Federal Prison Research Articles

Criminal thinking as a bipolar dimensional construct: Testing the risk-promotive status of the PICTS proactive and reactive criminal thinking scales.

This study sought to assess whether two scales from a criminal thinking inventory displayed bipolar properties such that high scores on these scales reflect a risk effect and low scores a promotive effect. To test this hypothesis, the proactive criminal thinking (PCT) and reactive criminal thinking (RCT) scales from the Psychological Inventory of Criminal Thinking Styles (PICTS) were organized into three categories-top 25% of scores (high group), the middle 50% of scores (intermediate group), and bottom 25% of scores (low group)-and crossed with preincarceration (prior convictions and age at first conviction), peri-incarceration (total and aggressive institutional infractions), and postincarceration (revocation and rearrest) outcome indicators. Participants for this study were 3,039 male inmates who completed the PICTS while confined in a medium-security federal prison. Results showed that the PCT and RCT each achieved a mixed (risk and promotive) effect for four out of six outcomes. Of the four unipolar effects, PCT achieved a promotive effect but not a risk effect for the two preincarceration outcomes, whereas RCT produced a risk but not promotive effect for the two postincarceration outcomes. These results provide support for the notion that PCT and RCT are primarily bipolar dimensional constructs in which high scores are associated with negative criminal justice outcomes and low scores with positive criminal justice outcomes, although there may be unipolar aspects to each scale as well. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Walking an EmotionalTightrope: Examining the Carceral Emotion Culture(s) of Federal Prisons for Women in Canada

This article examines the role of solidarity as a centrally distinguishing feature of two distinct emotion culture(s) operating in federal prisons for women in Canada. We explore the social interactions between correctional officers and inmates and among criminalized women to understand how group cohesion is shaped by the power dynamics between these groups in the prison environment. For correctional officers, solidarity facilitates difficult aspects of their work and enables them to behave antagonistically towards inmates. Despite prison staff's efforts to disrupt prisoner solidarity, solidarity serves two key functions for criminalized women–emotional coping and resistance to systemic oppression.

Trauma-Informed Yoga Teacher Training: Impact on Incarcerated Men's Wellness.

In late 2021, the United States had a total of 1.2 million individuals confined in state and federal prisons, with approximately 1.1 million of these people being men. Although existing research provides evidence that engaging in yoga programs within prison settings can enhance the well-being of incarcerated individuals, with several studies supporting this claim, knowledge regarding the specific effects of participating in a yoga teacher training program during confinement is still lacking. The purpose of the present investigation was to evaluate the effect of completing a prison-based 200-hour trauma-sensitive yoga teacher training program on the perceived physical, mental, social, and spiritual wellness of men in prison. We hypothesized that men who successfully completed the training program would report notable improvements in all four dimensions of wellness. Focus groups, participant workbook reviews, and demographic surveys were used to understand how participation in yoga teacher training influenced men's perceived wellness. Participants identified a variety of wellness gains associated with yoga teacher training. These gains have the potential to contribute to improved individual health, improved relationships with others, and safer communities.

Impact of new abortion restrictions on people in prison: Estimated number of incarcerated people without abortion access and distance to abortion providers

ObjectivesThis study aimed to estimate the annual number of incarcerated pregnant people in state and federal prisons needing an abortion. Study designWe used 2021 Bureau of Justice Statistics data and prior studies’ findings to estimate the number of pregnant incarcerated people, then calculated state-specific abortion ratios to determine the number potentially needing an abortion. ResultsOf 638 pregnant people incarcerated in prisons annually, 110 would be expected to need an abortion, including 55 in states where abortion is currently banned or restricted. ConclusionsUnder Dobbs, many incarcerated pregnant people will be forced to continue unwanted pregnancies to term.

