While young adult offenders have traditionally been characterized as making a poor adjustment to institutional life, the juvenile incarcerated in an adult facility represents a potentially greater problem. This study examined adjustment after separating the young violent offenders into two groups: those who committed their crimes prior to age 17 and those who committed crimes between 17 and 21. Juvenile inmates were almost twice as likely to be problem inmates, resulting in their not working or earning good-time credit. They were also three times more likely than their slightly older counterparts to be in the most restrictive custody grades. With current legislation enabling the continued incarceration of juveniles in adult facilities, administrators should adopt strategies to manage this special population more effectively.
A number of parolees are returning to the community with programming needs that may not have been addressed during their incarceration; these unmet needs may subsequently affect their successful reintegration into the community. Although there is an increasing female parole population, there has been a paucity of research concerning female parolees. The current study examines the types of needs identified at intake from a sample of 546 female parolees. The results revealed the following. First, if a parolee was employed, had stable living arrangements, and was assessed as needing and receiving some type of drug and/or alcohol program intervention, she was less likely to fail on parole. Second, many of these women were underassessed for having needs for drug and alcohol treatment as well as employment, housing, and other assistance. This underassessment may be because of an increasing emphasis on parole supervision (i.e., custody) rather than treatment in parole agencies.
Even though parole absconders represent one of the largest groups of problem parolees, little has been written about them. Using a large sample of California parolees, the authors examine several variables for their ability to predict absconding and produce an instrument capable of classifying absconders with better than 70% accuracy.
Many pronouncements have been made in the process of site selection for new prisons. A review of the research literature on the effect of prisons on communities reveals that most of this information is unsupported by good research design. This essay presents a critique of the methodological and research design problems of prison impact studies. Various threats to validity are explored and two complementary methodologies, a single-site time series and multisite time series, are proposed for prison impact studies. Strict attention to internal-validity concerns will provide better answers to causal mechanisms and outcomes than is currently the case.
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