Jail Administrators Research Articles

The Trajectory and Diaspora of Women Imprisonment: An Analysis

In Bangladesh, a very limited number of studies are prevalent to understand the condition of women prisoners. To know the real situation in this regard, we collected data by in-depth interviewing with 10 released women prisoners of two purposively selected jails (from Dhaka and Tangail district) from the two central districts of Bangladesh. For data collection and analysis for this study, we applied the qualitative method (case study). We analyzed the socio-economic factors behind their crime commission, their perception towards jail administration and the impact of their incarceration on their children. The findings revealed that lower socioeconomic condition can be a factor behind the women’s criminal outbreak. Lack of accommodation, proper food, drugs, prison atmosphere, staff's behavior, and employment opportunities are the major problems faced by the prisoners in jails. Their perception regarding jail administration was considerably adverse. We also found that mothers’ incarceration significantly influences their children regarding various short and long term exposure to behavioral problems. Moreover, children with incarcerated mothers are found to be more likely to suffer from mental health issues and deprived of the mainstream academic curriculum. Extensive separations from children have been shown to have an impact on incarcerated mothers as well. The legal rights and privileges for the women prisoners are in many cases absent in most of the cases analyzed here.

Three Transformative Ideals to Build a Better Crime Lab

This Article proposes that policy makers should consider establishing their jurisdiction’s crime laboratories as government corporations independent of law enforcement as a means of improving their quality and efficiency. Simply building new buildings or seeking accreditation will not solve the endemic problems that crime laboratories have faced. Rather, we propose that crime laboratories be restructured with a new organizational framework comparable to the Houston Forensic Science Center's (HFSC) status as a local government corporation (LGC), which has proven to be conducive to creating a new institutional culture. From our experience with the HFSC, we also believe that crime laboratories are well-advised to embrace the three ideals that have helped transform the HFSC: transparency, efficiency, and quality. These ideals do not exist independently of each other, rather each ideal overlaps with and reinforces the others. By providing concrete examples of the three transformative ideals in operation, this Article will illustrate how even a struggling laboratory can become high-functioning in a few short years without large public expenditures. Most importantly, in our view this success can be replicated. To determine the extent to which crime laboratories make documents pertaining to their internal operations public, we undertook an empirical study of crime laboratory transparency by researching the websites of local, state, and federal laboratories. The study tabulates the number of laboratories that provide online disclosure of critical documents, such as standard operating procedures, backlogs, and corrective action reports (also known as incident reports). Part I of the Article reports the findings of the study and provides a critical analysis of the results. Part II describes the HFSC’s corporate governance structure. This section demonstrates how the hybrid model of a public agency organized as a corporation offers a distinct set of advantages consistent with democratic principles, while also incorporating the efficiencies of a private-sector corporation. This part of the paper also addresses the organizational advantages of making a forensic laboratory independent of a law enforcement agency. However, we discuss advantages as viewed from the perspective of a laboratory director, rather than revisiting concerns about motivational and cognitive bias. Finally, Part III of the Article addresses the three transformative ideals — transparency, efficiency, and quality — that have guided the HFSC’s operations and have proved critical to its success. This section of the Article provides concrete examples to illustrate how the ideals can be put into action by laboratory administrators. This part of the paper demonstrates that, at least with regard to HFSC, the establishment of a crime laboratory as an independent LGC has generated benefits for law enforcement and crime survivors as well as defendants, the judiciary, and jail administrators. Indeed, by creating a transparent, high-functioning crime laboratory, the entire community wins.

A PTSD Screen for Forensic Populations

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has been observed in a sizable proportion of the U.S. adult correctional population. Jail administrators must pay particularly close attention to inmates with PTSD symptoms, considering these facilities serve as the gateway to the criminal justice system and inmates with PTSD may pose a risk to themselves, other inmates, and staff. The reality of conducting behavioral health assessments in a jail environment is wrought with significant challenges, including limited time. The current study examined prior research on PTSD screening tools to establish an empirical basis for a practical screen to be used among adults recently booked into local jails. Data from a random sample of 283 adults assessed specificity and sensitivity rates of different combinations of criteria. Results indicated a two-item screen achieved an 86.4% sensitivity rate as well as an 80.4% specificity rate. This evidence demonstrates a practical and clinically relevant approach to conducting PTSD screens among adult jail inmates.

