Prison conditions

No single criminal justice agency can promote desistance on its own. Partnerships across state, local, and federal agencies — along with the support of family and community stakeholders — are instrumental in supporting desistance from crime and reducing recidivism.

Law enforcement, courts, corrections, and community supervision agencies play a key role in the desistance process and reducing recidivism.

NIJ hosted a webinar to discuss under-researched aspects of reentry: expungement of criminal records and the impact of those records. This webinar includes a presentation of ongoing research projects examining the impact of legal aid for expungement and past research projects studying the accuracy and permanency of criminal records and the prevalence of collateral consequences of conviction. A Q&A session will conclude this webinar.

At this Research for the Real World seminar, NIJ brought together law enforcement practitioners and leading researchers in the field of stress to discuss the current research evidence and practical benefits of targeted stress-management interventions and how they can promote officer mental wellness.

This video, in the Crime File series, portrays a three-member panel discussing prison conditions in Texas both before and after a 1980 court order for the reform of prison management practices, implications of the Texas experience for prison management, and lessons for prison management to be drawn from the experiences of the experimental Federal correctional facility in Butner, N.C.

What do we know about the use of restrictive housing in jails and prison in the U.S.? Leading practitioners and researchers discuss what the current evidence can tell us about how restrictive housing is used, who is in restrictive housing, its effects on inmate populations, and what else we need to learn to identify alternatives to restrictive housing.

Dr. Decker gave a seminar in NIJ's Research for the Real World series about his research on the impact of race, gender and prison records on finding employment.

Before the seminar, we sat down with Dr. Decker for an interview to discuss his findings and their policy implications.

Scientific studies have long documented the negative impact of a prison record on a person's ability to find employment. But what is the impact when gender and race/ethnicity are factored in? Also, most jobs are now advertised online — so how does this affect the ability of former prisoners to find a job?