RT Article
T1 Managing rehabilitation: negotiating performance accountability at the frontlines of reentry service provision
JF Punishment & society
VO 19
IS 4
SP 482
OP 502
A1 Halushka, John
LA English
YR 2017
UL https://krimdok.uni-tuebingen.de/Record/1743174101
AB Based on a three-year ethnographic study of two prisoner reentry agencies, this article explores how frontline service providers negotiate the contradictory demands of performance accountability. Performance accountability systems—collectively known as the New Public Management (NPM)—force service providers to make difficult trade-offs between these managerial goals and the substantive goals of rehabilitation. However, we know little about how frontline service providers negotiate these competing demands. I show how, despite efforts to develop distinct organizational brands, both organizations I studied responded to performance pressures and resource constraints according to a set of practices I call “defensive institutionalism.” This involved strategies designed to protect organizational resources from high risk clients by (1) filtering the client pool and (2) responsibilizing clients. While these practices allowed these organizations to reconcile managerial and substantive goals in situ, they did not resolve the underlying contradictions of New Public Management. New Public Management incentivizes service providers to pursue short-term, individuated approaches to rehabilitation, and it induces isomorphism rather than innovation. I conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for current efforts to implement “evidence-based” criminal justice policies.
K1 New Public Management
K1 evidence-based practice
K1 Performance accountability
K1 Prisoner re-entry
K1 Rehabilitation
K1 Responsibilization
K1 Smart-on-crime
K1 Workforce development
DO 10.1177/1462474516669356