Major Mental Illness as a Predictor of Recidivism: Reactive Criminal Thinking as a Mediator and Substance Abuse as a Moderator of This Relationship

ABSTRACT Reactive criminal thinking (RCT) represents the impulsive, irrational, and emotional aspects of antisocial cognition. The current study tested major mental illness and its interaction with prior substance abuse as possible predictors of future recidivism, with RCT serving as a mediator and substance abuse as a moderator. Using Cox proportional hazards regression, it was determined that RCT mediated the relationship between major mental illness and recidivism in a group of 1,435 male federal prison inmates. Substance abuse × mental illness interaction did not predict RCT or recidivism at the traditional .05 level of significance. Findings from this study indicate that major mental illness promotes recidivism by stimulating increased levels of RCT which then goes on to predict recidivism.

Unleashing compassionate care: canine-assisted intervention as a promising harm reduction approach to prisonization in Canada and its relevance to forensic psychiatry.

In recent years, there has been a global advancement in the offering of canine-assisted interventions (CAI) in prisons. However, these programs have focused primarily on the benefits to the dogs involved and not on the impact on the participants. The authors of this perspective study have been running a CAI program with therapy dogs, called PAWSitive Support, in a Canadian federal prison since 2016. Thoughts from the program facilitators and interviews with prison staff indicate that the program, and specifically the therapy dogs, provides a unique and integrated source of comfort, support, and love for participants. These benefits are consistent with those seen in CAI programs outside of prisons. Unique to the prison setting appears to be an improvement in participant-staff relations. The therapy dogs have helped participants to experience comfort and consequently express their emotions. This seems to contribute to their recognition of support within the prison system and specifically developing trust with staff. Additionally, the dogs have helped to create an experience of the feeling of love within the prison, interpreted as the feeling of being cared for, which is rare for this population. The authors suggest that the integration of a therapy dog intervention in prison could be a novel harm reduction strategy to address issues related to prisonization and associated mental health concerns, including substance use. This consideration can offer unique insight into the field of forensic psychiatry about providing compassionate care to patients.

Gender, risk, and presentation of self in “caring” prison work: Insights from institutional parole officers in Canada

AbstractWhile scholars have investigated how prison workers understand and navigate occupational risks through performances of gender, most studies have focused on staff in security roles whose organizational cultures value displays of masculinities premised on characteristics such as toughness and stoicism. Less scholarly attention has considered how prison staff in nonsecurity roles, who perform duties oriented toward using interpersonal skills and helping others—characteristics that are commonly associated with female‐dominated helping professions—understand and navigate risk through gendered forms of impression management. The current study explores the question of how one such occupational group, institutional parole officers (IPOs) working in Canadian federal prisons, performs gender in response to both their perceptions of workplace risk and their occupational, and often personal, commitment to supporting the rehabilitation of prisoners. We organize and analyze our findings using Goffman's (1959) theory of impression management to demonstrate that IPOs, as they attempt to both support prisoners and mitigate the perceived risks of a prison workplace, perform gendered presentations of self that fluidly incorporate aspects of masculinities and femininities. However, we also argue that female IPOs experience greater feelings of workplace vulnerabilities and, thus, perform more impression management labor than their male counterparts. Our analysis thus deepens the limited literature on gendered presentations of self among nonsecurity prison workers by situating gender performances within the occupational risks experienced in the prison workplace.

“Use your common sense to navigate, and you're gonna get along okay”: Exploring the sensorial politics of attunement, survival, and resistance in Canadian federal prisons

