My primary theoretical interest is in understanding penal change explored at the micro, meso, and macro levels. I advance this effort through empirical and secondary studies of American prison history, but also of American punishment generally from the colonial period to the present and pre-modern (especially European) penal history.
Analytical, conceptual and theoretical accounts of penal change:
- A historical study of early American capital punishment and incarceration, introducing the concept of “penal layering” or how new reforms often coexist in complicated patterns with existing punishments
- A historical study exploring the difficulty in translating an idea or innovation before widespread adoption, focusing on the idea of penal incarceration across the American colonial period
- A historical study introducing the concept of “primitive professionalization,” exploring how nineteenth-century prison administrators and reformers competed over status via claims to professionalization long before the formal indicators of professional status
- A review article critically discussing the utility of “path dependence” frameworks for penal change
- A review article discussing standard theoretical accounts of penal change, introducing penal endogeneity as an explanation for penal change, and discussing the difficulties of theorizing penal change
- A study of the impact of an eighteenth-century reform authorizing convict transportation from England to America on rates of capital and corporal punishment
Analytical, conceptual and theoretical accounts of penal change grounded in organizational theory:
- A historical study exploring the pressures toward isomorphic diffusion of the early prisons
- A theoretical article introducing the concept of “legal templates” in combination with a theoretical account of isomorphic diffusion
- A review article on neo-institutional accounts of punishment
- A theoretical article taking seriously the practical consequences of placing punishment in an organizational context (“The Birth of the Penal Organization“)
- A historical study exploring the organizational difficulties facing early prisons (The Deviant Prison)
Analytic, conceptual, and theoretical accounts of prisoner behavior and their relationship to penal change:
- Introducing the concept of “friction” instead of mislabeling prisoner misbehavior as “resistance” (a theoretical article using examples from archival data)
- A historical study of the consequences of prisoners’ friction to oneself, others, and the prison
- A historical study of the structural sources of prisoners’ friction, challenging accounts describing prisoner behavior as purely agentic, and creating a theoretical framework incorporating structure and agency when explaining prisoner behavior on a continuum from friction to resistance
Ashley T. Rubin 