Recent scholarship suggests disciplinary protocols and incarcerated individuals’ perceptions of procedural justice toward correctional officers may be important in influencing one’s behavior and prison order. This study provides an examination of procedural and distributive justice in prison. We surveyed a stratified random sample of 144 respondents incarcerated in Maine state prisons about their perceptions toward the disciplinary process and corrections officers to assess the relationship between such views and patterns of institutional misconduct. Findings provide partial support for the procedural justice perspective in prison. Normative perceptions (e.g., legitimacy) are positively associated with voluntary deference measures while instrumental perceptions of officer effectiveness in controlling behavior are positively associated with respondent perceived risk. These results supply insight into theory development related to voluntary deference. Similarly, these findings can inform which relationships between officers and respondents may hold the potential to promote rule compliance and prison order.

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Within the context of American jurisprudence, crime, or more precisely criminality, is assigned meaning based on philosophical understandings of human nature. These philosophical understandings of human nature are known as ontological assumptions. While ontological assumptions are inherently teleological, they are essential to the development and advancement of criminological theory. At the most basic level, criminological theory can be taken up as an articulation of a causal mechanism, which employs a set of testable premises. However, before a theory can attempt to explain the etiology of criminality, it must provide an assertion regarding the intrinsic behavioral expectation of human beings – is criminality an intrinsic behavior that must be controlled, or a learned phenomenon? While philosophy provides a medium for dialogue between these polarized assumptions, it fails to satisfy the scientific need for empirical confirmation. The notion of empirical confirmation refers to the second component of theory – testability. Testability evokes another important philosophical construct known as epistemology. In a general sense, epistemology is the philosophical foundation for scientific discourse – the epistemological orientation, which establishes criteria regarding what constitutes credible knowledge. In essence, criminology or the study of criminality is the welding of two philosophical constructs, ontology and epistemology.

The process of transitioning from prison to the community poses unique challenges for those who have been convicted of sexually based offenses. Due to the realities associated with the unique challenges facing these individuals, the community supervision process fluctuates along the correctional continuum which polarizes rehabilitative and control. The current study examines how this fluctuation relates to both the supervision process and correctional outcomes. Furthermore, the literature suggests five specific checkpoints along this continuum which are measured both qualitatively and quantitatively. The five checkpoints are Social Reintegration, Community Reentry, Status Maintenance, Statutory Compliance, and Risk Management. Overall, all five checkpoints are included in some way in the community supervision process; and analyses show significant links between the checkpoints and correctional outcomes.

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