Institutional Change in Municipal Public Safety and the Logics of Punishment and Care

Abstract

Following the 2020 murder of George Floyd and related social uprisings, many U.S. cities engaged in efforts to reimagine their public safety systems and shift both funding and responsibility for public safety from police to social services. These efforts disrupted carceral systems by: 1) challenging the punishing nature of policing; 2) supporting alternative public safety approaches that center care; and 3) contesting the relationship between policing and social services, and therefore, punishment and care. Moreover, cities pursued novel changes in social control configurations regarding “how” and “by whom” public safety should be achieved, placing social service organizations and providers in a key position to advance and negotiate their roles and practices from the bottom-up. Theoretically, these efforts involved three interconnected shifts in institutional logics—specifically, logics of punishment and multiple approaches to care—that have long co-existed and frequently been intertwined in public safety fields. This dissertation explores the sociopolitical possibilities of carceral disruption and how multiple shifts in institutional logics co-occur, including through both top-down and bottom-up change processes. It does so through a multi-site, comparative case study of two United States cities that have taken substantial steps to transform public safety: Minneapolis, Minnesota and Austin, Texas. From June 2020-March 2022, qualitative and virtual ethnographic methodology was used—specifically, virtual observation of field-level institutional change processes and interviews of key public safety actors—to connect top-down institutional change efforts in each city with bottom-up actions by individuals on-the-ground. I explore institutional change across three empirical chapters. In Chapter Four, by comparing both cities, I show how top-down institutional change happened through multiple, simultaneous shifts in logics, which I develop into a three-part framework of “logic disentangling.” 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. Further, I illustrate the institutional change pathway through which logics shifted, showing how the transformational goals of institutional change were tempered into a new incrementalist institutional settlement between competing public safety logics. In Chapter Five, I explore how service providers conducted bottom-up institutional work in the field of public safety. I conceptualize and provide empirical evidence for five inter-related mechanisms of institutional work undertaken by service providers across both cities. These mechanisms were partly about managing boundaries with police and conflicting logics and partly about expanding and modifying logics in the organizational field. In Chapter Six, I explore how shifts in the institution of public safety involved shifts in service providers’ beliefs regarding the appropriate relationship between police and service providers, specifically how greater autonomy between the two groups engenders harm or care in comparative public safety service areas. These beliefs informed providers’ perceptions regarding the legitimacy of social service organizations and their care-based approaches to public safety, which influenced service provider-police collaborations. This dissertation proposes a model for how the mechanisms of top-down field-level institutional change correspond to bottom-up institutional work mechanisms, undergirded by beliefs relevant to the institution and its logics. I also argue that we must address the relationality between logics and their respective actors in the same organizational field to understand institutional change and carceral disruption.