Who has the power? Manipulating and reclaiming social support in solitary confinement

Social support is often cited as among the most important factors in successful adjustment to prison, reentry, and overall desistance. Yet, few studies have sought to explore the impact of familial social support on incarcerated persons’ experiences in solitary confinement. Analyzing the narratives of men housed in isolation units in one Northwestern state, the present study identifies the variety of experiences they have with social support during isolation, particularly focusing on the prison’s role in structuring relationships between incarcerated persons and their loved ones. Findings reveal that standard communication restrictions in solitary confinement have disparate impacts on differently situated persons living in prisons. Those who are able to maintain familial attachments are able to cope with isolation, first, by maintaining roles in prosocial webs, and second, by accessing material and emotional support, advocacy, and psychological stability. In spite of these benefits, policies and procedures in solitary confinement exacerbate the imprisonment experience and yield negative consequences for prison life, health, family, and prison operations.

How Religion Contributes to the Common Good, Positive Criminology, and Justice Reform

This paper argues that religious freedom has consistently been linked to volunteerism and the work of faith-based individuals and organizations in addressing a variety of social problems including crime and delinquency, substance abuse treatment, offender rehabilitation, and prison reentry. Moreover, the emerging subfield of positive criminology is beginning to document the ways in which faith-based efforts are providing more positive and restorative approaches that tend to be effective in reducing crime and promoting prosocial outcomes. Indeed, religious interventions are proving to be some of the most innovative and consequential at a time when jurisdictions are faced with ever-tightening budgets. Moreover, the role of faith-based volunteers and even offender-led religious movements in the process of identity transformation and reform is particularly relevant and timely when there is such a widespread call for evidence-based approaches to justice reform.

Persons With Severe Mental Illnesses and Sex Offenses: Recidivism After Prison Release

Individuals who have committed sex offenses (ISOs) with severe mental illnesses are a complex population to serve and more research is needed to guide practice and policy, especially around community supervision, enrollment in Medicaid, housing, employment, criminal justice contacts, and reincarceration after prison reentry. To further the literature in this area, we used logistic regression to model recidivism and admissions to violator or prison facilities among 127 ISOs with severe mental illnesses and 2,935 people with severe mental illnesses who were incarcerated in prison for other crimes. Compared to prison releasees with severe mental illnesses who committed crimes other than sex offenses, prison releasees with severe mental illnesses who committed sex offenses were admitted to violator facilities at higher rates, when controlling for substance use, Medicaid enrollment, homelessness, and unemployment. Implications for practice, policy and research are discussed.

The Missing Organizational Dimension of Prisoner Reentry: An Ethnography of the Road to Reentry at a Nonprofit Service Provider

Prisoner reentry has received great interest in political sociology, criminology, and beyond. Research documents the struggles of individuals trying to find their way back into society. Less attention has been given to the organizational aspects of reentry. This is unfortunate given the rapid growth of nonprofit reentry organizations in the U.S., which introduces a new set of questions about the context and challenges to prisoner reentry. Drawing on an ethnography of Safe, a nonprofit reentry organization in the Northeast, I describe the organization's pivotal role in institutionalizing the pathway to prisoner reentry: a road to reentry, which takes former prisoners through a process that reconfigures their morality, identity, and social relationships. The road to reentry concept helps bring together scholars of the welfare state and criminology by highlighting how the challenges of prisoner reentry rely on how this process is organized. The way in which prison reentry is organized, in turn, affects former prisoners' agency and shapes the relationship between these men and women and their respective families and communities.

Do We Have It All Wrong? The Protective Roles of Peers and Criminogenic Risks From Family During Prison Reentry

Prior work on the process of reentry from prison has highlighted the pivotal role that family and peers play during reintegration. Families are traditionally understood as important protective mechanisms against recidivism whereas peers are typically viewed as primarily criminogenic. Yet, drawing from differential coercion and social support theory, family and peer relationships can both be supportive (and protect against recidivism) and coercive (and contribute to recidivism). Using four waves of data from the Serious and Violent Offender Reentry Initiative, results of mixed-effects models demonstrate that family, but not peer, coercion relates to increased odds of reincarceration. Peer, but not family, social support relates to decreased odds of reincarceration. Findings suggest families are primarily criminogenic, whereas peers are protective during reentry.

The Role of Sanctions and Incentives in Promoting Successful Reentry: Evidence From the SVORI Data

Prior work on the efficacy of incentives and sanctions in community supervision practices suggests both can encourage desistance during prison reentry. Yet limited scholarship has investigated how sanctions and incentives impact reentry together and most research in this area is cross-sectional. Using four waves of data from the Serious and Violent Offender Reentry Initiative, results of cross-lagged dynamic panel models reveal that certain incentives, namely supervision officer praise, relate to significantly lower levels of offending and substance use. Conversely, supervision sanctions and supervision officer reprimands relate to higher levels of offending and substance use over time. Overall, supervision practices that emphasize recognizing prosocial behavior over punishing noncompliance appear to hold greater promise for promoting successful reentry. Findings suggest that supervision agencies should consider the potential negative outcomes of sanctions during the reintegration process, and policies should be put into place that more closely consider the role of sanctions on behavior.

Digital Rehabilitation: A Model of Reentry Into the Digital Age

Despite societal dependence on digital technologies and the Internet across the developed world, current prisoner rehabilitation, reentry models, and practices across most U.S. state correctional systems only target offline realms and issues while disregarding the digital realm. By integrating existing models of rehabilitation and reentry with recently developed and refined digital divide theories, this article develops a new model of digital rehabilitation, considering both the online and the offline realms. The proposed model fills a gap in the literature and allows for a more complete understanding of the problems that parolees encounter on release from prison. By conceptualizing corresponding fields and resources across three realms—prison, reentry, and digital—the digital rehabilitation and reentry model enables systematic research into the extent to which the digital realm can assist in a more successful reentry process.

Gender, Race, Class, and Health

This study explores the intersection of race, class, and gender on substance abuse treatment and human immunodeficiency virus risk among 12 incarcerated black women by integrating the Health Belief Model with Black Feminist Theory. The findings suggest that the culture and context of substance abuse not only influenced the women’s perception of susceptibility of risk and severity of risk but, perhaps more importantly, the perceived benefit of the intervention on their life circumstances. These findings have implications for the conceptualization, implementation, and evaluation of substance abuse treatment, HIV prevention education, and prison reentry programs targeting Black women.