Achieving reform in unstable correctional institutions: a theoretical perspective – revisited

Abstract

In many of our nation’s prisons and jails, the goal of achieving stability has been buried beneath the demand for institutional order. Ill-qualified correctional administrators having failed to achieve stability by overlooking the organizational commitments required from key institutional actors are satisfied in maintaining a chaotic status quo. That is, tolerating a condition of a tenuous order where inmate placation, rather than reformulation, is the guiding policy to neutralize institutional instability. An additional state of classification, order, is proposed here to the two existing states of classification descriptive of the social climates within correctional institutions–instability and stability. In doing so an emerging recognition of the dissimilarities between the states of order and stability are given due consideration. Finally, the vision of a humanistic correctional system held to be an inevitable outgrowth of the evolutionary process of social change is discussed.