Ryken Grattet

Research Interests

How do social control institutions contribute to the very problems they seek to manage?
Prison and parole populations in the United States have grown dramatically in the last three decades—just at the moment many predicted they would stabilize or actually decline. My work focuses specifically on the role that parole systems play in the era of “Mass Incarceration.” Returns from parole have contributed to escalating prison populations nation-wide, but especially in the largest prison and parole system in the country, California. I examine how the organization of community supervision—legally and bureaucratically—contributes to the extraordinarily high rate of parolees returning to prison in California. This work challenges conventional wisdom that individual attributes like criminal history, personal, and psychological characteristics are sufficient to understanding why some parolees wind up back behind bars.

How do local communities receive and remake law created at the “higher” levels of the legal system?

A fundamental problem of governing by the “rule of law” is that so often how a law is implemented differs from the intentions of those who designed and supported the law in the first place. In various guises, this gap between “law-on-the-books” and “law-in-action” has been recognized by sociolegal scholars since the early part of the 20th Century.  My studies of the policing of hate crime in America focus on the role of law enforcement organizations in distilling statutory understandings of hate crime, making sense of it, and, ultimately, applying the designation of hate crime to concrete incidents. My work casts light on the "law-in-between" law-on-the-books and law-in-action by showing how attributes of local enforcement agencies, as well as the communities within which they are situated, affect how law is received within local contexts.

Scholarly Publications

• Lin, Jeffrey, Ryken Grattet, and Joan Petersilia. In Press. “Justice By Other Means: Venue Sorting in Parole Revocation.” Law & Policy

• Ryken Grattet. 2011. Review Essay: Prison State: The Challenge of Mass Incarceration by Bert Useem and Anne Morrison Piehl; The Politics of Imprisonment: How the Democractic Process Shapes the Way America Punishes by Vannessa Barker; and Sunbelt Justice: Arizona and the Transformation of American Punishment by Mona Lynch.” Law & Society Review 45 (3):
• Ryken Grattet. 2011. "Societal Reactions to Deviance." Annual Review of Sociology 37: 185-204.
• Ryken Grattet, Jeffrey Lin, and Joan Petersilia. 2011. "Supervision Regimes, Risk, and Official Reactions to Parolee Deviance." Criminology 49 (2): 371-399.
• Lin, Jeffrey, Ryken Grattet, and Joan Petersilia. 2010. "'Back-end Sentencing' and Reimprisonment: Individual, Organizational, and Community Predictors of Parole Sanctioning Decisions." Criminology 48 (3): 759-795.
• Grattet, Ryken, Joan Petersilia, Jeffrey Lin, and Marlene Beckman. 2009. "Parole Violations and Revocations in California: Analysis and Suggestions for Action." Federal Probation 73(1): 2-11
• Grattet, Ryken. 2009. “The Urban Ecology of Bias Crime: A Study of Disorganized and Defended Neighborhoods.” Social Problems 56 (1):132-150.
• Grattet, Ryken and Valerie Jenness. 2008. “Transforming Symbolic Law into Organizational Action: Hate Crime Policy and Law Enforcement Practice.” Social Forces 87(1): 1-28.
• Grattet, Ryken and Valerie Jenness. 2005. “The Reconstitution of Law in Local Settings: Agency Discretion, Ambiguity, and a Surplus of Law in the Policing of Hate Crime.” Law & Society Review 39 (4): 893-941.
  

- Article Prize, American Sociological Association, Sociology of Law Section, 2007

• Jenness, Valerie and Ryken Grattet. 2005. “The Law in Between: The Effects of Organizational Perviousness on the Policing of Hate Crime,” Social Problems 52 (3): 337-359.
• Jenness, Valerie and Ryken Grattet. 2001 [2004 Paperback edition]. Making Hate a Crime: From Social Movement to Law Enforcement. New York: Russell Sage Foundation Press.
  - Award for Outstanding Scholarship. 2002. Society for the Study of Social Problems, Crime and Delinquency Section.
  - Finalist. 2002. Aaron Wildavsky Book Award for Best Policy Book in 2000-2001, Policy Studies Organization.
• Grattet, Ryken and Valerie Jenness. 2001. “Examining the Boundaries of Hate Crime Law: Disabilities and the Dilemma of Difference.” The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 91 (3): 11-50.
• Grattet, Ryken and Valerie Jenness. 2001. “The Birth and Maturation of Hate Crime Policy in the U.S..” American Behavioral Scientist 45 (4): 668-696.
• Phillips, Scott and Ryken Grattet. 2000. “Judicial Rhetoric, Meaning Making, and the Institutionalization of Hate Crime.” Law & Society Review 34: 567-606.

-    Article Prize, 2001, Law and Society Association.

-    Honorable Mention for Article Prize, 2001, American Sociological Association, Sociology of Law Section.

• Grattet, Ryken, Valerie Jenness, and Theodore Curry. 1998. “The Homogenization and Differentiation of ‘Hate Crime’ Law in the U.S., 1978-1995: An Analysis of Innovation and Diffusion in the Criminalization of Bigotry.” American Sociological Review 63: 286-307.

Policy and Public Publications

• Grattet, Ryken and Valerie Jenness. 2009. "CDCR Inmates and Parolees with Serious Mental Health Problems: Behavior, Treatment, and Management." Research Report Submitted to the California Prison Health Care Receiver. State of California.
• Grattet, Ryken, Joan Petersilia, Jeffrey Lin, and Ariel Whitworth. 2009. "Assessing Parole Violations and Revocations in California: Findings Strategies for the Future." Perspectives: The Journal of the American Probation and Parole Association 33(3): 42-47.
• Grattet, Ryken, Joan Petersilia, and Jeff Lin. 2008. Parole Violations and Revocations in California. National Institute of Justice. Final Grant Report. (http://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/224521.pdf)
  

• Grattet, Ryken, Jesse Jannetta, and Jeff Lin. 2006. Evidence-based Practices in Corrections: A Training Manual for the California Program Assessment Procedure. University of California, Irvine, Center for Evidence-based Corrections and the Office of Research, California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
• Jenness, Valerie and Ryken Grattet. 2004. “Policing Hate Crime in California,” A CPRC Policy Report. California Policy Research Center.
  - Excerpted as a CPRC Policy Brief, Vol. 16 (6), October 2004.
• Grattet, Ryken. 2004.“Making the Most of General Orders” Police Chief LXX (2, February): 63-66. (The trade magazine of the International Association of Chiefs of Police).