Maintaining Prison Order: An Evaluation of the Effects of the Detection and Processing of Inmate Misconduct Within and Across Ohio Correctional Institutions

Maintaining order and safety among inmates is a high priority of prison wardens. Order maintenance is evaluated, in part, by the prevalence and incidence of inmate misconduct, and many studies have been conducted in order to identify inmate- and/or facility-level predictors of misconduct at the individual and aggregate levels of analysis (respectively). A theme emerging from this body of research is that levels of misconduct vary significantly across facilities, and management practices contribute heavily to these differences. Related to management practices are issues regarding how inmates are supervised, how facility staff and administrators handle incidents of misconduct, and how inmates perceive the handling of these incidents. This last issue also might be linked to the odds of subsequent misconduct via inmate (dis)respect toward authority. The proposed study is designed to model the prevalence and incidence of both self-reported and officially detected misconduct by inmates, and to examine the effects of official processing and sanctioning of misconduct on: (a) inmate perceptions of fairness in treatment and of legal authority, and (b) the prevalence and incidence of subsequent misconduct by inmates. These processes will be examined within and across all correctional facilities for adult males and adult females in Ohio.ca/ncf