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Counties in Court: Interorganizational Adaptations to Jail Litigation in California

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Wayne N. Welsh  and
Henry N. Pontell
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Abstract

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Criminal justice systems have been described as fragmented and decentralized “nonsystems,” but sudden changes in the environments of criminal justice organizations may affect the loose coupling that normally characterizes such agencies. Court orders against county jails create pressures to tighten the loose coupling among local organizational subsystems: the jail, law enforcement, courts, probation, and county government. Using interviews with key officials, court documents, and other archival data, we examined changes in interorganizational relations in three California counties under court orders to reform local jails. While court orders eventually resulted in tighter coupling of the subsystems and more proactive interagency responses, the more reactive mode of response characteristic of loosely coupled subsystems initially led to increased interagency conflict. Adaptations were influenced by the legal, political, and organizational environments of each jurisdiction.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , 1991 , pp. 73 - 101
Copyright
Copyright © 1991 by The Law and Society Association

Footnotes

This research was supported by a doctoral fellowship awarded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; a faculty research grant from the Academic Senate, University of California, Irvine; and the Guggenheim Program in Criminal Justice, Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California, Berkeley.

A previous version of this paper was presented at the Law and Society Association annual meetings, Berkeley, 3 June 1990.

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