Exploring How Workplace Factors Are Associated With Role Strain Among Jail Staff: A Replication and Expansion Study

Role strain has many negative outcomes. While the majority of role strain research has focused on its effects, this study explored possible antecedents of role strain among staff at a large, urban Southern jail in the United States. Based on regression analysis of survey data, instrumental communication, views that policy is followed, input into decision-making, formalization, and supervisory support each had significant negative effects on role strain. Administrative support and positive relations with coworkers, however, had nonsignificant effects. Jail administrators should attempt to reduce role strain by creating clear structure of job duties and expectations (formalization), providing staff with a greater organizational voice (input into decision-making), explaining the importance of organizational policies being followed and how they benefit staff, improving the flow of critical information about job and organizational matters (instrumental communication), and training supervisors about how to provide support to their subordinates and reward them for doing so (supervisory support).

Roads to Freedom: Prisoners in colonial India by Mushirul Hasan

Reviewed by: Roads to Freedom: Prisoners in colonial India by Mushirul Hasan David Arnold Roads to Freedom: Prisoners in colonial India By Mushirul Hasan. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016. Jawaharlal Nehru, whose own experience of colonial imprisonment ran to almost nine years, remarked in a letter to his sister Vijayalakshmi in June 1930 that "Life is prison is not meant to be exciting—it is about as uneventful as the existence of the average turnip" (cited by Hasan in Roads to Freedom, 179). Nehru's remark was no doubt intended to be flippant, even if it revealed an inner truth about the spirit-breaking boredom and crushing isolation of prison life. But, over the last twenty years, scholars have begun to see in the history of the colonial prison something more momentous than the "existence of the average turnip." One factor in this must surely have been the impact of Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish, first published in 1975, though the assiduous reader will search in vain in Mushirul Hasan's account of political prisoners in colonial India for any reference to Foucault's work. Another contributory factor, which his book does amply demonstrate, is the abundance of archival and published material relating to prison life in British India—not so much the official record of prison policy and jail administration, which is a minor concern here, as the rich and varied outpouring in poetry and prose, in letters, memoirs and histories, produced by those who suffered imprisonment for their political convictions. Many of these are works have only relatively recently come to light or been published, or they have acquired fresh significance from being considered as forms of prison testimony. Hasan's main approach in Roads to Freedom is to focus on individuals or groups of prisoners whose writing illuminates their prison experiences or more broadly demonstrates their commitment to, and suffering for, the cause of Indian freedom. Thus, there are chapters tracing the life and works of two prominent Muslim politicians, Mohamed Ali and Maulana Azad, a set of "progressive" Urdu poets (Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Ali Sardar Jafri, Hasrat Mohani and Maulvi Zafar Ali Khan), and the communist M.N. Roy. The largest single section of the book is devoted to the Nehru family and to the letters, autobiographical writing and histories produced by Jawaharlal Nehru during his long, often tedious, periods of incarceration. Hasan's choice of prison subjects and the written work they produced is highly significant. His interest is clearly in those who were not merely nationalistic but also "progressive" or socialistic in their outlook, like the Urdu poets or Nehru and Roy, men who saw their prison ordeal as ultimately serving the interests of the people or whose prison-born work made a significant contribution to the literature of the time. By contrast Hasan makes scant reference to those one-time prisoners, like V.D. Savarkar and Bhagat Singh, who have become heroes of the Hindu Right. By placing particular emphasis upon Muslim politicians and Urdu writers, he demonstrates the importance of the Muslim commitment and self-sacrifice to India's struggle for freedom and the attempts of figures like Mohamed Ali and Maulana Azad to devise for themselves and their community a more progressive and constructive role within modern Indian society. Rather than being a place of intellectual nullity and cultural sterility—the life of the proverbial turnip—prison emerges from these chapters as a site of positive engagement with the religious diversity and cultural heterogeneity of India's past (as, preeminently, in Nehru's historical writing). That creative energy not merely exposed and reflected upon the immediate cruelty and tangible oppression of colonial rule and its prison regime but also enlarged upon the future a self-governing India might justly anticipate. In this sense, Roads to Freedom employs history to deliver a present-day message—about the need for the "younger generation" to remember the "toil and sacrifices" (5) of those who made India's independence possible and the place of Muslims, of Urdu culture, and the progressive outlook Nehru and Roy embodied, in engendering a now endangered freedom. One can but laud Hasan's intentions, but as a work...

