To examine participatory research (PR) in a women’s prison to assess: (1) whether incarcerated interviewers elicit different knowledge than outside interviewers and (2) whether incarcerated interviewers are perceived as more trustworthy than outside interviewers. We conducted a randomized experiment with 158 incarcerated women in Arizona, assigning participants to be interviewed by either an incarcerated (n = 78) or outside (n = 80) interviewer. Participants discussed their experiences of trust and relationships within the prison environment, as well as their comfort level with the assigned interviewer. We observed few statistically significant differences between conditions. However, perceptions of interviewer trustworthiness varied: participants assigned to incarcerated interviewers more often voiced concerns about confidentiality and information sharing. This study contributes to inclusive prison research approaches that engage incarcerated people as partners in the research process. However, using incarcerated interviewers raises ethical concerns, including risks related to perceived coercion and harm.

Alumni of the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program declare their experience in the course as "life-changing." If this impact holds true for all who have completed an Inside-Out course, the program will have transformed over 60,000 lives. We examine attitudinal change among Inside-Out alumni on factors expected to be influenced as a result of the 'dialogue across difference' critical to the foundation of the program. Across four courses representing 86 students, nonincarcerated "Outside" students reported higher post-course scores in support of the humanity of people incarcerated as compared to pre-course scores. Incarcerated "Inside" students reported higher post-course scores in support of the fairness and effectiveness of the criminal justice system as compared to pre-course scores. Our findings build on the limited empirical assessments in support of the numerous anecdotal accounts of the transformative power of a program that has been taught over 1,200 times across 48 U.S. states and 14 countries.

Objective: Including people most impacted by a challenge in designing and implementing solutions to that challenge has reemerged in social science research. In prison settings, academics' outside knowledge of "what works" combined with incarcerated people's inside knowledge of lived experience could lead to more comprehensive rehabilitative programs. This combined approach may make less sense as an intervention in prison, however, due to sensitive and complicated interpersonal dynamics. We determine if incarcerated women perceive prison programs as more efficacious when other incarcerated women are collaboratively involved in the design and implementation of those programs, as compared to other program delivery methods. Methods: We employ a participatory action research framework in administering a randomized vignette to 200 incarcerated women. We randomize who designs and teaches a prison program in a hypothetical scenario, with incarcerated women alongside university researchers the key combined condition of interest. We then ask a series of questions regarding incarcerated women's perception of the program's efficacy. Results: Women who received the combined condition were four times more likely to view the program as legitimate when compared to programs taught by correctional staff. The combined condition was not significantly different on legitimacy when compared to either researchers alone or incarcerated women alone. We did not observe other expected relationships between the combined condition and perceived program efficacy. Conclusions and Implications for Practice: Researcher and incarcerated person-led programming should be implemented carefully in institutional settings to leverage the value of lived experience while avoiding creating further harm for confined people.

Background: Solitary confinement and mental well-being has been researched extensively, with a significant increase in studies over the last ten years. These recent studies produce mixed evidence for whether placement in solitary confinement is associated with psychological distress. We advance our understanding of these relationships in two critical ways. First, we conduct both between- and within-person analyses within the same data to better understand the relationship of solitary confinement and mental well-being relative to the wellbeing of people in less restrictive prison settings. Second, we ask the men in our sample questions about their personality style, coping strategies, and interactions with staff, which allows us to explore how individual characteristics and prison experiences matter, alongside isolation, in understanding mental well-being.Methods: We gather data from interviews at three time points with 122 men in solitary confinement and 204 men in other conditions of confinement in Arizona from 2017 to 2019. We merge these interview data with administrative data on study sample and population sample to include critical measures such as mental health score, risk level, and visitation status. Our interviews contain a Global Severity Index (GSI), created from 90 self-reported psychopathological symptoms experienced, that we use to assess well-being. We estimate cross-classified multilevel models to assess between-person differences and within-person change in well-being over time.Results: There was a small relationship between solitary confinement and worsening well-bring (longitudinal, within-person) and a small relationship between solitary confinement and worse well-being (cross-sectional, between-person), with this between-person association reduced significantly upon inclusion of additional individual characteristics and prison experiences. Conclusions: Our results suggest that the incarceration experience, including conditions of confinement, is associated with mental well-being in different ways for different people. We believe that collective confinement and well-being could receive the same scholarly attention and public concern as solitary confinement.

