Prison Violence Research Articles

Exploring the Criminal Life Course of Uncontrollably Violent Detained Persons

This empirical study was the first to explore the criminal life course of people imprisoned in a Dutch facility for uncontrollably violent persons as a consequence of prison violence ( N = 383). Their characteristics were compared with those from studies of Dutch incarcerated people and those of persons residing in an in-prison psychiatric facility ( N = 1,913). Results showed that uncontrollably violent detained persons are an extreme group: their criminal life course is characterized by an early onset, an extensive and severe criminal career, and high scores on most violence-related historical risk factors. The severity and early onset of their criminal life course, their problematic behavior, and their problems in other life domains became even more apparent following our comparisons. This study underlines the relevance of detained persons’ pre-prison characteristics in addressing prison violence risk factors, and shows that early detection and monitoring is essential to prevent (more) damage.

Prison Violence in Latin America: Criminal Governance and an Absent State

Using a survey applied to incarcerated populations in Latin American countries, this study aims to examine the factors that determine the existence of violence in prisons and explain why some penitentiaries are more violent than others by studying variables such as inmate age, sentence length, and crime type. A quantitative examination is used to determine the effect of these variables on prison violence (property theft and beatings), and whether it is a result of the living conditions within the prisons. The results indicate that the most overpopulated prisons, with the worst living conditions, have the lowest levels of violence (in Brazil and El Salvador). The lower rates of violence observed in certain Latin American prisons appear to be explained by the existence of criminal governments within penitentiary systems, organized and run by a dominant prison gang.

Strategic anarchy; a model of prison violence as a means to informal governance and rent extraction

Prison gangs are often thought to create a “culture of violence” in U.S. prisons and jails. Yet mounting research and evidence suggests that prison gangs, in pursuit of profits from illicit market activity, also act as a check on the violent behavior of the broader prison population. This paper synthesizes existing research on prison gangs into a modeling framework that treats gangs as profit-maximizing suppliers and sources of informal governance in an illicit marketplace. The model offers broad policy implications that highlight the challenges and potential unintended consequences of correctional policies that address violence and gang activity.

Prison Violence as Punishment

Prison Violence as Punishment

Gang affiliation and prison violence: a comparison of matching analyses

Gang affiliation and prison violence: a comparison of matching analyses

What is a ‘good enough’ prison? An empirical analysis of key thresholds using prison moral quality data

Performance thresholds and minimum standards in prison have preoccupied policy makers and practitioners alike for some time. These standards are based on widely accepted statements of principle, but benchmarks are rarely set or explored empirically. Nor has there been any attempt to describe or define higher-end thresholds; the point at which outcomes become positive, or stated principles are achieved. In this study, we provide an empirical demonstration of how quality of life thresholds may be determined using data from 518 Measuring the Quality of Prison Life (MQPL) surveys conducted in prisons in England and Wales (2009–2020) and examine their relationship to five violence outcomes: serious prisoner on prisoner assaults, serious assaults on staff, self-harm incidents requiring hospital treatment, self-inflicted deaths, and homicides. The results suggested that thresholds exist for most of the MQPL dimensions. A set of lower ‘unsafe’ and higher ‘minimally safe’ thresholds were produced. We found that the scores of prisons below the lower threshold had a very strong relationship with each of our five serious forms of violence in prison. Similarly, prisons that did not manage to cross the ‘minimally safe’ threshold also had strong relationships with incidents of violence in their prison but were at slightly lower risk of those incidents occurring. Striking differences in mean incidents rates were found when comparing prisons below the lower threshold to prisons above the ‘minimally safe’ threshold. Our findings suggest that to operate a safe enough (and therefore legitimate) prison, a combination of harmony, security and professionalism dimensions above a certain threshold should be achieved.

