Browsing by Subject "Oversight"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Locked Out, Looking In: How Correctional Oversight Agencies are Adapting During the COVID Crisis
    (2020) Deitch, Michele; Bucknall, William
    The COVID pandemic is creating significant challenges for independent correctional oversight bodies that typically rely on physical access to prisons and jails in order to assess conditions of confinement and protect the safety of incarcerated people. And yet there has never been a greater need for increased transparency of prisons and jails, since COVID has created such serious risks for people in custody. This report highlights the creative strategies that oversight bodies have been using to gather information about what is happening behind bars, even when their access to prisons and jails is limited or restricted. The report is intended to serve as a resource document for independent correctional oversight bodies and other organizations that want to increase the transparency and accountability of prisons and jails.
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    The Pandemic Gender Gap Behind Bars: Meeting the Needs of Women in Custody During COVID-19 and Planning for the Future
    (2021-11) Welch, Alycia; Deitch, Michele
    This report examines the distinct harms that women in custody experience during incarceration and highlights the ways in which correctional agencies’ COVID-19 restrictions have been exacerbating those harms. Even before the pandemic, women were overlooked in correctional facilities that were not designed for them and that are not administered with them in mind. The vast majority of incarcerated women have experienced trauma, have unaddressed behavioral and physical health challenges, are single mothers, and are from low-income communities of color. These factors make them especially vulnerable to the impact of measures implemented by prisons and jails to mitigate the spread of COVID-19, such as suspension of visitation and programming, restrictions on volunteers entering the facility, lockdowns, and the use of medical isolation. Drawing on research about best practices for working with incarcerated women, the report recommends a set of gender-responsive approaches to COVID precautions in corrections facilities that would simultaneously strengthen public health and improve outcomes for women, their families, and communities.
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    Squaring the circle : security, accountability and Congress
    (2017-05-08) Lovett, Bradford Wade; Tulis, Jeffrey; Theriault, Sean
    This analysis considers the security-accountability paradox: in a democracy, how can the People consent to what they cannot see? Congress is the branch of government most concerned with democratic representation and is directed by Article I to give a public accounting of expenditures from time to time. However, when it comes to national security and the intelligence community (IC), Congress has abdicated this responsibility and fails to use tools such as hearings to exercise meaningful oversight. This analysis lays out qualitative standards for adjudicating between responsible legislative delegation and irresponsible legislative abdication. It finds that in routinizing unvouchered funds through the CIA Act of 1949, Congress systematized abdication of budgetary control over the IC. Using data from the Comparative Agendas Project, this study finds that, since the CIA Act, Congress has failed to adequately compensate for its initial abdication through meaningful use of congressional IC hearings. Rather, Congress continues routinized abdication at the expense of accountability to the public.