Concrete, steel, artificial light, complete technological automation, near-complete sensory deprivation, and total isolation - these are the basic conditions of supermaximum security prisons in the United States. "Supermax" prisoners remain alone twenty-three to twenty-four hours a day, under fluorescent lights that are never turned off. Meals arrive through a small slot in an automated cell door. Prisoners have little to no human contact for months, years, or even decades at a time, save brief interactions with correctional officers, who place hand, ankle, and waist cuffs on each prisoner before removing him from his cell. Prisoners only leave their cells four or five times per week, for showers or for brief, solitary exercise periods in "dog runs" - concrete pens with roofs at least partially open to natural light. In sum, supermax prisons across the United States detain thousands in long-term solitary confinement, under conditions of extreme sensory deprivation. They are prisons within prisons, confining the prisoners correctional administrators deem a threat to the general prison population.

Arizona opened the first supermax, in 1986, and California opened the second, in 1989. Over the subsequent ten years, almost every state, along with the federal prison system, either built a supermax or retrofitted an existing facility to create a supermax unit. This dissertation examines the birth of the supermax in Arizona and California, and the spread of the institutional innovation across the United States. The research presented here draws on three major categories of data: archival materials, including legal decisions and case files, local news reporting, and legislative records; oral history interviews with more than thirty key informants, including correctional administrators, legal professionals, architects, and former prisoners; and quantitative data maintained by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. This is the first study specifically focused on unearthing the administrative and political processes that underwrote the supermax.

The dissertation begins with an overview of the idea of solitary confinement and the term "supermax," leading to a working definition of supermaxes as institutions that are: bounded in time, administratively overseen, characterized by extremely restrictive conditions, and large in both scale of beds and durations of confinement. Chapter Two uses this definition to create a working list of supermax institutions in the United States. Chapter Three frames supermaxes as a product of mass incarceration, and introduces the core region (the Sunbelt) and core case study (California) on which the dissertation will focus. Chapters Four through Six document how and why correctional administrators decided to build California's first supermax, Pelican Bay State Prison. These chapters trace how socio-political changes in the 1970s - including structural changes to sentencing laws; race-based social organizing, both in and out of prison; and increasing judicial attention to prisons - paved the way for the supermax innovation in the 1980s. Chapter Four argues that critical power shifts between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government left a power vacuum, which correctional administrators quickly filled, in part through building supermaxes. Chapter Five describes the legislative process that nominally underwrote the supermax, and argues that California legislators ceded both planning and moral authority to state correctional administrators. Chapter Six describes the processes of architectural design and technological innovation that created the physical supermaxes themselves.

Chapters Seven though Nine explore the implications of the administrative origins of the supermax. These chapters document how the institution has never had a clearly articulated purpose (Chapter Seven), and how it has been operated in contradiction to its articulated goals (Chapters Eight and Nine). Chapter Eight shows that supermaxes have detained prisoners for decades longer than intended, and have disproportionately impacted minority prisoners. Chapter Nine argues that courts have largely deferred to correctional administrators' claims about the necessity of the supermax, even though little empirical evidence exists to support these claims. Together, these chapters demonstrate that correctional bureaucrats not only made the initial supermax design decisions in California, but also progressively concentrated their power over supermax prisoners through hyper-automated buildings and internal prison classification procedures.

Chapter Ten further explores the relationship between supermaxes and the federal judiciary, arguing that federal court decisions setting minimum conditions and standards for prisons in the 1970s and 1980s shaped the supermax innovation that followed. The conformity of supermaxes to these minimum constitutional standards has rendered the institutions resistant to legal challenges. The Conclusion discusses the implications of recent supermax-related trends, including prisoner protests about conditions of confinement, and state-based movements to reduce supermax populations. In sum, because supermaxes manifest, both physically and legally, the outer limits of non-death penalty punishment policy, they are critical for understanding both U.S. prison expansion, and the impacts of U.S. tough-on-crime policies.

This is a first-ever longitudinal study of Taiwan’s homicide cases and the practice of Taiwan’s criminal justice system. For portraying the practice of criminal justice system, this study adopts longitudinal research method to study a cohort of homicide cases known to police department of Taipei City, the capital of Taiwan, from 2006 to 2012, and to follow the cohort of sample cases throughout the legal system.

This study focuses on four aspects. First, to present homicide case mortality as the cases went through the legal system, from police investigation, prosecution, to court adjudication and punishment. The attempt is to show the picture of how the legal system may exclude cases from the system by the end of each phase and the reasons of the exclusion. Second, this study discovers how legal agencies, mainly police, prosecutor, and judge, may dispose of homicide cases before them by two indexes: time and energy. This part provides us an understanding of what kinds of homicide practically cost more resources of Taiwan’s legal system, and this study tries to figure out why it was like this. Third, this study compares the decisions of each legal agency to see how similar or different their decisions of the same cases may be, and analyzes the reasons behind. Last but not least, this study attempts to discover how, if any, the decision of one legal agency in homicide cases may have influence on those of other agencies.

By incorporating all the dimensions above, the true mission of this study is to reveal how Taiwan’s criminal procedure practically works thoroughly, from investigation, prosecution, adjudication, to punishment. By comparing how major and minor homicide cases were processed by the system, we will learn representative empirical features of Taiwan’s criminal justice system and criminal procedure.