Violence within women's prisons and its implications on reintegration effectiveness

The involvement of women in various aspects of life, both socially and economically, has exposed the potential for criminal behaviour among women. This situation has led to the phenomenon of women's involvement in criminal acts commonly associated with men, such as robbery, murder, organized crime, and human trafficking. Poor social and economic conditions tend to be triggering factors and solid reasons for women to engage in criminal activities. This background has become the basis for the increasing number of women in prison in Indonesia, opening the possibility of various forms of violence within women's prisons. This presents a significant challenge for the management of women's prisons in optimizing the reintegration system due to the escalation of significant demotivation resulting from the violence experienced by female inmates, both among themselves and with prison staff. This research employs an exploratory qualitative approach, focusing on women involved in criminal cases and sentenced to prison. Primary data from interview results are descriptively analysed, producing a comprehensive, authentic, and representative narrative. The findings of this study indicate that the concept of punishment in Indonesia still emphasizes punitive functions over corrective functions, where both physical and mental violence are considered effective forms of punishment, especially for women. Violence occurring within women's prisons is then negatively responded to and becomes a driving factor for the decreased interest of female inmates in succeeding in the reintegration program. This reluctance then triggers a negative response from the staff in the form of violence against female inmates. A solution to mitigate violence in women's prisons is the placement in open prisons, with the involvement of independent external parties in both the supervision process and the implementation of reintegration programs to achieve an inclusive and constructive effect for all parties involved.

‘Violence is all he knew, and it seemed to work’: using the power threat meaning framework to explore prison officers’ understandings of violence in Irish prisons

ABSTRACT In 2018 the Irish Prison Service (IPS) opened the National Violence Reduction Unit (NVRU), becoming home to all prisoners managed under the Violently Disruptive Prisoner (VDP) policy, who were repeatedly engaged in serious violence in prison. Embedded in the NVRU is a joint operational-psychological approach, aiming to understanding the violence of these prisoners, and work with them to reduce it. This study explored NVRU prison officers’ understandings of the origins, experiences and expressions of the violence of NVRU prisoners, through the Power Threat Meaning Framework (PTMF). Prison officers (n = 13) participated in semi-structured interviews at two time-points: 6 months after the NVRU opening (n = 13), and 12 months after the NVRU opening (n = 11). From these aggregated transcripts (n = 24), 6 themes were identified: (1) power, (2) threat, (3) meaning, (4) threat response, (5) function of threat response, and (6) moderating factors. Prison officers confirmed many a priori elements of the existing provisional PTMF, whilst also contributing novel elements related to their subjective understandings of this specific cohort. These findings are interpreted in the context of existing empirical research. Implications for future research, and policy and practice within and beyond the NVRU, are suggested.

Who's holding the trauma? RE-ACT: increasing prison officer insights and reducing violence in prisons

According to Ministry of Justice data, violence in prisons in England and Wales is increasing. It is important to consider the impact that exposure to violent incidents can have on prison officers involved. An exposure which could influence how an individual will respond to future violent incidents. Every relational interaction can be therapeutic, and empowering, or destructive, and lead to a sense of hopelessness. To increase an understanding in prison officers' decision-making when responding to violence, the authors have developed a workshop (named RE-ACT) to increase awareness around decision-making when responding to violence. These psychologically underpinned, trauma-aware reflective workshops explore decision-making during violent incidents and are co-delivered by psychologists and security managers/operational staff. This article will discuss the rationale, development, design, delivery, and evaluation, of the workshops.

An exploratory study of prison-based violence from the contemporary prisoner perspective

PurposeUnderstanding and preventing prison-based violence remains a challenge for both prison professionals and academic researchers. Alongside the rising tide of prison violence, the contemporary researcher views prison violence as a social problem and something that needs to be understood from an ecological viewpoint before violence prevention strategies can be implemented. The purpose of this study was to present an exploratory investigation into the causes of violence within a Category B UK prison, its impact and the factors that contribute to violence prevention.Design/methodology/approachAdopting an ethnographic, qualitative methodology, semi-structured interviews were conducted with six prisoners to gather their individual perspectives on prison violence. Interview transcripts were analysed by the researcher using grounded theory analysis.FindingsResults revealed that participants perceived debt as a catalyst for violence and associated a sense of “loss” with emotional violent outbursts. Furthermore, participants placed responsibility on other prisoners and staff to facilitate violence prevention outcomes by making positive changes (prisoners) and being honest, and moral within the workplace (staff). Emphasis was placed on cultural maintenance factors that appeared to promote, reinforce and maintain a violent cultural environment.Practical implicationsIncluding the prisoner voice in prison violence research is fundamental to understanding the complexity of the problem. Understanding the cultural environment within which violence occurs strengthens the ecological perspective. Violence prevention strategies identified in this research requires change from prisoners, staff and ultimately the wider prison system if it is to succeed in preventing violence.Originality/valueResults are discussed considering their implications for future policy and practice in the context of violence prevention.