People who engage in violence during their incarceration create a number of challenges for those who live and work in our correctional facilities. In response, there is a growing focus on the use of short-term confinement in disciplinary segregation that includes therapeutic programming. The ability of these programs to affect future behavior, however, is mixed. To better understand why research is mixed, the current study incorporates the views and perspectives of staff and participants involved in rehabilitative efforts within a segregated housing setting. Structured interviews were carried out with 25 former program participants and 10 correctional staff who oversee the day-to-day management of a disciplinary segregation program in a U.S. prison that includes rehabilitative programming. Subject perspectives provide additional direction for the inclusion of programming in segregated housing and a note of caution for programs that are alternative in name but traditional in practice.

At this point it is clear that the pursuit of the rehabilitative ideal is stitched into the DNA of American corrections. However, in our collective quest to establish and defend ‘what works,’ correctional rehabilitation has lingered in a state of preoccupation with risks, deficits, and individual pathology. The framework of Positive Psychology provides an alluring blueprint for an approach to correctional rehabilitation where people are not considered different humans who are reduced to their deficits and their worst decisions. In the current paper we explore the possibilities of incorporating the principles of Positive Psychology into correctional rehabilitation to help promote a notion of correctional success that is more dynamic, humanizing, and inclusive. We begin by discussing the development, progression, and current state of correctional rehabilitation. We then turn to discussing the development, progression, and current state of Positive Psychology, suggesting that there is a missed opportunity in applying its principles to people who are impacted by the criminal justice system. We conclude with a section discussing the opportunities and challenges of bringing correctional rehabilitation and Positive Psychology together.

BACKGROUND:Experiencing incarceration leads to increased rates of stress that result in a variety of negative physical, mental, and emotional outcomes. However, little research focuses on how individuals vary in their coping responses to stressful life events, like imprisonment.AIMS:This study extends prior research by examining whether changes in coping styles throughout the first year of incarceration influence mental health symptomology at 6- and 12-months post placement.METHODS:Using longitudinal data collected via semi-structured interviews with incarcerated men, this study measures changes in coping strategies and their effect on psychological well-being using the SCL-90-R. Ordinary least squares regression models were used to regress mental health symptomology on residual change scores of coping strategies.RESULTS:Changes in dysfunctional coping during the first 6- and 12-months of placement were associated with increased levels of adverse mental health symptoms. Changes in emotion- and problem-focused coping were not associated with mental health symptomology.CONCLUSIONS:This research illustrates the need to continue exploration into individual responses to stressful events, such as initial incarceration, and suggests that prison systems should be designed in ways that decrease the need to adapt in dysfunctional ways, while providing opportunities for incarcerated people to cope in more productive ways.

The use of segregation continues to be at the forefront of debates on the most effective way to address violence in prisons. Concern over the negative impact of these placements has prompted correctional administrators to employ alternative strategies to reduce their segregated populations and address serious misconduct. Few studies, however, have explored the impact that these strategies have on future behavioral outcomes. To address this gap, the current study explores the effectiveness of a disciplinary segregation program reserved for those who engage in violent misconduct during their incarceration. This study employs a quasi-experimental research design to estimate the treatment effects of placement in a disciplinary segregation program on subsequent levels of institutional misconduct during a one-year follow-up. Results from this study reveal that placement in the disciplinary segregation program had no effect on subsequent levels of serious in-prison misconduct amongst participants when compared to their matched counterparts. Our findings suggest that scholars and practitioners should work to build a response to in-prison violence that starts with what is known about the causes of violence and what effectively modifies attitudes and behaviors. Future research should include rigorous measures of both program process and implementation to better identify effective forms of intervention.

Nearly everyone sent to prison will one day return to the community. This means that understanding recidivism is of critical importance to members of that community. At the most basic level, recidivism can be defined as “the reversion of an individual to criminal behavior after he or she has been convicted of a prior offense, sentenced, and (presumably) corrected.” Recidivism therefore requires that some sort of involvement with the criminal justice system has taken place, and that then the individual again comes into contact with the system after additional transgressions. Recidivism, in other words, is officially detected, repeat unlawful behavior.

People often leave prison worse than when they arrived; sometimes, they leave the same. People could leave prison better than when they arrived through a reimagined response to crime. They could be set up to live sustainable, fulfilling, and meaningful lives after prison. This approach could be informed by research on what makes for a meaningful life – regardless of whether a person has come into contact with the criminal justice system. A reimagined corrections could view time spent in prison as an opportunity rather than solely as a punishment; an opportunity to repair harm, empower people, and promote public safety.