What does prison feel like? This question has generated a theoretically and epistemologically innovative body of literature known as sensory criminology. However, due to the bureaucratic barriers that researchers experience in trying to access prison spaces and incarcerated people, much of this literature is written about/from the privileged experiences of prison ethnographers, undoubtedly missing many of the sensory nuances of prison life. To collapse the distance, and to prioritize the value of the sensory from the perspective of incarcerated people, we use qualitative data gleaned from 57 semi-structured interviews with former federally incarcerated people in Canada to examine the sensory dynamics of prison life as they are grounded in lived experiences. To concentrate our discussion, we focus analytic attention on the sensorial politics of survival and resistance, highlighting how incarcerated people must first become affectively and sensorially attuned to the prison environment to survive and resist the state-sanctioned violence of incarceration. After contextualizing our project – Feeling the Carceral – we analyze what incarcerated people describe as the shocking and tumultuous process of affective attunement to the prison environment. Next, we demonstrate how incarcerated people use their sensory interpretations of prison spaces to both protect themselves from, and resist, state-sanctioned violence, ultimately questioning the ethics and usefulness of carceral intervention. Specifically, we contend that attending to the ways incarcerated people sensorially decipher and interpret the prison environment not only demonstrates the intelligence and resourcefulness of criminalized people, but it also reveals more subtle, yet nonetheless totalizing, forms of prison violence that have been previously overlooked in the literature.

“They’re Just Watching You All the Time”: The Surveillance Web of Prison Needle Exchange

In 2018, the federal prison authority in Canada began implementing Prison Needle Exchange Programs (PNEPs) at select institutions. Despite longstanding and successful models of prison-based syringe distribution internationally, Canada’s correctional service introduced a highly restrictive security-based approach, placing prisoners who access the program into a surveillance web that implicates diverse actors and relies on methods such as bio-surveillance and security risk assessments. We examine these and other surveillant functions of the PNEP through the first-hand experiences of thirty former prisoners who were incarcerated at one of the prisons with such a program. These experiences point to how the surveillance web is constituted by multiple lines of sight and flows of information across health and security fields. It is further comprised of risk management practices and discretionary punishment carried out by correctional officers as well as the targeting and social sorting of people who use drugs. Former prisoner narratives also demonstrate how the PNEP is reflective of emerging forms of exclusion and processes of securitization that operate through the identification, management, and containment of specific groups. As a whole, the PNEP model implemented in Canada, and the practices that undergird it, target people who use drugs for increased surveillance, resulting in extremely low rates of program enrollment despite pervasive drug use in prison, and undermining access to an essential health care service to which prisoners are entitled. The study findings point to novel forms of carceral surveillance that enmesh observational, technological, and bureaucratic practices, and demonstrate how prisoner health and therapeutic objectives can be subsumed by securitarian logics.

Occupational Stress, Correctional Officers, and Training for the Job: Probing Sources of Stress During the Correctional Service of Canada’s Correctional Training Program

Occupational stress remains a remarkable problem among correctional officers. While the scholarship on correctional services has scrutinized correctional work to identify and analyze sources and consequences of stress, correctional training has received little attention. Drawing on the literature on sources of stress in corrections work, we analyze and compare whether sources of stress on the job overlap with those of correctional training. We base our analysis on interviews with correctional officers from Canada’s federal prison system who were interviewed while completing the Correctional Service of Canada’s Correctional Training Program. Findings suggest that sources of stress in training are not consistent with those of correctional work. The training program conditions succeed in preparing recruits to manage pressure, strain, and anxiety. However, the program does not necessarily equip recruits to deal with on-the-job stress, and does little to eliminate the occupational stressors and mental health disorders that too often emerge during occupational tenure. Correctional training programs in Canada and beyond must ensure that recruits are equipped with tools to deal with the specific sources of stress and possibly eliminate such sources in the course of work.

Burnout and habits harmful to the health of employees in the Argentine federal prison service.

Given that psychosocial risks may be sources of stress at work and also encourage the presence of burnout, members of state security services are likely to present high levels of this syndrome. To describe the prevalence and relationship between burnout and unhealthy habits amongst workers of the Argentine Federal Prison Service (SPF). An ex post-facto study was carried out with descriptive, cross-sectional, comparative and comparative analyses. We used the Spanish adaptations of the Maslach Burnout Inventory MBI-HSS (Maslach and Jackson, 1986), the Test For Nicotine Dependence (Fagerström, 1978) and the Body Mass Index in 151 prison officers (88 men and 63 women of 22 to 52 years). The prevalence of burnout was 6.62%, while the results for dimensions were: smoking 37.09%, passive smoking 70.20%, overweight 45.03% and obesity 44.37%. The dimensions of burnout showed that differences between groups indicate a higher level of emotional exhaustion in treatment and treatment functions, passive smokers and those who consume less fruit and vegetables on a weekly basis. There was greater depersonalization in subjects that are currently smoking. There was lower personal fulfillment in obese people, passive smokers, current smokers, moderate level smokers, those who consume less fruit and vegetables every week and those with obesity. Smoking and high body mass index and links with eating habits are factors that may negatively affect the health and wellbeing of prison officers in terms of personal accomplishment.

