Organizational Compliance with Court-Ordered Reform

Abstract

We present a detailed case study of administrative responses to litigated reform efforts directed at the Texas Department of Corrections over a two-decade period. We found that administrators attempted to maintain their organizational boundaries by: (1) controlling information; (2) using political connections in the broader community; (3) launching a judicial counterattack; and (4) exercising administrative prerogatives. Defiance of demands from the broader legal community was related to: (1) the organizational culture of the Texas prison system, which developed and existed in isolation not only from the federal courts but also from oversight by state officials; (2) pronouncements by the prison system's leadership that created a moral climate in which court-ordered reform could be readily defined by prison staff as illegitimate; and (3) ineffective control structures within the system that failed to respond to violations of the law by prison staff. Keeping the limitations of a single case study in mind, we close with a set of observations for addressing court-ordered organizational reform in a comparative framework.