This dissertation examines how crime victims' pleas for recognition by the criminal justice system have been answered through the formation of county victim-witness agencies (VWAs) in California. It tells the story of "victim advocacy" as an idea, a field, and an institutional development in California. In California as elsewhere in the United States, over its forty-year history victim advocacy and VWAs came to embody two often competing visions of how the state should respond to individual crime victims: one which seeks to enhance victims' participation in criminal trials, including the creation of special "rights" for victims, and one which seeks to provide recovery services to victims apart from the criminal process. Whether VWAs have managed to pursue these two very different agendas with equal force, or alternatively whether one is typically sought at the expense of the other, has become the basis of speculation, debate, and criticism among criminal justice scholars. Responding to claims that a VWA's institutional host encourages one agenda over the other, especially critiques that VWAs placed within District Attorney's offices have largely succumbed to prosecutorial and/or punitive agendas, this dissertation finds only mild variation in what California's diverse set of fifty-eight VWAs do. It finds that welfarism - helping victims to recover emotionally, physically, and financially from victimization - is the most consistent feature of victim advocacy in California, and that VWAs have not transformed the way victims participate in criminal trials. While the term "victim advocacy" embodied the hope that victims might gain an independent voice in criminal proceedings through "rights", the term "victim assistance" better describes the welfarist tasks that California's VWAs emphasize.

This dissertation offers three studies on criminal behavior and criminal risk forecasting. The first two chapters present theoretical models and empirical evidence on the nature and motives of criminal behavior among high risk and high rate offenders and the implications these models have for criminal justice policy. The third chapter is a study of judicial and administrative decision-making with regard to assessments of crime and violence risk.

Chapter 1 gives an account of the 1970s and 80s rise and dominance of the policy of incapacitation through incarceration. The chapter describes the deterministic model of criminal behavior underpinning the theory and policy of incapacitation, and the policy implications of recent re-conceptualizations that view criminal behavior much more like other human choices - a question of contingencies and opportunities. The chapter focuses on Franklin Zimring's (2011) account of the New York City crime decline as evidence against the notion that criminal propensities are fixed and predictable over periods of years. Rather, it appears, relatively modest and superficial changes in circumstances and environmental features can lead to vastly different rates of criminal engagement.

The second chapter turns to a particular aspect of the New York City crime decline and the question of future criminal risk prediction. Specifically, the chapter examines the more than two decade drop in the rate of prison return for a new felony among New York City offenders. The chapter assesses whether the declining prison return rate is indeed an indicator of significant behavior change, or is a reflection of changes in criminal justice system actor practices. Further, to the extent that the statistics are an indicator of behavior change, the chapter evaluates whether this can interpreted as the result of the changing New York City crime environment over the last two and a half decades, or is better understood as a reflection of changes in the individual criminal propensities of those leaving prison over this period. To tease apart these competing accounts, the chapter analyzes a unique dataset involving individual records of four cohorts of prisoners from New York City released in the years 1990, 1995, 2000, and 2008. The analysis suggests a mixed picture - all three accounts are at work.

Finally, the third chapter of the dissertation turns from models of criminal behavior and criminal decision-making, to judges and administrator decisions regarding criminal risk. The chapter uses machine-learning procedures for prediction and causal estimation to analyze release decisions in California Parole hearings for inmates serving life sentences with the possibility of parole. Using an original dataset generated from all parole suitability hearings conducted since 2011 (over 8,000 transcripts), the chapter offers an empirical analysis of the current system, evaluating the rationality, uniformity, and defensibility of the criteria and decision-making applied to each claim for release. Finally, using the parole analysis as proof of concept, the chapter considers the promises and pitfalls of algorithmic assisted decision-making in the criminal justice system.

In 1994, Congress passed 42 U.S.C. §14141, a statute authorizing the United States Attorney General to seek equitable relief against local and state police agencies that are engaged in a pattern or practice of unconstitutional misconduct. Although police departments in some of the nation's largest cities have now undergone this sort of structural reform litigation, there has been little empirical research on the topic. Drawing on original interviews, court documents, statistical data, and media reports, this dissertation describes the federal government's use of structural reform litigation in American police departments and theorizes on its effectiveness. It shows that, under the right circumstances, structural reform litigation is uniquely effective at combating misconduct in police departments. It forces local municipalities to prioritize investments into police misconduct regulations. It utilizes external monitoring to ensure that frontline officers substantively comply with top-down mandates. And it provides police executives with legal cover to implement wide-ranging reforms aimed at curbing misconduct. Although expensive, structural reform litigation may ultimately pay for itself through reducing a police department's civil liability.

But structural reform litigation is far from a perfect regulatory mechanism. Successful organizational reform requires continual support from municipal leaders, dedication by executives within the targeted agency, and buy-in by frontline officers. This suggests that structural reform litigation alone is insufficient to transform a law enforcement agency. The financial burden of structural reform litigation falls on local police agencies over a relatively short period of time. Additional questions remain about whether targeted agencies will sustain reforms after federal intervention ends and about whether this type of federal intervention makes officers less aggressive. This dissertation concludes by showing how the lessons from structural reform litigation can inform future regulations of law enforcement.

We compare homicide rates in two quite similar cities with vastly different execution risks. Singapore had an execution rate close to 1 per million per year until an explosive twentyfold increase in 1994-95 and 96 to a level that we show was probably the highest in the world. Then over the next 11 years, Singapore executions dropped by about 95%. Hong Kong, by contrast, has no executions all during the last generation and abolished capital punishment in 1993. Homicide levels and trends are remarkably similar in these two cities over the 35 years after 1973, with neither the surge in Singapore executions nor the more recent steep drop producing any differential impact. By comparing two closely matched places with huge contrasts in actual execution but no differences in homicide trends, we have generated a unique test of the exuberant claims of deterrence that have been produced over the past decade in the U.S.