ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the specific explanations that criminologists have offered about why boot camps spread. Cullen and colleagues have expanded on this idea and tied it to the diffusion of boot camps. Boot camps in Windlesham's framework can be seen as just one element of a much larger conservative and punitive turn in American criminal justice policy which occurred in the 1980s and early 1990s. Policy diffusion scholarship emerged from the general diffusion of innovations Research Evidence tradition which explores how new practices, technologies, or ideas take hold and spread throughout organizations and societies. Some policy diffusion scholars have argued that, because of their larger staff and higher research budgets, states with more professional legislators might be more likely to learn of other states' policies; legislative professionalism could thus encourage policy diffusion and more conservative populations were more likely to be operating camps.
