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Organizational Compliance with Court-Ordered Reform

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Sheldon Ekland-Olson  and
Steve J. Martin
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Abstract

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We present a detailed case study of administrative responses to litigated reform efforts directed at the Texas Department of Corrections over a two-decade period. We found that administrators attempted to maintain their organizational boundaries by: (1) controlling information; (2) using political connections in the broader community; (3) launching a judicial counterattack; and (4) exercising administrative prerogatives. Defiance of demands from the broader legal community was related to: (1) the organizational culture of the Texas prison system, which developed and existed in isolation not only from the federal courts but also from oversight by state officials; (2) pronouncements by the prison system's leadership that created a moral climate in which court-ordered reform could be readily defined by prison staff as illegitimate; and (3) ineffective control structures within the system that failed to respond to violations of the law by prison staff. Keeping the limitations of a single case study in mind, we close with a set of observations for addressing court-ordered organizational reform in a comparative framework.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 22 , Issue 2 , 1988 , pp. 359 - 383
Copyright
Copyright © 1988 by The Law and Society Association

Footnotes

We would like to thank Richard Hawkins, James Jacobs, Michael Sharlot, and Mark Warr for their helpful suggestions during various stages of this research project. Funds from the Hogg Foundation and the School of Law at the University of Texas, Austin, were instrumental in allowing us to finish this project.

References

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