Correlates of Institutional Misconduct Among State Prisoners

Abstract

A s with participation in illegitimate activities in the larger society, involvement in rule infractions within prisons is not normally distributed among prisoners. Rather, a small segment of the inmate population is disproportionately represented in official records of disciplinary activity. I n this research, factors associated with differential levels of involvement in prison disciplinary infractions were examined.The findings indicate that the inmate's age at commitment, history of drug use, current offense (particularly homicide/ nonhomicide categories), and the type of sentence that the inmate served were significantly related to high-rate infraction status. For one subgroup of the inmate population, race was also significantly related to infraction-rate status. However, these variables are not sufficiently predictive of institutional misconduct tojustify their use as classification factors. The implications of the findings for the study of social control mechanisms in prisons are discussed.The prisoner's conduct record within the institution has traditionally been viewed as an indicator of adjustment or maladjustment to the prison situation (Wolf, Frienek, and Schaffer, 1966). Moreover, the disciplinary infraction record has been identified by some observers as a predictor of postrelease recidivism risk.Both of these premises have been questioned in recent research (see O'Leary and Glaser, 1972;Lipton et al., 1975; Gottfredson and Adams, AUTHORS NOTE: Z would like to thank Michael Gottfredson, John L a d , and an anonymous reviewer for their comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Juvenile sex offenders and institutional misconduct: the role of thought psychopathology

“…This was done because of a previously reported relationship between seriousness of index offence and inmate misconduct (cf. Flanagan, 1983;Wooldredge, 1991;DeLisi et al, 2004). The offences ranged from murder or manslaughter (30 detainees), robbery or carjacking (184 detainees), attempted murder (20 detainees), and aggravated assault (113 detainees) down to technical violations of probation (see also Haapanen and Steiner, 2006).…”

Human-Animal Interaction in a Prison Setting: Impact on Criminal Behavior, Treatment Progress, and Social Skills

“…However, it is doubtful the differences in age can discount the present results, as there is no empirical evidence connecting younger inmates with improvements in these measures. In fact, studies specific to criminal infractions have found that younger inmates incur more infractions than older inmates (Faily, Roundtree, & Miller, 1980;Flanagan, 1983). Nonetheless, selection bias is a potential confound, which should be addressed in future research.…”

The Effect of Drug Treatment on Inmate Misconduct in Federal Prisons

“…Most of these other factors are from cross-sectional research. Two of these factors are age and sentence length (Brown & Spevacek, 1971;Flanagan, 1980;Flanagan, 1983;Goetting & Howson, 1986;Myers & Levy, 1978). Being young and having a longer sentence are correlated with higher rates of misconduct.…”