THE PRISON JOURNAL / June 2002Jacoby / FAILING CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTIONS THE ENDURANCE OF FAILING CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTIONS: AWORST CASE

This article presents a case study of the survival of FarviewStateHospital, Pennsylva-nia’s only maximum security correctional facility for mentally ill offenders. Begin-ning in the late 1960s, Farview came under attack by lawyers, journalists, politicians, moviemakers, and academics for treating inmates brutally and being very expensive to operate. Despite extraordinarily diverse and concerted efforts to close this institu-tion, it remained open for another 25 years. The endurance of this institution is explained through functional and interest group analysis. If such “worst case ” insti-tutions can survive, closing less defective institutions may be even more difficult. THE PROBLEM: THE SURVIVAL OF FAILING INSTITUTIONS The issue under investigation here is how institutions—particularly crimi-nal justice institutions—that fail to fulfill their purposes or become outdated manage to survive despite abundant evidence of their failure. We have become accustomed to the incapacity of the police to prevent crime, of courts to mete out justice, and of correctional institutions to rehabilitate. We explain their continued functioning despite their deficiencies in a variety of ways: The police cannot prevent crime; only the establishment of primary, informal controls can do that. The courts are far too overcrowded to devote adequate attention to any particular case. Correctional institutions cannot rehabilitate because the hope of rehabilitation is based on the incorrect assumptions of the individualized treatment model. Although police, courts, and correctional agencies do not meet our highest expectations, they survive. Only when a particular functional unit becomes overridden with injustice, corruption, brutality, and inefficiency to a degree sufficient to stimulate public outrage is its existence seriously threatened. An earlier version of this article was presented at the annual meetings of the American Soci