Showing papers on "Prison published in 2003"

Transitions from Prison to Community: Understanding Individual Pathways

Abstract: ▪ Abstract In 2002, over 600,000 individuals left state and federal prisons, four times as many as were released in 1975. However, according to a national study, within 3 years, almost 7 in 10 will have been rearrested and half will be back in prison, either for a new crime or for violating conditions of their release. Clearly, an individual's transition from prison back into a home and into a community is difficult, and avoiding crime can be the least of his or her problems. Understanding these pathways and the reasons for and the dimensions of an individual's success or failure is the focus of recent scholarly attention to the problem of “prisoner reentry,” the process of leaving prison and returning to free society. However, most of the existing research on prisoners' lives after release focuses solely on recidivism and ignores the reality that recidivism is directly affected by postprison reintegration and adjustment, which, in turn, depends on four sets of factors: personal and situational characteri...

Harsh Justice: Criminal Punishment and the Widening Divide Between America and Europe

Abstract: Why is American punishment so cruel? While in continental Europe great efforts are made to guarantee that prisoners are treated humanely, in America sentences have gotten longer and rehabilitation programs have fallen by the wayside. Western Europe attempts to prepare its criminals for life after prison, whereas many American prisons today leave their inhabitants reduced and debased. In the last quarter of a century, Europe has worked to ensure that the baser human inclination toward vengeance is not reflected by state policy, yet America has shown a systemic drive toward ever increasing levels of harshness in its criminal policies. Why is America so short on mercy? In this deeply researched, comparative work, James Q. Whitman reaches back to the 17th and 18th centuries to trace how and why American and European practices came to diverge. Eschewing the usual historical imprisonment narratives, Whitman focuses instead on intriguing differences in the development of punishment in the age of Western democracy. European traditions of social hierarchy and state power, so consciously rejected by the American colonies, nevertheless supported a more merciful and dignified treatment of offenders. The hierarchical class system on the continent kept alive a tradition of less-degrading "high-status" punishments that eventually became applied across the board in Europe. The distinctly American, draconian regime, on the other hand, grows, Whitman argues, out of America's longstanding distrust of state power and its peculiar, broad-brush sense of egalitarianism. Low-status punishments were evenly meted out to all offenders, regardless of class or standing. America's unrelentingly harsh treatment of trangressors-this "equal opportunity degradation"- is, in a very real sense, the dark side of the nation's much vaunted individualism. A sobering look at the growing rift between the United States and Europe, Harsh Justice exposes the deep cultural roots of America's degrading punishment practices.

Ballot Manipulation and the "Menace of Negro Domination": Racial Threat and Felon Disenfranchisement in the United States, 1850-2002

Abstract: Criminal offenders in the United States typically forfeit voting rights as a collateral consequence of their felony convictions. This article analyzes the origins and development of these state felon disenfranchisement provisions. Because these laws tend to dilute the voting strength of racial minorities, we build on theories of group threat to test whether racial threat influenced their passage. Many felon voting bans were passed in the late 1860s and 1870s, when implementation of the Fifteenth Amendment and its extension of voting rights to African‐Americans were ardently contested. We find that large nonwhite prison populations increase the odds of passing restrictive laws, and, further, that prison and state racial composition may be linked to the adoption of reenfranchisement reforms. These findings are important for understanding restrictions on the civil rights of citizens convicted of crime and, more generally, the role of racial conflict in American political development.

Prison Conditions, Capital Punishment, and Deterrence

Abstract: Previous research has attempted to identify a deterrent effect of capital punishment. We argue that the quality of life in prison is likely to have a greater impact on criminal behavior than the death penalty. Using state-level panel data covering the period 1950-90, we demonstrate that the death rate among prisoners (the best available proxy for prison conditions) is negatively correlated with crime rates, consistent with deterrence. This finding is shown to be quite robust. In contrast, there is little systematic evidence that the execution rate influences crime rates in this time period.