From Asylums to Jails: The Prevailing Impact on Female Offenders

More than half of prisoners who are in city or county jails have a mental illness, a higher number than persons incarcerated in state and federal prisons (James & Glaze, 2006). More important, 75% of jailed female offenders have a mental illness compared to 63% of their male counterparts. By their very nature, jails are dramatically different compared to prisons. Persons in jails are there temporarily or are serving a relatively short sentence, normally a year or less. Thus, jails have higher daily admissions and releases of offenders than prisons. Jail administrators and correctional officers are also more often confronted with inmates whose mental stability deteriorates faster upon their incarceration. Quickly identifying mentally ill inmates, particularly those who are suicidal, is essential in order to provide timely intervention and manage this population. This article provides an in-depth examination of women's mental illnesses and etiology. It also provides a critical analysis of risk factors and assessment tools that jail staff and administrators may use to help identify mentally ill female inmates. The article concludes with a discussion of postrelease issues and programs.

Win–Win: How Health Care Professionals and Jail Administrators Can Collaborate to Address HIV Behind Bars

Win–Win: How Health Care Professionals and Jail Administrators Can Collaborate to Address HIV Behind Bars

Expanding the Literature on Job Satisfaction in Corrections

While few variables have been studied with greater frequency than job satisfaction, outcomes have largely reflected ambiguous and inconsistent findings. To advance empirical knowledge as it relates to job satisfaction in corrections, this research design addresses a number of shortcomings prevalent in extant correctional literature. In that regard, it uniquely focuses on the rarely explored work environment of jails in the United States, incorporates a nationwide target population, includes both personal and organizational variables in the analysis, and employs a multifaceted inferential methodology based on the strength of causal analysis. Results indicate that it is not the personal variables such as age, race, gender, or ethnicity that primarily account for the job satisfaction of jail line staff, but rather, organizational variables. These include a supportive work climate, empowerment/autonomy, and compensation/benefits, with the greatest contributor being the employee’s overall work environment. Implications of the findings for sheriffs and jail administrators committed to the long-term process of elevating employee job satisfaction are discussed.

Identifying Collateral Effects of Offender Reentry Programming Through Evaluative Fieldwork

The transfer of offender supervision from prisons to community corrections has prioritized the implementation of reentry programming and outcome evaluation oriented toward impact specification and evidence based practices discovery. Similar to rehabilitation research, generally, reentry scholarship tends toward the statistical documentation of recidivism and related public safety indicators while under-utilizing qualitative techniques. This study reports the qualitative methods and findings from a mixed methods evaluation of a national model county reentry program for offenders with co-occurring disorders. Observation of treatment services, in-depth interviews with jail administrators and services providers, and focus group interviews with a sample of treatment group participants evidenced collateral benefits of programming. Discussion centers on treatment program implications and the value of mixed methods for justice program evaluation.

