq... more Author(s): Reiter, Keramet A. | Abstract: In 1989, California opened Pelican Bay State Prison, equipped with 1,056 cells explicitly designed to keep California’s alleged “worst of the worst” prisoners in long-term solitary confinement, under conditions of extreme sensory deprivation. The 8 x 10 foot cells of the Pelican Bay SHU, or Secure Housing Unit, are made of smooth, poured concrete. They have no windows. Instead, there are fluorescent lights, which stay on 24 hours per day. For at least twenty-two hours every day, prisoners remain in their cells, looking out through a perforated steel door at a solid concrete wall. Food is delivered twice a day through a slot in the cell door.
Prisoner's rights are those rights that individuals retain after they are found guilty of a c... more Prisoner's rights are those rights that individuals retain after they are found guilty of a crime and sentenced to a term of confinement in a prison or jail. In the United States, prisoner's rights include both positive rights, such as the right to challenge a criminal sentence and the right to challenge conditions of confinement within prison, and negative rights, such as the right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment and the right to be free from discrimination.Most prisoner's rights are civil rights, meaning that a prisoner must file a lawsuit against a specific individual or agency and seek a particular remedy, such as a change in policy or a payment for damages suffered. In such cases, prisoners often represent themselves (pro se), initiating and pursuing their own legal challenges. The development of prisoner's rights in the United States can be divided chronologically into roughly three different eras of progress: limited rights in the early republic a...
... Halevi, Sharon. 1999. The premier body: Sarah Netanyahu, Nava Barak, and the discourse of wom... more ... Halevi, Sharon. 1999. The premier body: Sarah Netanyahu, Nava Barak, and the discourse of womanhood in Israel. NWSA Journal , 11(2): 7281. [CrossRef], [CSA] View all references; Nira Yuval-Davis 1980100. Yuval-Davis, Nira. 1980. ...
Keramet Reiter looks at the use of solitary confinement in American prisons and examines the work... more Keramet Reiter looks at the use of solitary confinement in American prisons and examines the work of activists in trying to end it. She examines the case of Ashker v. Governor of California, a class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of 500 prisoners in California who had each been housed continuously in solitary confinement for ten years or more. She also examines whether the case repudiated the practice of solitary confinement, “consigning it to legal infamy.”
In this testimony, I will discuss, in turn, three aspects of solitary confinement in the United S... more In this testimony, I will discuss, in turn, three aspects of solitary confinement in the United States on which I have a particular expertise: (1) the history of the practice as an administrative (rather than legislative or judicial) innovation, (2) the lack of evidence that the practice promotes safety, either in prisons or in communities; and (3) the unprecedented scale of the practice – in terms of both numbers of people confined and durations of confinement.Statement of Keramet A. Reiter, J.D., Ph.D.Before the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Right
The chapter showcases California’s prison bureaucracy where correctional bureaucrats pioneered th... more The chapter showcases California’s prison bureaucracy where correctional bureaucrats pioneered the development of the “supermax” high-level-security prison, or “prisons within prisons.” Drawing on forty oral history interviews with prison administrators, lawyers, prison architects, and reformers, the chapter demonstrates how correctional bureaucrats initiated solutions to address local problems without political scrutiny. By focusing on local control through correctional bureaucrats, the chapter argues that bureaucrats acted as more than policy implementers but as “policy initiators” who reacted to fears over mounting prison uprisings, gang strife and racial violence, and prisoners’ rights lawsuits by redesigning the prison scheme to arrive at their “solution” of architectural cell isolation. In contrast to the top-down federal narrative of mass incarceration, this chapter reveals that correctional bureaucrats had near total control when advocating for the holistic redesign of the e...
In 2011 the US Supreme Court declared healthcare in California’s prison system constitutionally i... more In 2011 the US Supreme Court declared healthcare in California’s prison system constitutionally inadequate under the Eighth Amendment and upheld an order to reduce the prison population by almost one- third. This article examines the initiation and trajectory of the Brown v. Plata litigation, California’s effort to “realign” state prisoners into county facilities, and recent legal challenges to conditions in jails. Plata must be understood not just as a symbolic critique of mass incarceration, but as an example of (a) the persistent power of administrative discretion and political resistance to reform and (b) the challenges of devolving punitive power to increasingly local decision-makers. Rather than reducing California’s reliance on mass incarceration, Plata may have simply initiated fragmentation of mass incarceration into local jails, which are both less visible and more resistant to federal judicial control than state prison systems.