Reentry can be complicated and daunting, yet people leaving prison tend to be overly optimistic about their capability to remain crime-free. This optimism could be good-where a hopeful mindset could be indicative of a prosocial future narrative. Or this optimism could be bad-where a naive mindset could be indicative of a lack of preparation for the challenges ahead. Our goal is to explore the concept of perceived uncertainty for reentry success with a focus on how it may be useful in better preparing people to rejoin society. Using data from 200 women incarcerated in Arizona, we explore (1) the demographic characteristics that are associated with perceived uncertainty for reentry success and (2) the extent to which perceived uncertainty is associated with the identification of specific obstacles upon their release. Our findings suggest that most women are optimistic about their capability to stay out of prison, but that age, education, and custody level are associated with perceived uncertainty in this capability. Women with uncertainty are more likely to identify employment as a barrier that could bring them back to prison. We suggest that a focus on perceptions of uncertainty is critical for research and programming on prison reentry.

Criminological research largely relies on surveys or administrative data to study people involved in the criminal justice system, either as clients or as staff (Kleck et al., 2006; Woodward et al.,...

The individual and social protective factors that help break the cycle of violence are examined. Specifically, this study investigates (a) the individual and social protective factors that reduce violent offending among previously victimized children, and (b) whether certain protective factors are more or less important depending on the type and frequency of childhood victimization experienced. Data on young adults from Wave III of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health are used (N = 13,116). Negative binomial regression models are estimated to examine the protective factors that promote resiliency to violent offending among individuals who reported being physically and sexually victimized as children. Results indicate that a number of individual and social protective factors reduce violent offending in young adulthood. With a few exceptions, these factors are specific to the type, frequency, and comorbidity of abuse experienced. The results suggest a number of promising approaches to break the cycle of violence among previously victimized children. Future research should move beyond explaining the cycle of violence to examine how the cycle may be broken.

Participatory action research (PAR) focuses on conducting research with people, instead of on people. While this collaborative approach has been used across a range of disciplines, criminology has been slow to adopt the tenets of PAR. The current article seeks to reinvigorate the discussion of PAR as a research methodology within corrections. We highlight the success of our own project, where five incarcerated interviewers conducted over 400 interviews within the Arizona Department of Corrections. We describe the project—how we set it up, our perceived benefits, and our challenges—and we conclude with some thoughts on how PAR can be expanded in corrections specifically and in criminal justice in general. Our broader purpose is to highlight an innovative methodology to ensure conversations advance research that is translated into meaningful action.

Prison is a place with an accumulation of men who espouse toughness and aggression, where those who deviate are punished and forced to renegotiate their thoughts on what it means to be a man. Behaviors not considered overtly masculine, such as receiving support in the form of correctional programming, may be off limits to men serving time. Guided by the larger masculinities and crime framework, we examine the perceptions of masculinity and its consequences through in-depth, semi-structured interviews with five incarcerated men in the state of Arizona. We focus on three questions: what does it mean to be a man? Does the prison experience alter this conceptualization? Does this conceptualization affect participation in correctional programming? Our results reveal that there is variation in how incarcerated men define what it means to be man, the incarceration experience matters for how incarcerated men define and express their masculinity, and what it means to be a man in prison indirectly impacts engagement in correctional programs.

A number of scholars, civil, and human rights activists have expressed concern about the negative impact restrictive housing may have on the physical and mental well-being of inmates. Rigorous, theoretically informed outcome evaluations, however, are virtually nonexistent. Guided by theory and existing empirical evidence, this study explores the future behavioral and mental health outcomes associated with completing an alternative approach to restrictive housing in the Arizona Department of Corrections. To explore program outcomes, we use paired-sample t tests to determine whether post-program behavior is significantly different from preprogram behavior. In addition, we use cross tabulations and independent samples t tests to identify relationships between individual-level inmate and program characteristics and program outcomes. Results from this study suggest that a more therapeutic restrictive status housing program has the potential to improve the future behavior of program graduates; however, future research is needed to build upon these findings.

The children of prisoners can suffer from behavioral issues, poor school performance, and heightened risk of crime and delinquency. Separation is part of what makes incarceration a punishment, but what can be done to ensure that it has the least harmful effect on children? Using data from the Arizona Prison Visitation Project, the current study seeks to examine the influence of different types of prison contact (inperson, mail, and phone) and frequency of contact on parent-child relationship quality and how those changes in relationship quality may influence child behavior. Examining results from the parent (n = 127) and child (n = 293) level, the study finds that in-person visitation can increase relationship quality, with mail and frequent phone contact also beneficial.