Accidental Humanity and Hypermasculinity in the La County Jail
0091-4169/13/10204-0965 THE JOURNAL OF CRIMINAL LAW & CRIMINOLOGY Vol. 102, No. 4 Copyright © 2012 by Northwestern University School of Law Printed in U.S.A. CRIMINAL LAW TWO MODELS OF THE PRISON: ACCIDENTAL HUMANITY AND HYPERMASCULINITY IN THE L.A. COUNTY JAIL SHARON DOLOVICH* This Article considers what can be learned about humanizing the modern American prison from studying a small and unorthodox unit inside L.A. County’s Men’s Central Jail. This unit, known as K6G, has an inmate culture that contrasts dramatically with that of the Jail’s general * Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law; Scholar-in-Residence, Center on the Administration of Criminal Law, NYU School of Law. I owe a great debt of thanks to Joe Doherty, Director of the UCLA School of Law’s Empirical Research Group, for helping me design the research project on which this Article is based and for guiding me through a lengthy IRB certification process. Thanks are also due to Jamie Binnall, Sam Bray, Ingrid Eagley, Phil Goodman, Juan Haines, Russell Korobkin, Bart Lanni, Rob Mikos, Sasha Natapoff, Cameron Saul, Joanna Schwartz, and Jed Shugerman, and to workshop participants at the University of Chicago, University of Connecticut, Emory, Harvard, Loyola, NYU, UCLA, and San Quentin for very helpful comments and conversation; to Erin Earl, Rebecca Johns, Anne Marie Morris, Brian Priestley, Michael Reiss, Frank Sabatini, Jules Torti, and the reference librarians of the UCLA School of Law Hugh & Hazel Darling Law Library for their research assistance; to the UCLA Academic Senate, UCLA Dean’s Office, Georgetown University Law Center, Harvard Law School, NYU School of Law’s Center on the Administration of Criminal Law, and the Williams Institute for generous support of this research; to Jody Freeman, for her long support and encouragement of this project; and to several officers of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, including Chief Alex Yim, Deputy Alan Shapiro, and most especially Senior Deputy Randy Bell and Deputy Bart Lanni.
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