'Turn Around', 'Bend Over', 'Squat', and 'Cough': The Supreme Court Strips the Fourth Amendment 'Naked' in Florence v. Board of Chosen Freeholders

This case note criticizes the Supreme Court’s decision in Florence v. Board of Chosen Freeholders of County. of Burlington, 132 U.S 1510 (2012), which held that under the Fourth Amendment, jail administrators can require all arrestees admitted to the general population of a jail to undergo a visual strip/cavity search, even for minor offenses and even without reasonable suspicion to believe the arrestee is in possession of a concealed weapon or contraband. Particularly, the case note follows a historical development of the Fourth Amendment and the complexity of defining reasonable searches by circuit courts. Additionally, it examines the “tug of war” among the circuits leading up to the Florence decision. Furthermore, it explores the inconsistent and mixed applications of Bell v. Wolfish, 441 U.S. 520 (1979), to Fourth Amendment jail-strip-search cases by circuit courts. Bell considered for the first time the constitutionality of a search performed on a pre-trial detainee inside prison walls vis-a-vis a blanket strip-search jail policy. In addition to providing a detailed explanation of the facts, procedural history, and disposition of the Florence case, including all concurring and dissenting opinions, this note further analyzes and critiques Florence’s questionable holding and rationale. Specifically, it addresses three distinct issues: (1) the Supreme Court’s failure to address the manner of the strip searches, which could in turn transform arrestees into victims of sexual violence and abuse; (2) the Supreme Court’s failure to consider current state laws and federal policies requiring reasonable suspicion to strip search a prison detainee; and (3) the Supreme Court’s troublesome conclusion that blanket strip-search policies actually serve as an effective deterrent against weapon and contraband concealment by prison detainees.

Should I Stay or Should I go?

Research on turnover in the correctional workplace has predominately focused on investigating the relationship between job satisfaction and turnover intent among prison staff. In an effort to broaden that level of inquiry to encompass the jail workforce, this study analyzes data from a national survey of 1,924 line-level jail staff to assess the impact of both work-related variables and personal characteristics on the intention of employees to resign. Although not randomly generated, respondents represent 46 states and are generally reflective of what is known about composition of the national line officer jail workforce in terms of demographics. Descriptive results indicate that the majority of jail officers are satisfied with their jobs and have no intention of quitting. Further logistic regression modeling confirms related literature indicating that the most influential variables are dynamic factors such as job satisfaction and work environment, rather than the static variables associated with individual employee characteristics, such as gender, age, or race. Since the environmental variables investigated are amenable to change, it would appear that, with greater insights into these dynamic precursors of thoughts about quitting, jail administrators can develop strategic initiatives targeted toward proactively reducing the fiscal cost and intangible impact of voluntary turnover.

Library Services to Inmates in the Rural County Jails of Western North Carolina

This paper investigates the current statues of library collections and services in the rural jails in western North Carolina. The authors interviewed the sheriffs and jail administrators in 6 of the 7 western most county detention centers. The benefits of reading and importance of literacy to this underserved population, descriptions the collections and library service policies along with photographs of the actual book collections and the challenges the jails face in maintaining and delivering these services, are presented. This paper advocates that one possible solution to this situation is working towards building partnerships between the public library systems and their local jails and how that can benefits everyone in the community.

Turning off jail turnover: do generational differences matter?

Reducing turnover in America’s jails is a significant fiscal concern and a serious organizational challenge. When determining how to improve retention, the private sector has been influenced by the literature on generational relevance. To explore whether similar cohort-driven motivators might be productively directed toward reducing jail turnover, the application of generational relevance theory to jails was empirically tested. To assess the impact of retention-related variables on various age cohorts working in America’s jails, a national survey was administered to jail staff throughout the country. Results indicate that less than half of the variables included in the analysis reached levels of statistical significance when analyzed by generational cohorts, and even among significant variables, over one-third were age-driven by nature. Although the findings do little to advance the cause of generational relevance theory, they are not without merit for jail administrators seeking to reduce turnover, pointing toward the universal appeal such intrinsic factors as treating people fairly, creating a positive work climate, and assuring that employees are listened to, have input, and are recognized, respected, and appreciated. Essentially, results indicate that reducing jail turnover is more likely to be a product of initiatives that are generically requisite than generationally relevant.

