Title: Safety First? Policy Diffusion and State Security Policies Post 9/11

• In Event: Politics and Policy in American Federalism

Abstract

Following the September 11th terror attacks, Congress passed The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT) Act of 2001 (“The Patriot Act”). In its initial passage, these pieces of federal legislation addressed various fundamental policy areas, altering the nation’s approach to surveillance and intelligence gathering, police and law enforcement, and immigration and border security issues. Despite legal challenges to iterations of these policies, revisions, provisional sunsets, exclusions of former stipulations, and superseding legislation, their initial iterations generated permeating institutional effects on state and local governments within these policy realms. Using text analysis to compile state and local legislative and regulatory records, I examine state actions following the national passage of the Patriot Act to (1) observe whether or not this legislation had longer-term institutional influence on state carceral security policies via the process of top-down, vertical policy diffusion, and (2) denote if and how these changes undergird or undermine democratic norms.

Author

• Kanika Khanna, Cornell University