Population status of the world's largest limpet,Scutellastra mexicana(Mollusca: Patellidae), on María Madre Island, Mexico: Possible last bastion of a species facing global extinction

AbstractScutellastra mexicanais the largest patellid in the world, with records of up to 35.5 cm in length, and is one of the most endangered marine invertebrates from tropical Pacific rocky shores.The decline of this species occurred during the 20thcentury, when fishing cooperatives reported the capture of millions of specimens in less than 2 decades (1970–1980). Since then, the species has continued to be captured illegally to the point that it has practically disappeared.This paper reports the population status ofS. mexicanain María Madre Island (Mexican Pacific Ocean), which was used as a Federal Prison from 1905 until 2019.A total of 2,381 limpets were recorded in four main populations: Guayacama, Borbollones, Punta Halcones and Papelillos. The density was very low: from 0.05 to 0.3 individuals m−2, with an ageing population structure, and no recent recruitment. The size‐frequency distribution of the populations showed that most of the individuals were between 9 and 15 cm. Mean and maximum shell length varied between 10.5 and 19 cm at Papelillos, 13.6 and 20.3 cm at Punta Halcones, 13.7 and 17.6 cm at Borbollones, and 12 and 20 cm at Guayacama.Evidence of illegal extraction was evident in Papelillos since the size of the limpets was significantly the smallest of the four populations studied, and also significantly smaller than those in an adjacent midden.Now that the prison has been closed it is imperative to establish legal measures, to provide extreme protection of María Madre, and to change the current status ofS. mexicanain the Official Mexican Standard (NOM‐059‐ECOL‐2010) from threatened species to in danger of extinction. This may be the last hope for the species.

Sources of stress among Federal Correctional Officers in Canada.

Most correctional officers describe their jobs as stressful. The current study advances the scholarship on correctional stress by offering a rare qualitative analysis that identifies, provides meaning, and contextualizes sources of stress in correctional services. This study complements the correctional stress literature, which, until now, has relied primarily on quantitative methodologies to identify and assess stress determinants. Forty-four correctional officers from Canada's federal prisons were interviewed about their primary source of stress. Findings indicate that staff (i.e., co-workers and managers), not prison residents, represent a primary source of stress in correctional work. In addition, job seniority and gossip were the main stress triggers associated with co-workers, while centralization of decision-making processes and a lack of instrumental communication and support triggered stress coming from managers.

Assessing recidivism risk with criminal thinking and prior arrests: do risk factors accumulate or interact?

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study was to determine whether two well-known risk factors for recidivism, criminal thinking and prior criminal arrests, were capable of achieving a combined effect, and if so, whether this effect was additive, interactive, or both. This hypothesis was tested in a group of 226 males incarcerated in a medium security federal prison who had participated in a criminal thinking intervention prior to their release from prison. The two main variables, criminal thinking (Exp(b) = 1.016 [1.007,1.024]) and prior arrests (Exp(b) = 1.062 [1.024, 1.102]), and their interaction (Exp(b) = 1.264 [1.002, 1.595]) were statistically significant according to the results of a Cox regression analysis. Moreover, the combined score displayed a small incremental increase in the area under the curve (AUC) of a receiver operating characteristic analysis (.660 [.583, .737]), whereas adding the interaction to the two-variable combination improved the AUC further (.668 [.592, .743]). These results suggest that risk factors for recidivism not only add predictive variance to a risk assessment they may also be capable of forming specific interactive effects with other risk factors, although the effects observed in the current study were small and in need of further evaluation.

