"But Who Oversees the Overseers?: The Status of Prison and Jail Oversight in the United States"

The title of this post is the title of this notable new article by Michele Deitch in the American Journal of Criminal Law.  Here is part of the issue's introduction:

In 2010, I published research demonstrating that external oversight over prisons and jails was a rarity in the United States.  Ten years later, this article reveals a similar conclusion — despite the extraordinary concerns surrounding conditions of confinement and the treatment of people in custody, relatively few jurisdictions have established independent agencies tasked with scrutinizing these institutions and addressing the problems they find.  However, there have also been significant signs of change over the last decade: the national landscape for independent correctional oversight is improving, with greater awareness of this issue, more calls for the creation of oversight mechanisms, more concrete efforts to establish these entities, and the successful implementation of several new oversight bodies.

This article builds on my 2010 report to highlight those recent developments and to assess the current state of correctional oversight in the United States.  Part I describes the concept of correctional oversight and explains its goals to improve transparency and increase accountability within prisons and jails.  It goes on to outline the benefits of oversight that can accrue to diverse stakeholders, including incarcerated persons, correctional administrators, policymakers, judges, the media, and the public at large.  This section also discusses the prevalence of independent oversight bodies in other countries, and how the lack of such oversight makes the United States an anomaly on the world stage.

In Part II, I discuss America’s historical reliance on court oversight as a way to address problematic institutional conditions and how this has inhibited the development of preventive oversight mechanisms.  But as litigation has become a less reliable tool for prison reformers, and as the drawbacks of court oversight have become more obvious, advocates have begun to emphasize the need for preventing harm through routine inspections of facilities rather than waiting until conditions hit rock bottom to get involved in reform efforts.

Part III examines the growing interest in correctional oversight and discusses recent calls for the development of independent oversight mechanisms in this country.  Since 2006, there has been a series of notable highlights in the nascent oversight movement, and this section sets forth a chronology of those key events.

Part IV describes a multi-year research project conducted at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas to find, interview, and catalog all external prison and jail oversight bodies that currently exist for adult correctional facilities around the nation.  This part of the article presents and analyzes the key findings about these various oversight bodies.  In this section, I also highlight those jurisdictions that have established oversight bodies since 2010, to show the shifting landscape of correctional oversight in the United States. This section of the article also includes charts with lists of various prison and jail oversight bodies at the state and local levels.

Finally, Part V concludes with an overall assessment of the status of correctional oversight in the United States.  That assessment mixes optimism and excitement about the future of oversight with a dose of realism about the challenges ahead and a recognition that we continue to trail our peer nations when it comes to belief in the critical importance of independent oversight.  But still we must push on in our efforts to promote transparency and accountability in all places of confinement.