A comparison of reformatory inmates committed directly by the court with those transferred from juvenile institutions

Abstract

PROBLEMCorrectional administrators frequently assume that boys who must be transferred from a juvenile institution t o a reformatory present histories of prolonged rebellion against authority. Presumably, these boys will continue to present serious problems both in their institutional and postrelease adjustment. Isolation of the major antecedents of such problems may provide clues to more effective treatment of their maladjustive behavior.Previous studies by Cowden(2s 3 * ' 1, Cowden and Pacht@), and Cowden, et al. (6) dealt with the role of background and personality variables as antecedents to aggressive behavior. This study focuses upon those variables most predictive of adjustment problems to determine (1) whether offenders transferred to the reformatory do present a continuing pattern of behavioral adjustment problems, and (2) to assess the relative importance of background factors in relation to transfer status as predictors of their ongoing behavioral adjustment. METHODBoys transferred from the Wisconsin Schools for Boys to the State Reformatory because of unacceptable behavior within juvenile institutions were compared with young felony offenders committed directly to the Reformatory by the court. The transfer group consisted of 57 Ss, the court-committed group of 121 Ss (later reduced to 48).These two samples of Reformatory inmates were compared on a number of background factors, prognostic indices, and measures of institutional adjustment : age at admission, race, socioeconomic status, educational level, number and seriousness of prior offenses, number of prior commitments to juvenile institutions, initial predictions of institutional and postrelease adjustment based on admission reports, institutional adjustment based on the number of misconduct reports for a &month period, and prognostic ratings of postrelease adjustment based on prerelease reports prepared for the Parole Board. RESULTSComparisons showed transfers to be significantly ( p < .001) younger when received at the Reformatory (16 years, 5 months us. 21 years, 1 month); more likely (not quite significant at the .05 level) Negro than Caucasian (38% us. 24%); with significantly ( p < .Ol) less education (9.5 grades completed us. lO.l), significantly ( p < .OOl) more prior offenses (x = 10.5 us. 6.5), and significantly ( p < .001) poorer initial prognostic ratings and more confinements to juvenile institutions (x = 2.7 us. 36).Age at admission to correctional institutions in previous studies(3, e, has proved to be a central factor in the prognosis of offenders, as younger Ss consistently demonstrate a poorer institutional and postrelease adjustment. Since the "transfer" sample was 4 years, 8 months younger than the court-committed sample, the two groups could not be matched exactly for age without a great reduction in the size of the latter sample. As a compromise, the mean ages of the two groups were aligned to within approximately one and one-half years of each other (16 years, 5 months us. 17 years, 9 months) by selective withdrawal of 78 ol...