The executives of barbed-wire bureaucracies are confronted with all of these problems and many others as well: judicial intervention; the rise of correctional officer unionism and prisoners' rights organizations; challenges from the private sector; greater media scrutiny and political pressure; increases in public spending that lag behind both demographic and sentencing trends; and so on. Since around 1970, the political and legal constraints on corrections commissioners have increased while the bureaucratic authority vested in them has decreased. In the apt phrase of the late practitioner-penologist Richard A. McGee, contemporary commissioners face a formidable cadre of "coaches, customers, and critics." Moreover, they face fundamental challenges to the moral and practical worth of their work.
Let me begin by understating the obvious: The clients of barbed-wire bureaucracies are non-voluntary. The average police commissioner runs an agency that is visible to the general public, interacts largely with ordinary citizens, and spends much of its resources responding to the un-coerced and friendly requests of noncriminal persons. The average corrections commissioner, on the other hand, runs an agency that is out of the public eye and interacts mainly with prisoners who do not want to be in prison, jail detainees who wish to be released, parolees who have "done their time" and prefer to be unsupervised, and probationers who do not like to be "hassled" by their overseers. As one corrections commissioner observed: The cops get a very mixed bag-lost kids crying for their mommy, speeding businessmen, punks on corners, and now and then a real criminal or two. We [in corrections] get all of their hardest cases. We manage all of society's "bad asses"; that's pretty much what we do. . . . [I]n carrying out the will of the court, we force people with a history of beating the system and doing things their way to be places they don't want to be, do things they don't want to do, for longer than they want to, under conditions that are about a hundred times more restrictive and unpleasant than they'd like.
Sociologists have established ad nauseam that convicted criminals share an ethos that runs counter to the norms and values of "straight" or "middle-class" life and are prone to resist in subtle and overt ways the authority of their "keepers." With respect to prisons and jails, the conventional view is that penal administrators once managed by entering into tacit, corrupt bargains with convicts in order to keep the peace, bending or breaking the official rules governing most aspects of inmate behavior in return for inmate compliance with major custodial goals (i.e., no escapes or riots). Of practical necessity, the government of keepers managed not "by the book" but in deference to the language, leaders, laws, rites, and rituals of the society of captives.
It is commonly believed that in the late 1960s such informal arrangements among inmates and between inmates and staff began to break down primarily as a result of two factors: First, there was the politicization of the inmates, especially acute among convicts from minority backgrounds; and second, there were deepening rifts and bloody battles among and within inmate gangs organized along racial and ethnic lines. Meanwhile, there was a steady and unprecedented climb in the number of inmates and a simultaneous increase in the percentages of convicts who were violent offenders, repeat offenders, or violent repeat offenders; by the mid-1980s, nearly 95 percent of prisoners fell into one of these three categories. Beyond the walls, many adjudicated criminals on probation, parole, or under some other form of non-carceral supervision were people who, a few years earlier, probably would have been kept behind bars. Additionally, the rising number of convicts who are serious drug abusers has made the barbed-wire bureaucrats custodians of an ever more unpredictable and, many commissioners contend, un-reformable population of offenders. In short, by every conceivable measure, today's adjudicated criminals-the non-voluntary clients of corrections agencies -are the largest, most incorrigible, and hardest to handle lot in the history of American corrections.
Nevertheless, the contemporary corrections commissioner is expected to muster the human and financial resources necessary to manage these offenders. Although most studies suggest that commissioners have a good deal of latitude in shaping correctional policies, the task of translating those policies into administrative action requires them to harness the efforts of individuals and groups- legislators, activists, judges, union leaders, and others-whose interests and ideas may conflict sharply. Consider, for example, the contemporary corrections commissioner's position vis-a-vis correctional officers and judges.
In 1954 a federal circuit court ruled that judges are "without power to direct prison administration or to interfere with ordinary prison rules and regulations." Since 1970, however, the "hands-off" doctrine has been repealed as judges have intervened on a wide range of prison issues, including crowding, food services, sanitation, healthcare, due process protections for inmates, and the constitutionality of prison conditions. In 1986 some thirty corrections agencies were operating under conditions-of-confinement court orders; many had class-action suits in progress and population limits set by the courts; over a dozen state systems had court-appointed special masters, monitors, and compliance coordinators. In some jurisdictions, judges have become de facto commissioners of corrections.
Some commissioners have tried to stay one step ahead of the courts, seeking accreditation for their facilities as a shield against unfavorable rulings and rushing their agencies into compliance with judicial decrees. Other commissioners have dragged their feet, with a few even rallying their rank-and-file workers to oppose the court's "interference." However, most of today's commissioners are cognizant of the bitter experiences of directors who have' 'argued with the umpires"; none of them came to office before the era of judicial involvement. They are inclined, therefore, to take the former approach. Yet in so doing, they risk weakening or destroying their often tenuous support within the department, especially among the uniformed custodial staff.