Coercive mobility and crime: A preliminary examination of concentrated incarceration and social disorganization

Abstract: This article explores how incarceration affects crime rates at the neighborhood level. Incarceration is analyzed as a form of residential mobility that may damage local network structures and undermine informal control. Geocoded data are combined with census data, data on incarceration convictions and releases, and crime data for Tallahassee, Florida. The results show a positive relationship between the rate of releases one year and the community's crime rates the following year. They also show that low rates of admissions to prison have an uncertain impact on crime rates, moderate rates reduce crime, and higher rates increase crime. Implications for criminal justice policies are discussed.

Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA

Abstract: This is a detailed history and analysis of the IRA from the dramatic events of the Easter Rising in 1916 to the peace process. In it he examines the guerrilla war of 1919-1921, the partitioning of Ireland in the 1920s and the Irish Civil War of 1922-23. Here, too, are the IRA campaigns in Northern Ireland and Britain during the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Richard English, explains how the Provisionals were born out of the turbulence generated by the 1960s civil rights movement. He examines: the escalating violence; the split in the IRA that produced the Provisionals; the introduction of internment in 1971; and the tragedy of Bloody Sunday in 1972. He then details the prison war over political status, culminating in the hunger strikes of the early 1980s, moves on to describe the Provisionals' subsequent emergence as a more commitedly political force, and concludes with the peace process.

Aging Prisoners: Crisis In American Corrections

Abstract: Introduction The Demographic Transition Purpose and Focus Book Organization References Studying Older Offenders Old Age and Crime Explaining Crime in Old Age Health Concerns of Aging Inmates Adjustment to Prison Life Housing and Programming for Aging Inmates Older Women in Prison Responding to Aging Offenders Index

The mark of a criminal record

Abstract: Over the past three decades, the number of prison inmates has increased by more than 500 percent, leaving the United States the country with the highest incarceration rate in the world. With over two million individuals currently incarcerated, and over half a million prisoners released each year, the large and growing numbers of men being processed through the criminal justice system raises important questions about the consequences of this massive institutional intervention. This paper focuses on the consequences of incarceration for the employment outcomes of black and white job seekers. The manuscript is comprised of two studies: the first, a large-scale experimental audit of employers in Milwaukee, used matched pairs of young men to apply for real entry-level jobs to measure the extent to which employers use information about criminal histories and race to screen out otherwise qualified applicants. Indeed, the results of the audit study provide clear evidence for the dramatic impact of both a criminal record and race on employment opportunities: Ex-offenders are one-half to one-third as likely to receive initial consideration from employers relative to equivalent applicants without criminal records. Perhaps most striking, the results show that even blacks without a criminal record fare no better-and perhaps worse-than do whites with criminal records.The second study, a telephone survey of these same employers, gathered self-reported information about the considerations and concerns of employers in hiring entry-level workers, with a specific focus on employers' reactions to applicants with criminal backgrounds. By linking results from the audit study to those of the employer survey, I find that employers' self-reports vastly understate the barriers faced by both blacks and ex-offenders seeking entry-level employment. Though employer surveys can tell us a great deal of useful information about the relative preferences of employers, extreme caution should be used in generalizing these results to estimates of actual behavior. The findings of this project reveal an important, and much under-recognized, mechanism of stratification. A criminal record presents a major barrier to employment, with important implications for racial disparities.

In The Tube At San Quentin The “Secondary Prisonization” of Women Visiting Inmates

Abstract: Through the imprisonment of their kin and kith, mass incarceration brings millions of women—especially poor women of color—into contact with the criminal justice system. These women experience restricted rights, diminished resources, social marginalization, and other consequences of penal confinement, even though they are legally innocent and reside outside the prison’s boundaries. This article draws on field observations in the visitor waiting area at California’s San Quentin State Prison and interviews with fifty women whose partners are incarcerated to illuminate one facet of the regulation and distortion of women’s lives that occurs due to the detainment of their family members, lovers, and friends behind bars: the experience of visiting an inmate in a correctional facility. An extension of Sykes’s classic analysis of the “pains of imprisonment” to the experiences of prison visitors suggests that women experience a form of “secondary prisonization” through their sustained contact with the correctional...