Joining a long-standing tradition of reflexive analysis in qualitative research, particularly in ... more Joining a long-standing tradition of reflexive analysis in qualitative research, particularly in closed institutions, this chapter examines our role as researchers from the United States in our in-depth study of punishment in Denmark. In this study we conducted ethnographic field research and in-depth interviews with prisoners, staff, and experts in the Danish prison system. Here, we critically examine the ways in which we were simultaneously perceived and treated as outsiders and insiders and the effects of these roles on the research study and, potentially, on the prison system more broadly. We found that our insider status as researchers and our outsider identities as US-based prison researchers facilitated enhanced access to the prison system. Furthermore, our perceived and adopted outsider identities as representatives of a failing US prison system may have also shored up the legitimacy of Danish prison policies and practices.
Solitary confinement has been a perennial tool of control in US prisons, despite its status as a ... more Solitary confinement has been a perennial tool of control in US prisons, despite its status as a repeatedly delegitimized practice. Although there have been significant changes in punishment over time, solitary confinement has remained, mostly at the margins and always as a response to past failures, part of an unending search for greater control over prisoners. This history raises the question of how a discredited penal technology can nevertheless persist. We locate the source of this persistence in prison administrators' unflagging belief in solitary confinement as a last-resort tool of control. To maintain this highly criticized practice, prison administrators strategically revise, but never abandon, discredited practices in response to antecedent legitimacy struggles. Using solitary confinement as a case study, we demonstrate how penal technologies that violate current sensibilities can survive, despite changing macro-level social factors that otherwise explain penal change ...
Bradley Ballard died of sepsis in May 2014 after he tied a rubber band around his genitals, smear... more Bradley Ballard died of sepsis in May 2014 after he tied a rubber band around his genitals, smeared his body with feres, and passed out in his Rikers Island. New York City jail cell. Ballard had been arrested tor assault and public lewdness in 2013; he had previously served six years in New York state prisons for assault charges. Ballard was known to be severely mentally ill; he had spent 38 days in a prison psychiatric hospital in the weeks before he died, in the last week of his life, he made a lewd gesture at a female officer and was subsequently placed in total solitary confinement. For several days, he was not allowed to leave his cell, nor was he given medications. Because he intentionally stopped up his toilet, the water line supplying his cell was shut off (Pearson 2014).
Objectives California has strict firearm-related laws and is exceptional in its regulation of fir... more Objectives California has strict firearm-related laws and is exceptional in its regulation of firearms retailers. Though evidence suggests that these laws can reduce illegal access to guns, high levels of gun violence persist in Los Angeles (LA), California. This research seeks to describe the sources of guns accessed by active offenders in LA, California and reports offenders' motivations for obtaining guns. Setting Los Angeles County Jail (LACJ) system (four facilities). Methods Random sampling from a screened pool of eligible participants was used to conduct qualitative semistructured interviews with 140 incarcerated gun offenders in one of four (LACJ) facilities. Researchers collected data on firearm acquisition, experiences related to gun violence, and other topics, using a validated survey instrument. Grounded theory guided the collection and analysis of data. Results Respondents reported possession of 77 specific guns (79.2% handguns) collectively. Social networks facilitate access to illegal guns; the majority of interviewees acquired their illegal guns through a social connection (85.7%) versus an outside broker/ unregulated retailer (8.5%). Most guns were obtained through illegal purchase (n=51) or gift (n=15). A quarter of gun purchasers report engaging in a passive transaction, or one initiated by another party. Passive gun buyers were motivated by concerns for personal safety and/or economic opportunity. Conclusions In LA's illegal gun market, where existing social relationships facilitate access to guns across a diffuse network, individuals, influenced by both fear and economic opportunity, have frequent opportunities to illegally possess firearms through passive transactions. Gun policies should better target and minimise these transactions.
Objectives: California has strict firearm-related laws and is exceptional in its regulation of fi... more Objectives: California has strict firearm-related laws and is exceptional in its regulation of firearms retailers. Though evidence suggests that these laws can reduce illegal access to guns, high levels of gun violence persist in Los Angeles (LA), California. This research seeks to describe the sources of guns accessed by active offenders in LA, California and reports offenders' motivations for obtaining guns.
