Prison-based Research Research Articles

Racial Differences in Suicidal Behaviors and Post-Suicide Attempt Treatment: a Latent Class Analysis of Incarcerated Men's Experiences.

Community-based research has found racial differences in suicide attempts for Black and White men and in how men are treated after a suicide attempt; however, prison-based research has largely not explored such differences. This study examined racial differences in the circumstances of incarcerated men's suicide attempts and investigated health care disparities in staff responses to these suicide attempts. With administrative data from three state prisons over a 5-year period, we conducted a latent class analysis to explore patterns of suicide attempts for 207 incarcerated men. We examined race as a predictor of class membership. Black men were more likely than White men to use a method of hanging/suffocation for attempting suicide, and they were also commonly subjected to segregation when they attempted suicide. Black men were less likely to receive health care post-attempt than White men. Given the findings of this study, several key researches, practices, and policy directions are needed to prevent suicide and promote the health and well-being of incarcerated men, particularly incarcerated Black men.

Navigating the dynamics of trust, rapport and power while conducting social health research with people in prison

This paper critically reflects on conducting research with people in prison, including gaining trust and building rapport, and the power imbalances of conducting research in the prison setting. Navigating trust and power is key to successful prison-based research, but these navigations are not confined to the researcher–participant interaction and extend to include researcher entry into the prison and earlier processes such as the ethics application submission. Existing ‘how-to’ guides for prison-based research often draw on ethnographic studies which allow substantial time for the interviewer to build rapport with key prison contacts, including officers, as well as opportunity for people in prison to become familiar with the ethnographer’s presence prior to data collection. Drawing on prison-based research experience from three qualitative health studies pertaining to people in prison living with hepatitis C and/or history of injecting drug use (the primary risk factor for hepatitis C transmission), I consider challenges of access and strategies for on-the-spot rapport building with people in prison. The approaches outlined may be applicable to research with other population groups in which power imbalances may exist.

Community-engaged prison-based research in a pandemic: the efficacy of summative content analysis for understanding prison culture and climate

ABSTRACT The challenges presented by COVID-19 in prison settings highlight the need for research that captures the lived experiences and needs of incarcerated individuals. Primary data collection among people living in prison during the global pandemic, however, presents unfamiliar obstacles that require innovation and invite opportunities to adopt methods not traditional in criminal-legal research. This manuscript details the application of summative content analysis to consider incarcerated persons’ perceptions of institutional culture and climate. This research was conducted as part of the Prison Research and Innovation Initiative (PRII). A written open-ended questionnaire yielded data from 84 individuals incarcerated in a medium-security institution in the Midwest region of the United States. The results highlight several prominent themes in prison culture and climate and endorse the use of open-ended questionnaires analyzed with summative content analysis as a viable approach to collecting and examining high-quality data from people living in prison. The results from this work also underscore the efficacy of this method as a part of community-engaged research in prison settings.

Twenty Years in Prison: Reflections on Conducting Research in Correctional Environments

Prisons are a difficult terrain in which to undertake research. Our experience in conducting a comprehensive prevalence study of health factors across New South Wales has provided us with a unique perspective on how to overcome common difficulties when undertaking prison-based research that may otherwise seem insurmountable. We outline six domains that constitute major challenges to the successful completion of projects as we understand them and offer practical solutions where possible. Our aim is to encourage researchers to undertake this important work in a manner that will provide positive outcomes for researchers, organizations working in the corrections space, and inmates.

A Scoping Review of Qualitative Research Methods Used With People in Prison

Researchers undertaking qualitative interview and focus group research with people in prison must consider the research methods they use, given the ethical and practical complexities of prison-based research. In particular, there are explicit and implicit coercion risks and barriers to access, privacy, and confidentiality. To examine how the challenges of conducting rigorous qualitative research with prisoners were handled, we undertook a scoping review of recruitment and data collection processes reported in qualitative research with prisoners. We searched for peer-reviewed articles of qualitative interview and focus group research with adult prisoners, published in the English language from 2005 to 2017, using MEDLINE, Embase, PsycINFO, and CINAHL databases. There were 142 articles reporting on 126 studies which met the review inclusion criteria. Challenges related to coercion risk, participant recruitment, sampling, confidentiality, privacy, and working with prison-based intermediaries should be explicitly addressed and reported. Our findings highlight key considerations and contextualized strategies for recruitment and data collection for researchers who seek to conduct rigorous and ethical qualitative research with prisoners.