Influence of environmental factors on mental health within prisons: focus group study

Abstract: Objective To increase understanding of how the prison environment influences the mental health of prisoners and prison staff. Design Qualitative study with focus groups. Setting A local prison in southern England. Participants Prisoners and prison staff. Results Prisoners reported that long periods of isolation with little mental stimulus contributed to poor mental health and led to intense feelings of anger, frustration, and anxiety. Prisoners said they misused drugs to relieve the long hours of tedium. Most focus groups identified negative relationships between staff and prisoners as an important issue affecting stress levels of staff and prisoners. Staff groups described a “circle of stress,” whereby the prison culture, organisation, and staff shortages caused high staff stress levels, resulting in staff sickness, which in turn caused greater stress for remaining staff. Staff shortages also affected prisoners, who would be locked up for longer periods of time, the ensuing frustration would then be released on staff, aggravating the situation still further. Insufficient staff also affected control and monitoring of bullying and reduced the amount of time in which prisoners were able to maintain contact with their families. Conclusions Greater consideration should be given to understanding the wider environmental and organisational factors that contribute to poor mental health in prisons. This information can be used to inform prison policy makers and managers, and the primary care trusts who are beginning to work in partnership with prisons to improve the mental health of prisoners.

Women's Imprisonment

Abstract: Incarceration of women in the United States is at a historic high, but understanding of women's experiences in prison, their responses to treatment, their lives after prison, and how changing prison regimes have affected these things remains limited. Individual attributes, preprison experiences, and prison conditions are associated with how women respond to incarceration, but assessments of their joint and conditional influences are lacking. Needs assessments abound, but systematic evaluations of interventions based on these assessments are rare, as are studies of the long-term consequences of imprisonment. Understanding of ways women negotiate power and construct their lives in prison is greater than in the past; new theoretical frameworks have provided important insights, but fundamental questions remain unanswered.

Shame, Guilt, and Violence

Abstract: LJuring the past 35 years I have used prisons and prison mental hospitals as "laboratories" in which to investigate the causes and prevention of the various forms of violence and the relationships between these forms and to what I will call (with a nod to William James) "the varieties of moral experience." In the course of that work, I have been struck by the frequency with which I received the same answer when I asked prisoners, or mental patients, why they assaulted or even killed someone. Time after time, they would reply "because he disrespected me" or "he disrespected my visitor [or wife, mother, sister, girl-friend, daughter, etc.]." In fact, they used that phrase so often that they abbreviated it into the slang phrase, "He dis'ed me." Whenever people use a word so often that they abbreviate it, it is clearly central to their moral and emotional vocabulary. But even when they did not abbreviate it, references to the desire for respect as the motive for violence kept recurring. For example, I used to think that people committed armed robberies in order to get money; and indeed, that is the superficial explanation that they would often prefer to give, to themselves and to us. But when I actually sat down and spoke at length with men who had repeatedly committed such crimes, I would start to hear comments like "I never got so much respect before in my life as I did when I pointed a gun at some dude's face." On one occasion, the officers in a prison had become involved in a running battle with a prisoner in which he would assault them and they would punish him. The more they punished him the more violent he became, and the more violent he became the more they punished him. They placed him in solitary confine-

Male Prisoners and HIV Prevention: A Call for Action Ignored

Abstract: US prison inmates are disproportionately indigent young men of color. These individuals are severely affected by HIV/AIDS, largely owing to the high-risk behavior that they engage in prior to incarceration. Researchers and practitioners have issued a call for the importance of offering HIV prevention services in prison settings. However, this call has largely been ignored. In this article, we outline reasons why these recommendations have been largely ignored, discuss innovative HIV prevention programs that are currently being implemented in prison settings, and offer recommendations for securing support for HIV prevention services in correctional settings.

