From Carceral Transformation to Incrementalist Change: Municipal Public Safety and the Institutional Logics of Punishment and Care

Background/Purpose: Since the summer of 2020, many US cities have engaged in efforts to transform how they achieve public safety. Inspired by anti-carceral movements like abolition (Kaba & Ritchie, 2022), these efforts challenge the punishing nature of policing, support alternative public safety approaches that center care, and contest the relationship between policing and social services. From an institutional theory lens, these are three inter-related shifts in institutional logics of public safety—those of punishment and care—that have long co-existed and often been intertwined. Yet, institutional theory also suggests that the initial transformative change goals of such shifts may result in more modest, incremental change outcomes due to localized sociopolitical processes (Micelotta et al., 2017). If abolition or criminal legal reform are to achieve anti-carceral goals, how can we better understand the processes that might temper transformational change in public safety? This study contributes an institutional lens to understand anti-carceral public safety change efforts.

Methods: Comparative case studies were conducted of two cities that took substantial steps to transform municipal public safety, including through defunding the police. Virtual ethnography of municipal processes took place over 21 months. Additionally, 54 qualitative interviews were conducted with relevant actors, including city officials, social service administrators and providers, police, funders, and social movement activists. In line with a pattern inducing analytical approach (Reay & Jones, 2016), ethnographic observation and interviews were analyzed together to understand the contextual construction, characteristics, and change of the institutional logics under consideration.

Results: By comparing both cities, I show how institutional change happened through multiple, simultaneous shifts in logics of public safety. To understand these shifts, I first develop a three-part framework of “logic disentangling,” which I define as a phenomenon where logics that previously enjoyed some level of stability, settlement, and relationship, transition to a state where their character, dominance, and relationality are contested. I show how disentangling happened through: 1) attempts to change the character of the dominant punishment logic of policing; 2) efforts to support the dominance of marginalized care-based logics; and 3) separating the relationship between punishment and care logics. As part of this framework, I present the four logics of public safety—Treatment, Repair, Prevention, and Punishment—that were articulated and practiced in the field. Finally, I illustrate the institutional change process through which logics shifted. In this process, the three transformational shifts in logics were tempered by sociopolitical challenges and the actions of powerful local actors, resulting in an incrementalist “both/and” settlement between conflicting institutional logics of public safety.

Conclusions/Implications: This paper adds to our understanding of how the transformative goals of anti-carceral institutional change in public safety result in incrementalist outcomes. A focus on disentangling provides insight into how change in existing public safety arrangements involves multiple and co-occurring shifts in institutional logics, shifts that can be tempered through sociopolitical processes. Through examining institutional logic change processes related to public safety, this paper contributes to conversations in social work on “undoing” or “dismantling” carceral oppression.