Peer violence in adolescent residential care: A qualitative examination of contextual and peer factors

This research examined the way contextual and peer factors influence peer violence in adolescent residential care. One hundred and twenty residents aged 11–21 from 20 residential care facilities participated in 20 focus groups about peer violence in care. The results demonstrated that four, mutually interrelated themes, contributed to explanations of violence amongst residents: 1) residential peer culture; 2) vulnerability at the beginning of institutionalization; 3) deprivation, stigmatization and frustration; and 4) poor relationship with staff. The results are discussed with reference to the existing residential care and prison-based research on bullying and peer violence and a number of research and policy recommendations are provided. • Four main themes contributed to peer violence amongst residents. • The first two themes included the peer culture and victimization upon admission. • The remaining themes included deprivation and poor relationship with staff. • A number of research and policy recommendations are provided.

Federal Regulations for Prison-Based Research: An Overview for Nurse Researchers

Federal Regulations for Prison-Based Research: An Overview for Nurse Researchers

Characteristics of male and female prisoners involved in bullying behavior

This study explores bullying behavior in a larger and more representative sample than previous prison-based research. It has two core aims, first to explore the nature of bullying in relation to indirect and direct aggression and, second, to explore the predictors of bully-category membership with particular reference to behavioral characteristics. Participants were adult men (n=728) and women (n=525) prisoners. All completed a behavioral measure of behavior indicative of bullying (Direct and Indirect Prisoner behavior Checklist, DIPC) that also explored prison-based behavior such as negative acts towards staff or prison rules, positive acts and drug-related behavior. Indirect aggression was, as predicted, reported more frequently than direct aggression, although this only held for perpetration. Bully-victims, as predicted, showed more negative behavior. Pure bullies and pure victims also showed more negative behavior than the other categories. The findings are discussed in relation to the environment in which bullying behavior is being assessed and with attention to the possible motivations underlying both bullying and negative behavior. Directions for future research are suggested.

Exploring definitions of bullying among personality disordered patients in a maximum-secure hospital

The current study explored the perceptions of staff and patients concerning how patient-to-patient bullying should be defined and what behaviours it should include. Participants were randomly selected from the Personality Disorder Unit of a maximum secure hospital. A total of sixty interviews were conducted (30 staff and 30 patients). Problems in attempting to utilise definitions of bullying developed for use in other contexts, i.e., schools, were identified. Patients and staff presented with similar views about how it should be defined: both felt that aggression did not have to be repeated or severe in order to be classed as bullying, that bullying could be accidental, that the power imbalance between perpetrator and victim was not always explicit and, finally, that victims could provoke bullies unintentionally. Indirect (i.e. covert) forms of aggression were less likely to be considered bullying than direct (i.e. overt) forms. A number of differences were found between staff and patients regarding how bullying was conceptualised. Staff were more likely than patients to hold the belief that some patients liked being bullied, and appeared to acknowledge a broader definition of bullying than patients, accounting for a wider range of aggressive behaviours. A number of similarities between the current study and previous prison-based research were found. The implications of these findings for current research and the value in attending to prison-based research are highlighted.

Coercion and informed consent in research involving prisoners

Prison-based research has been limited due to concern that prisoners may represent a vulnerable population secondary to possible coercion and limited capacity for voluntary informed consent. This study was designed to assess decisional capacity and susceptibility to coercion in prison research subjects. Subjects were 30 mentally ill prisoners and 30 healthy controls. The groups were compared on ability to provide informed consent to a hypothetical drug trial, susceptibility to possible coercion, neuropsychological functioning, and psychiatric symptoms. Results indicated that all controls and all but one of the prisoners demonstrated adequate capacity to consent to the hypothetical drug trial. However, when decisional capacity was measured quantitatively, prisoners performed significantly worse regarding two aspects of this ability. Regarding possible coercion, prisoners’ main reasons for participating in research included avoiding boredom, meeting someone new, appearing cooperative in hopes of being treated better, and helping society. Neuropsychological functioning was strongly positively correlated with decisional capacity and negatively correlated with susceptibility to possible coercion, whereas psychiatric symptoms were only weakly correlated with these variables. In conclusion, a very high percentage of particularly vulnerable, mentally ill prisoners demonstrated adequate capacity to consent to research. Lower scores on a quantitative measure of decisional capacity suggest that extra care should be taken during the consent process when working with these subjects. The reasons prisoners gave for participating in our research indicated that the prison setting may have influenced their decision to participate, but that they were not actually coerced into doing so. Despite serious past incidents, ethicists will need to consider the possibility that prisoners have become an overprotected population.