Employment Barriers Facing Ex-Offenders

Abstract: The Reentry Roundtable entitled, The Employment Dimensions of Prisoner Reentry: Understanding the Nexus between Prisoner Reentry and Work, was held on May 19-20, 2003 in New York City. The Roundtable focused on several aspects of the employment-reentry link, including the employment profile of the prison population; the work experience in prison; applicable lessons from welfare to work; the employment barriers ex-offenders face; and the potential linkages between correctional systems, intervention programs, and private employers. The meeting aimed to identify policy and research opportunities geared to improving the employment prospects, and thereby the chances of successful reintegration, for hundred of thousands of people leaving prison each year. This paper discusses the barrier offenders face when returning to the work force, examining both the characteristics and attitudes of ex-offenders and employers.

At Work in the Iron Cage: The Prison as Gendered Organization

Abstract: Acknowledgments 1 Engendering the Prison 2 Penology in America: Men's and Women's Prisons as Gendered Projects 3 From Turkey to Of?cer: Prison Work in Historical Perspective 4 Paths to Prison 5 Work with Inmates 6 The Rest of the Job: Coworkers, Supervisors, and Satisfaction 7 Conclusion Methodological Appendix Notes References Index About the Author

Crack and the Political Economy of Social Suffering

Abstract: A comparison of cocaine, crack and heroin epidemics documented through participant-observation methods in the United States and Canada reveals dramatically distinct patterns of abuse across differentially vulnerable population groups. Political economic and cultural forces, rather than pharmacology shape the trajectory of drug epidemics. The de facto apartheid of the U.S. inner city and its associated prison industrial complex spawned the massive epidemic of crack smoking in the late 1980s and early 1990s. A contradictory Canadian public policy of police repression combined with centralized, paternalistic social services explains that country's particularly destructive intravenous cocaine epidemic, particularly among its aboriginal and francophone urbanized populations. The United States suffers from the iatrogenic consequences of its failed war on drugs. Heroin and cocaine have never been purer or cheaper despite the massive investment of U.S. public resources in repression at great humanitarian cost.

Changes in criminal thinking and identity in novice and experienced inmates: prisonization revisited

Abstract: Criminal thinking and identity were assessed in 55 federal prison inmates with no prior prison experience (novice inmates) and 93 inmates with at least one prior adult incarceration and 5 or more years in prison (experienced inmates). Changes on the Self-Assertion/Deception scale of the Psychological Inventory of Criminal Thinking Syles (PICTS) and Centrality subscale of the Social Identity as a Criminal(SIC) questionnaire were congruent with the prisonization hypothesis and a priori predictions that measures of criminal thinking and identity would rise in novice inmates between initial assessment and follow-up but would remain stable in experienced inmates. On the other hand, experienced inmates recorded significant gains on the In-Group Affect subscale of the SIC. Incarceration, it would seem, may promote prisonization in both novice and experienced inmates.

A History of Prison Inmate-Animal Interaction Programs

Abstract: Interest is growing in establishing animal-facilitated programs in prisons. Although food animals have been maintained by prisons for years, few have looked at the benefits inmates derive from working with animals. Recently, prisons have started dog and horse training programs. Preliminary evidence indicates that inmates benefit, learning life-enhancing skills and lowering the recidivism rates. Shelter dogs and wild horses trained by the prisoners help people with physical and emotional needs. State and federal funds are needed to further study the benefits derived for prisoners, animals, and society.

Embodied Surveillance And The Gendering Of Punishment

Abstract: This ethnography explores the enactment of “get tough” politics in a state prison for women and considers whether the implementation of seemingly gender-neutral programs and policies implies that w...

