Leadership’s role in reducing jail violence and recidivism

Abstract

In May 2012, Los Angeles County Sheriff Leroy D. Baca took a bold step in leadership and created the Education-Based Incarceration (EBI) Bureau. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LASD) essentially established a school district inside “… the nation’s largest jail system” (Baca, 2010, p. 58). With approximately 20,000 inmates, nearly 8,000 men and women now receive some form of rehabilitative education across seven county jail facilities. The new EBI Bureau, led by a captain, was established to fulfill Sheriff Baca’s vision to provide education to all incarcerated men and women in Los Angeles County. EBI is a system that “is focused on deterring and mitigating crime by investing in its offenders through education and rehabilitation. … By providing substantive and intellectual education in jails, and being supportive rather than punitive in efforts to reduce crime-related behavior, the likelihood to recidivate will be lowered while success and stability in the community occurs” (Baca, 2010, p. 54). The implementation of this new system has not come without resistance. Using a system’s thinking conceptual framework, this chapter examines the leadership impact of Sheriff executive staff, the custody staff, and the inmate, as it pertains to the blending of two distinct systems – jail and school. Furthermore, the chapter explains the roles of leadership in reducing jail violence and recidivism.

Citation

Choate, B.R. and Normore, A.H. (2013), "Leadership’s role in reducing jail violence and recidivism", Collective Efficacy: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on International Leadership (Advances in Educational Administration, Vol. 20), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 163-180. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1479-3660(2013)0000020009