Setting: Los Angeles County Jail (LACJ) system (four facilities).
Methods: Random sampling from a screened pool of eligible participants was used to conduct qualitative semistructured interviews with 140 incarcerated gun offenders in one of four (LACJ) facilities. Researchers collected data on firearm acquisition, experiences related to gun violence, and other topics, using a validated survey instrument. Grounded theory guided the collection and analysis of data.
Results: Respondents reported possession of 77 specific guns (79.2% handguns) collectively. Social networks facilitate access to illegal guns; the majority of interviewees acquired their illegal guns through a social connection (85.7%) versus an outside broker/unregulated retailer (8.5%). Most guns were obtained through illegal purchase (n=51) or gift (n=15). A quarter of gun purchasers report engaging in a passive transaction, or one initiated by another party. Passive gun buyers were motivated by concerns for personal safety and/or economic opportunity.
Conclusions: In LA's illegal gun market, where existing social relationships facilitate access to guns across a diffuse network, individuals, influenced by both fear and economic opportunity, have frequent opportunities to illegally possess firearms through passive transactions. Gun policies should better target and minimise these transactions.
Procedural justice research generally indicates that legitimacy produces compliance when people p... more Procedural justice research generally indicates that legitimacy produces compliance when people perceive the law and legal actors to be fair. Drawing upon 140 in-depth interviews with gun offenders detained in Los Angeles County jails, this article examines legal and extra-legal factors that influence illegal gun possession. Although prior research studies on legal and illegal gun carrying have suggested a relationship between (a) safety perceptions and possession and (b) legal perceptions and possession, few have deeply interrogated how such perceptions develop and interact to inform ideas of legitimacy and compliance with gun laws. Our findings suggest that feelings of insecurity coupled with perceptions of, and experiences with, law enforcement interacted in complex ways to condition legitimacy-based beliefs, and ultimately, compliance. Although many of our respondents viewed the law as legitimate in the abstract, they believed it to be illegitimate in individual application, especially where rules and sanctions failed to account for personal experiences of insecurity.
Using data from 140 interviews with individuals detained in the Los Angeles County Jail system, t... more Using data from 140 interviews with individuals detained in the Los Angeles County Jail system, this article examines what gun offenders know about gun and ammunition regulation in California. Though most respondents had a consistent, albeit general, understanding of the regulations limiting gun acquisition and possession, analysis suggests that their understanding of ammunition restrictions was more limited. Our sample’s awareness of firearms law is especially important to consider given that they are the very population targeted by firearms regulations and prohibitions at the local, state, and federal level. By examining what detained offenders know about firearms laws, we can better theorize about individual gaps in legal knowledge and the realistic expectations for how understanding of the law can affect behavior.
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Setting: Los Angeles County Jail (LACJ) system (four facilities).
Methods: Random sampling from a screened pool of eligible participants was used to conduct qualitative semistructured interviews with 140 incarcerated gun offenders in one of four (LACJ) facilities. Researchers collected data on firearm acquisition, experiences related to gun violence, and other topics, using a validated survey instrument. Grounded theory guided the collection and analysis of data.
Results: Respondents reported possession of 77 specific guns (79.2% handguns) collectively. Social networks facilitate access to illegal guns; the majority of interviewees acquired their illegal guns through a social connection (85.7%) versus an outside broker/unregulated retailer (8.5%). Most guns were obtained through illegal purchase (n=51) or gift (n=15). A quarter of gun purchasers report engaging in a passive transaction, or one initiated by another party. Passive gun buyers were motivated by concerns for personal safety and/or economic opportunity.
Conclusions: In LA's illegal gun market, where existing social relationships facilitate access to guns across a diffuse network, individuals, influenced by both fear and economic opportunity, have frequent opportunities to illegally possess firearms through passive transactions. Gun policies should better target and minimise these transactions.
had a consistent, albeit general, understanding of the regulations limiting gun acquisition and possession, analysis suggests that their understanding of ammunition restrictions was more limited. Our sample’s awareness of firearms law is especially important to consider given that they are the very population targeted by firearms regulations and prohibitions at the local, state, and federal level. By examining what detained offenders know about firearms laws, we can better theorize about individual gaps in legal knowledge and the realistic expectations for how understanding of the law can affect behavior.