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The Disruption of Prison Administration: An Investigation of Alternative Theories of the Relationship Among Administrators, Reformers, and Involuntary Social Service Clients

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

G. David Garson*
Affiliation:
Tufts University
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Interest in contemporary disruptions of human services administrations by involuntary clients, from welfare recipients to draft inductees, warrants an empirical investigation of prison rioting for two reasons. First, interest derives from a crisis of normal services involving such key foci of recent administative research as informal organizational behavior, the nature of professionalization of roles, and the ambiguities of clientelism. Second, the prison, while certainly not a microcosm of society, is a self-contained unit more amenable analysis than more diffuse social service milieus such as “the ghetto,” another prime locale of involuntary clientelism. The present exploratory study reviews alternative theories of the disruption of prison administration in the light of data collected on over a hundred inmate disturbances in the period from 1863-1970.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1972 The Law and Society Association

Footnotes

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Prepared for delivery at the 1971 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, Illinois, September 7-11, 1971. Copyright 1971, the American Political Science Association. This research was partially supported through grants from the National Science Foundation and from the Joint Center for Urban Studies of M.I.T. and Harvard University. Although full responsibility for errors is my own, I am indebted to James Q. Wilson and to Lloyd Ohlin for their comments on the manuscript, which is revised and abridged section of a doctoral dissertation titled “Collective Violence in America, 1863-1963” (Harvard University, Department of Government, 1969).

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