Evaluating the use of PTSD Assessment Tools Within the U.S. Prison Setting: An Exploratory Analysis

The identification and treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in carceral settings remain a fundamental concern for practitioners, policy-makers, and incarcerated persons (IPs) alike. In recent years, PTSD assessment tools designed for the general population have been adopted for use in prisons upon intake, sometimes side-by-side with other assessment tools. This study attempts to provide insight into how these tools are used for a majority of IPs within the United States. Based on results from six U.S. states and the federal prison system, we find that PTSD assessment would benefit from newer tools designed for the specific challenges in the prison environment.

Coal, Cages, Crisis: The Rise of the Prison Economy in Central Appalachia by Judah Schept

Reviewed by: Coal, Cages, Crisis: The Rise of the Prison Economy in Central Appalachia by Judah Schept Justin Randolph Coal, Cages, Crisis: The Rise of the Prison Economy in Central Appalachia. By Judah Schept. (New York: New York University Press, 2022. Pp. [vi], 321. Paper, $32.00, ISBN 978-1-4798-5897-2; cloth, $99.00, ISBN 978-1-4798-8892-4.) On page one of Coal, Cages, Crisis: The Rise of the Prison Economy in Central Appalachia, its author is nearly arrested. Judah Schept’s offense was attempting to photograph a Kentucky prison. Police spoiled that photo opportunity, but others proved successful. One of the book’s photos, also featured on this edition’s cover, a landscape captioned “The Interface,” depicts the road between a strip mine’s coal seam and the razor wire of a prison (p. 125). Interfaces offer a conceptual symbol for Schept’s inquiry. He explores the juncture between past and present with an eye to paths around the prison. “The rise of cages in the coalfields,” he argues, “reflects a new strategy for an old project: the state’s ongoing need to manufacture and maintain capitalist social order and social relations” (p. 5). Through this interdisciplinary study of the rural prison boom, Schept provides an invaluable state of the field in carceral and Appalachian studies, using the lens of racial capitalism to interpret the region’s complex identity. He also gives an innovative model for the use of blended oral and archival historical methods to study deep historical processes that manifest in the recent past. To be sure, the book’s multiscalar and multitemporal presentation will dissatisfy those strict historicists expecting engagement with a circumscribed archive. But Coal, Cages, Crisis opens important pathways for historians of the southern prison and those southerners who have judged the prison an unnatural feature of the landscape. The book has three parts. In Part 1, “Extraction and Disposal,” Schept reflects on Appalachia’s construction as a space of great value and worthlessness. Chapter 1 showcases the book’s reliance on autoethnography, placing the authorial self in the narrative and interactions with oral history informants, to explore mountaintop removal (MTR). Longtime residents reveal [End Page 397] that rural planners used MTR sites for garbage incineration before they were used for prisons. Chapter 2 reflects on the region’s legal and political history, rooting Appalachia’s prison boom in the War on Poverty as well as the regulatory revolution of the 1970s, which empowered mining companies to normalize MTR. Part 2, “Profit and Order,” places Appalachia’s deeper history of resource extraction and anticapitalist militancy in a continuum with the region’s experience of mass incarceration. Chapter 3 focuses on the afterlife of convict leasing through the case of Tennessee’s Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary— now an ecotourist hot spot with moonshine tastings. Chapter 4, similarly, considers the longue durée of Wheelwright, Kentucky, a company town whose economy transitioned from coal to private prisons. Both chapters rely heavily on secondary historical literature and archival research situated alongside theoreticians of capitalist crisis, including Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Stuart Hall, and the abolitionist geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore, to complicate simple narratives of one industry replacing another. Part 3 tracks one community’s debate over a new federal prison in Letcher County, Kentucky, between 2013 and 2019. Chapters 5 and 6 expound on Schept’s idea of “carceral social reproduction,” the elite reorganization of Appalachian society—everything from workforce development to social benefits like road construction and elementary education—around prison expansion (p. 152). Chapter 7, coauthored with the activist-scholar Sylvia Ryerson, narrates the 2019 defeat of this newest prison by a complex coalition of anti-prison forces. This reviewer hopes for books that build on Schept’s image of the prison by exploring those just outside the frame of photos like “The Interface.” How might incarcerated people behind the concertina wire directly inform this history? How do the police lurking behind the photographer plug into a political economy like Kentucky’s, where “the state prison population has grown” since the passage of a 2011 bill meant to decarcerate (p. 13)? Schept has given us a model and program for collaborative...