The mental health of prisoners

Abstract: Mental health problems are the most significant cause of morbidity in prisons. Over 90% of prisoners have a mental disorder. The prison environment and the rules and regimes governing daily life inside prison can be seriously detrimental to mental health. Prisoners have received very poor health care and, until recently, the National Health Service (NHS) had no obligations to service this group, which was the Home Office's responsibility. The NHS is expected to take responsibility eventually, following a new health partnership with the Prison Service. NHS psychiatrists will have to be much more active in the development and delivery of health care to prisoners who now have the right to equal health care. There are positive developments but concerted and determined action is required to bring prison health care up to acceptable standards.

Criminal Careers Behind Bars

Abstract: In the criminal career literature, prison is usually viewed as an interruption of offending. Little research has applied the criminal career perspective to misconduct committed by prisoners. The current study used official data from a probability sample of 1,005 inmates from the southwestern United States to examine offending careers during incarceration. Descriptive and negative binomial regression analyses produced findings that suggest both similarities and dissimilarities between conventional and prison criminal careers. The incidence and prevalence of crime were inversely related to its seriousness but the magnitude of crime was higher in prison. One-third of inmates were never contacted for a prison violation and 74% were never contacted for a serious/violent violation. On the other hand, 40% of inmates were chronic or extreme career offenders even while incarcerated. A small cadre of inmates accounted for 100% of the murders, 75% of the rapes, 80% of the arsons, and 50% of the aggravated assaults occurring behind bars. Finally, prior criminality was the best predictor of prison offending, which is supportive of the importation model. While a significant number of inmates fully comply with prison rules, an even larger percentage of inmates continue to commit an array of crimes and rule violations despite the efforts of prison officials. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Prison violence : the dynamics of conflict, fear and power

Abstract: 1 Introduction and overview 2 Methods and key concepts 3 Victimization and bullying 4 Fear and vulnerability 5 The escalation of conflicts in prison 6 Power contests 7 Pathways to safety Appendix 1 Statistical tables Appendix 2 Case studies - Index

Integrating substance abuse treatment and criminal justice supervision.

Abstract: The drug abuse treatment and criminal justice systems in this country deal with many of the same individuals. Approximately two-thirds of clients in long-term residential drug abuse treatment, one-half of clients in outpatient drug abuse treatment, and one-quarter of clients in methadone maintenance treatment are currently awaiting a criminal trial or sentencing, have been sentenced to community supervision on probation, or were conditionally released from prison on parole (Craddock et al., 1997). Conversely, 60 to 80 percent of prison and jail inmates, parolees, probationers, and arrestees were under the influence of drugs or alcohol during the commission of their offense, committed the offense to support a drug addiction, were charged with a drug- or alcohol-related crime, or are regular substance users (Belenko and Peugh, 1998). The co-occurrence of drug abuse and crime is not simply an artifact of criminalizing drug possession. Drug use significantly increases the likelihood that an individual will engage in serious criminal conduct. More than 50 percent of violent crimes, including domestic violence, 60 to 80 percent of child abuse and neglect cases, 50 to 70 percent of theft and property crimes, and 75 percent of drug dealing or manufacturing offenses involve drug use on the part of the perpetrator—and sometimes the victim as well (e.g., Belenko and Peugh, 1998; National Institute of Justice, 1999). Sustained abstinence from narcotics is associated with a 40- to 75-percent reduction in crime (e.g., Harrell and Roman, 2001). In dealing with drug abusers who are criminal justice offenders, many clinicians and service providers support a public health perspective, contending that clients are best served through a focus on treatment, with only minimal involvement of the criminal justice system. They sometimes find themselves at odds with public safety proponents who say that criminal offenders require constant supervision to succeed. Both views are valid, but neither is adequate in itself. Research has shown that neither the pure public safety nor an exclusively public health approach to the problem works fully; instead, it supports an integrated approach that has very specific implications for best practices (see Marlowe, 2002, for review). This article briefly reviews results obtained from one-dimensional public safety and public health strategies and presents promising findings from integrated public health-public safety programs. Finally, the implications for best treatment practices and client-program matching are discussed.