Victimization in Prison. A Study of Victimization and Prison Climate Dimensions in Belgian Prisons

ABSTRACT Prisoner victimization introduces significant challenges to penal institutions worldwide. Researchers across the globe already provided extensive knowledge on risk factors from community crime theories for prison victimization. Other scholars are focusing on prison climate. The present study contributes to previous works by exploring both the role of community crime theory (individual, prisoner related) risk factors and prison climate dimensions in explaining prisoner victimization in Belgium. Three climate dimensions – relationships, safety and autonomy – were analyzed. Specifically, the study examined a sample of 1,006 prisoners using bivariate and multivariate regression analyses. The multivariate results showed that prison climate dimensions significantly contribute to explaining prisoner victimization, in addition to the other risk factors. These findings suggest that deprivation and strain theories remain relevant for understanding prison violence. Future researchers should study other prison climate dimensions, as well as environmental characteristics that may facilitate victimization. This paper also highlights the importance of investments in prison climate, such as dynamic security through relationships, in addition to hard security.

Transgender Incarceration and Law Enforcement as a Source of Harm: Upstream and Primordial Prevention Perspectives.

In the United States (US), transgender individuals are more likely to experience violence and sexual assault in jails and prisons compared with cisgender peers. Harms of incarceration on transgender individuals include limited access to medical care and hormone therapy, as well as being housed in facilities based on biological sex instead of gender identity. However, there has been insufficient research on addressing factors that lead to transgender individuals being incarcerated in the first place. In this article, we argue the need to focus on law enforcement interactions with transgender individuals in the US to reduce incarceration-related harms. Using the perspectives of primordial prevention and focusing on upstream factors that create health-related harms, we assert that focusing on law enforcement is a necessary component in addressing how the criminal justice system harms transgender individuals.

THE ROLE OF SUPERVISING JUDGES IN PREVENTING VIOLENCE AGAINST PRISONERS IN CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTIONS

The occurrence of violence in correctional institutions is a form of anomaly in the implementation of legislation. Based on the Corrections Law, it is emphasized that treatment of prisoners must be humane. Violence itself occurs due to many factors, namely lack of supervision from supervising judges. The Supervisory Judge has the duties and functions to ensure optimal implementation of criminal sentences in correctional institutions. This research is normative juridical research related to the role of supervisory judges in correctional institutions based on law in the scope of violence against prisoners while serving their sentences. The conclusion of this research is that the process of implementing observation and supervision has not run optimally so it is unable to contribute to the prevention of violence in prisons. The gap between rules and implementation causes the role of the Supervisory Judge to be suboptimal. The inhibiting factors are the lack of budget and transportation, an unbalanced number of judges and workload, a large number of prisoners, and limited time as an active judge as well as a supervising judge and observer. Even though the role of wasmat judges is quite strategic in efforts to prevent violence if examined normatively, there are still no regulations containing sanctions and setting strict monitoring and observation mechanisms, so that prevention of acts of violence cannot be achieved through supervision and observation of supervisory judges

Voice of incarcerated male youths in Malawi’s semi-urban prisons: a qualitative study

ObjectiveIncarcerated male youths in Malawi’s detention facilities face multiple threats to their health and well-being. The most common challenges are overcrowding, poor sanitation and a lack of access to basic...

Understanding prison violence in Aotearoa New Zealand using machine learning

Understanding prison violence in Aotearoa New Zealand using machine learning

Understanding prison violence in Aotearoa New Zealand using machine learning

AbstractPrison violence is a major safety issue for people in prison and staff. In Aotearoa New Zealand, all prison incidents are recorded on the Department of Corrections (Ara Poutama Aotearoa) COBRA database. An analysis of prison violence at the unit level is applied using machine learning to provide a prediction model of prison violence as well as identify important factors associated with violence. The analysis identifies gang affiliation and security class as important predictors of violence in prison. The study also demonstrates the importance of the social environment and spatial scale when conducting an analysis of prison data.