Harm Reduction in Federal Prisons in Canada

Harm Reduction in Federal Prisons in Canada

Thoughts Beyond Stigma-Implications for Change Reflected in the Voices of Previously Incarcerated Citizens

State and federal prisons release more than six hundred thousand people annually, with nearly 95% of those returning to the communities in which they resided before incarceration, albeit frequently with discomfort and marginalization, largely due to stigma (Alexander, 2020; Park & Tietjen, 2021). Programs to foster reintegration exist in almost every locale, yet recidivism remains due to many factors. Stigma has received much attention as a cause of failure for successful reentry and acclimation (Park & Tietjen, 2021). With the surge of interest and empirical study of stigma as a barrier, the voices of returning citizens can further enhance significant theory and knowledge related to stigma to inform successful reentry and adjustment. The purpose of this study was to advance theory regarding the nature of stigma from the perspectives of prior incarcerated informants who also spent varying lengths of time back in their communities after completing a term of incarceration. As is often characteristic of a mixed method study relying on abductive analysis such as that presented herein, the findings often transcend or depart from the original purpose of an inquiry, elevating the richness and theoretical learning to include unexpected results. The study reveals and discusses insights beyond the intended aim of the research.

A requiem for the Unabomber

ABSTRACT Theodore John Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, died by suicide in June 2023. One of the most best known criminals of the late twentieth century, and a former Harvard mathematics prodigy with an IQ of 167, Kaczynski is remembered for the 1995 publication of his 35,000-word anti-technology essay, Industrial Society and Its Future. This work called for the rejection of technological civilization and the embracing of wild nature. Its publication led to Kaczynski’s identification, apprehension, and a convoluted set of legal proceedings that culminated in a coerced plea arrangement and his incarceration in the US federal supermax prison. Kaczynski was not permitted to introduce a defense of necessity. Instead, he was labeled as ‘mad’ by the press and his family, and identified as a paranoid schizophrenic by a court-appointed psychiatrist. But several commentators have argued that Kaczynski’s reasoning is sound. Indeed, many of Kaczynski’s observations about technology and the environment have proven to be prescient. Accordingly, a new generation of followers have adopted his anti-technology philosophy. If Kaczynski was correct about technology and the environment, this might warrant a reevaluation of his socio-theoretical writings and reconsideration of his constructed persona as a mad genius.

Unpacking the Prison Food Paradox: Formerly Incarcerated Individuals’ Experience of Food within Federal Prisons in Canada

This paper presents findings from a survey conducted with formerly incarcerated individuals on their experiences of food and food systems within federal prisons in Canada. Beyond affirming the many problems with the quality and quantity of food provided to incarcerated individuals, the findings discussed in this article highlight the multi-faceted and paradoxical role of food behind bars. Food was a tool of punishment and a site of conflict, yet it simultaneously provides an important source of community and camaraderie. While there can be no “just” carceral food system because carceral systems are inherently unjust systems, a conversation about food provisioning within prison helps bring into focus opportunities to improve the material conditions of incarcerated individuals in the short-term as well as openings to question the logic and legitimacy of carceral institutions more broadly. As we are all bound-up in carceral food systems, there is a collective responsibility to interrogate and make visible the realities of carceral food systems in order to work towards non-carceral futures.