Trouble in the Heartland: Challenges Confronting Rural Jails

There has been very little scholarship on the roles and functions of rural jails in the United States. This study examines some of the key challenges facing these small correctional institutions, using data from two national surveys, focus groups of jail administrators, and the results from a survey of Texas jail administrators. These studies solicited information about the operational challenges and changing offender populations in small and rural jails. In order to better respond to these changing characteristics, a number of policy options for rural jails are considered, including: regionalization, transferring the operations of local jails to state departments of corrections, increasing alternatives to incarceration, expanding local capacity, abiding by standards or becoming accredited, and privatizing local corrections. The merits of these different solutions are examined.

Recruiting the Next Generation of Jail Employees: Does Generational Relevance or Agency Size Make a Difference?

Given their multiple functions, inadequate funding, and generally low visibility, America’s jails have sustained an ongoing struggle to recruit a sufficient quantity and quality of applicants to effectively fulfill their mission. Although the current economic downturn has temporarily curtailed turnover, postponed retirements, and intensified job competition, the cyclical nature of economic developments assures that jails will once again be forced into aggressive recruitment rivalry. To proactively address such upcoming challenges, it is essential to determine how jails can most productively target and select the best candidates. Providing information to assist jail administrators in that regard, a national survey was conducted to identify what attracted various age groups to jail employment, in order to ascertain whether a differential recruitment focus is needed to attract the new generation of workers. Jail size was also considered in terms of whether the ease or difficulty of progression through the selection screening process made a difference. Most revealing, however, was the lack of statistically-significant differences between various generational cohorts. Virtually all age groups were in substantial agreement that the extrinsic attractions of jail employment—such as salary, benefits, pension plan, and job stability--were their most important job consideration factors. Overall, findings point toward the recruitment benefit that jails may potentially derive from capitalizing on the advantages of being a steady rock of dependable employment, especially in times that are characterized by job insecurity and economic hardships.

In Search of Respect: Examining Arrestee Satisfaction with Police

Recent research suggests that attitudes toward police hinge upon the procedures officers use in their interactions with the public. Using survey data collected from a sample of adults arrested and booked into a local jail in Washington County, Arkansas, this paper examines some of the factors that influence arrestees’ satisfaction with police. Results reveal that the most important factor influencing arrestees’ opinions of police was their belief in the benevolence of police actions, followed by their perceptions of the effectiveness of police, whether or not their arresting officer treated them with respect, racial group membership, and total household income. These findings lend support to the “normative” or “process-based” model of policing. The authors discuss the implications of these findings for police and jail administrators.

Jail Administrators' Perceptions of the Use of Psychiatric Advance Directives in Jails

Jail Administrators' Perceptions of the Use of Psychiatric Advance Directives in Jails

Toward Successful Postbooking Diversion: What Are the Next Steps?

Toward Successful Postbooking Diversion: What Are the Next Steps?

Jail Administrators' Perceptions of the Use of Psychiatric Advance Directives in Jails

Jail Administrators' Perceptions of the Use of Psychiatric Advance Directives in Jails

Jail Administrators' Perceptions of the Use of Psychiatric Advance Directives in Jails

Individuals with serious mental illnesses are at high risk of incarceration. Jails are often unable to obtain information needed to provide appropriate care. Psychiatric advance directives may be useful tools to communicate treatment information to jails. This study explored their use as a novel intervention for individuals with mental illnesses in jails. Eighty jail administrators in North Carolina were surveyed to determine their support for psychiatric advance directives in jails. Relationships between respondents' job type (jail administrator or medical administrator) or jail census and support for the directives were examined by using chi square tests. Open-ended responses were analyzed using qualitative methods. Seventy-three percent of respondents indicated they supported psychiatric advance directives. Respondents from jails at or below a median census of 120 were significantly more likely to support psychiatric advance directives than those from larger jails. Psychiatric advance directives' informational function may prove valuable in jail settings. Additional research assessing directives as interventions for individuals with mental illnesses at risk of incarceration is needed.