Evaluation of a prison violence prevention program: impacts on violent and non-violent prison infractions.

Individuals who commit acts of violence in prisons are often placed in highly controlled environments called restrictive housing (i.e., solitary confinement), which can have severe physical and mental health consequences and does not reduce violence. As such, North Carolina prisons have introduced the rehabilitative diversion unit (RDU) to reduce the use of restrictive housing and reduce violence in prison. We evaluated the effect of the RDU on prison infractions. We compared rates of infractions by type (including violent infractions) among men enrolled in the RDU and men who were eligible for the RDU but placed in restrictive housing for control purposes (RHCP). We also evaluated sustained program impacts by comparing the hazard of first infraction among these same two groups of men after program completion, when they had returned to the general prison population. Finally, we compared the hazard of first promotion to a less restrictive custody level (medium custody) when these men had returned to the general prison population. The primary analytic cohort was made up of 3128 men contributing 897,822 person-days. Adjusted rates of violent infractions were lower in the RDU than in RHCP (adjusted rate ratio: 0.6; 95% CI: 0.4, 1.1). All other categories of infractions, including drug-related infractions, occurred at higher rates during RDU, as compared to RHCP. In analyses of sustained program impacts, for most categories of infractions, there were no differences in the hazard of first infraction post-RDU and post-RHCP. However, the hazard of violent infraction post-RDU was higher (adjusted hazard ratio: 2.1; 95% CI: 1.1, 4.0) than post-RHCP. The hazard of promotion to a less restrictive custody level was higher post-RDU (adjusted hazard ratio: 17.4; 95% CI: 7.2, 42.2) than post-RHCP. We found the RDU program may be effective in reducing violence for men enrolled in the program, but that these benefits were not sustained. Continued programming may be a useful tool to transition men from the programmatically intensive environment of the RDU to the general prison population. Additionally, we recommend the expansion of evidence-based treatment for substance use disorder.

Greenspace in prison improves well-being irrespective of prison/er characteristics, with particularly beneficial effects for younger and unsentenced prisoners, and in overcrowded prisons

In this paper, we present evidence of estimated significant associations between greenspace and prisoners’ self-reported well-being, self-harm and violence in prisons in England and Wales. Refining and extending our previous research that estimated the relationship between greenspace and self-harm and violence while controlling for the effects of prison characteristics (e.g. prison size, over-crowding and security level), the findings in the present study show that greenspace remains significantly related to self-harm and violence when we additionally control for prison population characteristics (such as prisoner age, ethnicity, sentence length) and when we use additional self-reported indicators of well-being. Furthermore, our findings also show that the beneficial effects of greenspace appear to be particularly prominent in prison establishments that suffer from overcrowding or hold relatively large shares of younger and un-sentenced prisoners. Finally, our results reveal that greenspace has important impacts on the inter-relationships between self-reported well-being, self-harm and prison violence.

“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.

‘I’ve lived and bred violence my whole life’: understanding violence in the Irish Prison Service through the lens of the power threat meaning framework

ABSTRACT In 2018 the Irish Prison Service (IPS) opened the National Violence Reduction Unit (NVRU), which became home to a small amount of prisoners managed under the Violently Disruptive Prisoner (VDP) policy, who were repeatedly engaged in very serious violence in prison. The NVRU shifted practice under the VDP policy to a joint operational-psychological approach, with the aim of understanding the violent behaviour of these prisoners and working with them to reduce it. This study explored NVRU prisoners’ understandings of the origins, experiences and expressions of their violent behaviour through the lens of the Power Threat Meaning Framework (PTMF). Despite difficulties engaging this cohort, half (n = 3) of all prisoners residing in the NVRU during its first year participated in semi-structured interviews. Participants identified six themes: (1) power, (2) threat, (3) meaning, (4) threat response, (5) function of threat response and (6) moderating factors. In doing so they identified many a priori elements of the existing provisional PTMF, whilst also contributing novel elements related to their specific and subjective personal experiences. These findings are interpreted in the context of existing empirical research. Implications for future research, and policy and practice within and beyond the NVRU, are suggested.