Still Paying for the Past: Examining Gender Differences in Employment Among Individuals with a Criminal Record

Although many studies have examined employment outcomes of those with criminal convictions, no study to date has examined gender differences in employment outcomes of individuals with criminal convictions using a nationally representative sample of individuals from the United States. In this study, we use data from the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to examine differences in employment after a criminal conviction for females and males. Results reveal that for women with a conviction, a drug offense and having dependent children limit the number of weeks of employment. For males, race, education, age at first conviction, and a subsequent conviction predict the number of weeks employed. Implications for policy and future research are discussed.     

Psychological distress and severity of personality disorder symptomatology in prisoners convicted of violent and sexual offences

Abstract

Background: There have been recent proposals in England and Wales to develop services aimed at reducing the risk to the public posed by offenders with so-called “severe personality disorder”. The emphasis of the proposals is on risk. However, prisoners with personality disorder may have psychiatric treatment needs other than those purely relating to public protection. The aim of the study was to examine the association between severity of self reported personality disorder pathology and psychological distress in serious offenders.

Method: All male prisoners in two prisons, convicted of violent or sexual offences, were sent the Personality Diagnostic Questionnaire 4+(PDQ?4+) and the Symptom Checklist 90-R (SCL-90-R).

Results: High levels of self reported personality pathology were associated with high levels of psychological distress.

Conclusions: Offenders with the most severe self reported personality disorder pathology experience distress that may be clinically significant. Services for offenders with personality disorder will need to address their associated psychiatric symptoms.     

英国女性囚犯的现状研究及其启示

随着英国成为西欧女性监禁率最高的国家,其在女性囚犯的管理方式和制度的问题和诟病逐渐显现出来。英国监狱制度一向被认为是比较完善和系统的,但是英国女性囚犯在监狱中遭受着持续暴力、药物滥用、脱衣搜身制度、男性主导的监狱文化以及与家庭沟通的过度限制,给她们的身心生活均造成了严重而持久的影响,导致监狱内精神疾病和自杀现象频发,但同时也引起了替代羁押刑及措施的研究和应用。这给同样处于女性囚犯数量持续增长现状的中国敲响警钟,我们应当重视以下对策研究:建设个性化的女子监狱;不断完善离监探亲制度;加强社区矫正制度的应用。     

Integration and offender mental health

Integrated care can introduce seamless coordinated pathways that are focused around the individual needs of patients, helping to prevent missed opportunities for intervention. Within offender healthcare, sequential funnelling through designated areas where screening can take place, along with co-location of services, lends itself to integrated working, at least in theory. However, within the offender healthcare pathway, service fragmentation and autonomous, disconnected (often referred to as siloed) working, has historically been the norm. If commissioned and designed to ensure and incentivise connections between services, whilst developing high quality service-focused research activities, pathways could enable clinical and social interventions, and outcomes, on a public health scale for these highly morbid populations. As such, offender healthcare offers a real opportunity to model integration for wider introduction across other health and social care areas. Discussed within is the call for integration, its concept, and its role within offender healthcare.     

Women's and men's fear of gang crimes: Sexual and nonsexual assault as perceptually contemporaneous offenses

Perceptually contemporaneous offenses are crimes that are coupled in people's minds when they express fear. Previous studies have shown that fear of rape predicts women's fears of other crimes. This study examined the differential effects of sexual and nonsexual assault as offenses that may be coupled with specific gang crimes. For both women and men, once physical harm is accounted for by controlling for fear of nonsexual assault, fear of rape explains much less variance than it does when it was included alone. We argue that fear of physical harm, not the sexual intrusion in rape, has the strongest effect on fear for both women and men.     

Does Inmate Behavior Affect Post-Release Offending? Investigating the Misconduct-Recidivism Relationship among Youth and Adults

Recent scholarship has highlighted the potential implications of in-prison experiences for prisoner reentry and, in particular, recidivism. Few penological or reentry studies, however, have examined the relationship between one experience that may be especially consequential, inmate misconduct, and recidivism. The goal of this study is to address this gap in the literature by employing a matching design that estimates the effect of inmate misconduct on reoffending, using data on a release cohort of Florida prisoners. The results indicate that inmates who engage in misconduct, violent misconduct in particular, are more likely to recidivate. Consistent with prior scholarship, we find that this relationship holds only for adult inmates. These findings underscore the importance of prison experiences for understanding recidivism, examining youthful and adult inmate populations separately, and devising policies that reduce misconduct.     

Examining the Sources of Variation in Risk for Recidivism

This research explores the correlates of desistance and recidivism among a modern cohort of men released from prison. Using eight years of follow‐up data, we estimate a series of multivariate models to differentiate offenders who recidivate in the short term from men who failed after an extended period or who do not return to criminal behavior at all. Consistent with research of this type, the odds of recidivism increased sharply after release and leveled off over time. In addition, younger men with more extensive criminal histories were the least likely to desist and failed early in the release period. The results also reveal heterogeneity in patterns of recidivism over the short and long term, and highlight the importance of post‐release context in understanding prisoner reentry.     

Evaluating the Minnesota Comprehensive Offender Reentry Plan (MCORP): Results from a Randomized Experiment

Using a randomized experimental design, this study evaluated the effectiveness of the Minnesota Comprehensive Offender Reentry Plan (MCORP), an offender reentry pilot project implemented in 2008. In an effort to reduce recidivism, MCORP attempted to increase offender access to community services and programming by producing greater case management collaboration between caseworkers in prison and supervision agents in the community. The results showed that MCORP significantly improved employment rates, decreased homelessness, broadened offenders’ systems of social support, and increased the extent to which offenders participated in community support programming (mentoring, restorative justice services, and faith‐based programming). The findings further revealed that MCORP significantly reduced all three types of reoffending (rearrest, reconviction, and new offense reincarcerations) but did not have a significant impact on supervision revocations for technical violations. The evidence suggests that MCORP was effective in decreasing reoffending largely because it increased the extent to which offenders were employed, involved in community support programming, and able to develop systems of social support.     

Prison Visitation and Recidivism

Scholars and policymakers have called for greater attention to understanding the causes of and solutions to improved prisoner reentry outcomes, resulting in renewed attention to a factor—prison visitation—long believed to reduce recidivism. However, despite the theoretical arguments advanced on its behalf and increased calls for evidence-based policy, there remains little credible empirical research on whether a beneficial relationship between visitation and recidivism in fact exists. Against that backdrop, this study employs propensity score matching analyses to examine whether visitation of various types and in varying amounts, or “doses,” is in fact negatively associated with recidivism outcomes among a cohort of released prisoners. The analyses suggest that visitation has a small to modest effect in reducing recidivism of all types, especially property offending, and that the effects may be most pronounced for spouse or significant other visitation. We discuss the implications of the findings for research and policy.