The effect of supermaximum security prisons on aggregate levels of institutional violence

Abstract: Supermax prisons have been advanced as means of controlling the “worst of the worst” and making prisons safer places to live and work. This research examined the effect of supermaxes on aggregate levels of violence in three prison systems using a multiple interrupted time series design. No support was found for the hypothesis that supermaxes reduce levels of inmate-on-inmate violence. Mixed support was found for the hypothesis that supermax increases staff safety: the implementation of a supermax had no effect on levels of inrnate-on-staff assaults in Minnesota, temporarily increased staff injuries in Arizona, and reduced assaults against staff in Illinois.

Characteristics of Prison Sexual Assault Targets in Male Oklahoma Correctional Facilities

Abstract: Research on male inmate sexual assault has been quite limited in correctional literature. Even fewer of these studies have focused specifically on the characteristics of sexual assault targets. Therefore, data gathered from August 1998 to May 1999 via face-to-face interviews with 174 inmates in three male Oklahoma correctional facilities were drawn on to examine various demographic and organizational characteristics of prison sexual targets. Respondents were asked a series of questions regarding their vulnerability to threatened and/or completed forced sexual assault encounters with other inmates. Roughly 14% of the inmates reported that they had been sexually targeted by other inmates.

The Two Western Cultures of Privacy: Dignity versus Liberty

Abstract: Privacy advocates often like to claim that all modern societies feel the same intuitive need to protect privacy. Yet it is clear that intuitive sensibilities about privacy differ from society to society, even as between the closely kindred societies of the United States and continental Europe. Some of the differences involve questions of everyday behavior, such as whether or not one may appear nude in public. But many involve the law. In fact, we are in the midst of major legal conflicts between the countries on either side of the Atlantic - conflicts over questions like the protection of consumer data, the use of discovery in civil procedure, the public exposure of criminal offenders, and more. Clearly the idea that there are universal human sensibilities about privacy, which ought to serve as the basis of a universal law of the protection of privacy, cannot be right. This article explores these conflicts, trying to show that European privacy norms are founded on European ideas of personal honor. Continental privacy, like continental sexual harassment law, prison law, and many other bodies of law, aims to protect the personal honor of ordinary Europeans. American law takes a very different approach, protecting primarily a liberty interest. These are not differences that we can understand unless we abandon the approach taken by most privacy advocates, since they have little to do with the supposedly universal intuitive needs of personhood. Instead, they are differences that reflect the contrasting political and social ideals of American and continental law. Indeed, we should broadly reject intuitionism in our legal scholarship, focusing instead on social and political ideals.

Reducing Aboriginal Over‐representation in Prison

Abstract: The Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody attributed the high rate of Aboriginal deaths in custody to the over-representation of Aboriginal people in prison. Most analyses of this over-representation focus on the issue of systemic bias in policing, the law or the operation of the criminal justice system. The present article contends that, while discriminatory treatment of Aboriginal people by police and the court system is an historical fact, the leading current cause of Aboriginal over-representation in prison is not systemic bias but high rates of Aboriginal involvement in serious crime. We argue that efforts to reduce Aboriginal imprisonment rates through policing or criminal justice system policy have failed and will continue to fail until they succeed in reducing crime in Aboriginal communities. Future efforts to bring down Aboriginal imprisonment rates should focus on this issue.

Is In-Prison Treatment Enough? A Cost-Effectiveness Analysis of Prison-Based Treatment and Aftercare Services for Substance-Abusing Offenders

Abstract: This study performed a cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) of the Amity in-prison Therapeutic Community (TC) and Vista aftercare programs for criminal offenders in California. For the average treatment participant, the cost of treatment was $4,112, which led to approximately fifty-one fewer days incarcerated (36% less) than the average individual in the control group. This implies that, for the average offender, treatment reduced recidivism at a cost of $80 per incarceration day. For participants who received both in-prison treatment and aftercare services, an additional day of incarceration was avoided at a cost of $51 per day relative to those that received in-prison treatment only.