Race, Staff, and Punishment: Representative Bureaucracy in American State Prisons

A total of 1.5 million people are incarcerated in the United States’ prisons. Tens of thousands are placed in restrictive, solitary confinement units. Building on theories of representative bureaucracy, this article considers both the race of the inmates and the race of correctional staff. The article has three main findings: that minority prison staff have higher preferences for rehabilitation and lower preferences for punishment, that prisons with a high percentage of Black inmates utilize punishment at higher rates, and that representation, in the form of Black staff, helps ameliorate the high level of punishment associated with a high percentage of Black inmates.

Does Military Service Make the Experience of Prison Less Painful? Voices From Incarcerated Veterans

There are more than 100,000 military veterans incarcerated in prisons throughout the United States. Nevertheless, almost nothing is known about these veterans or their incarceration experiences. In this article, we present results from a survey of more than 1,100 inmates in a large state correctional system to determine how inmates who are military veterans compare with inmates who have not served in the military in terms of their willingness to serve alternative sanctions to avoid imprisonment. The data reveal that, with the exception of military service, inmates who are military veterans are significantly less likely than their counterparts who have not served in the military to accept a variety of community sanctions over prison. In addition, Black inmates who have not served in the military are somewhat different than White inmates who have served in the military in those choices. Implications of these findings for future research are discussed.

Health during Industrialization

This article considers the relationship among race, stature, and proximity to Pennsylvania's nineteenth-century dairy-producing regions. Previous studies demonstrate a positive relationship between stature and access to dairy products. However, Pennsylvania's dairy-producing region was also close to urbanized Philadelphia. Here a new dataset is used from the Pennsylvania state prison system to track the heights of black and white males incarcerated from 1829 to 1909. It is documented that both blacks and whites living in southeastern Pennsylvania near both dairy-producing counties and urbanized Philadelphia were consistently shorter than individuals born and incarcerated elsewhere, indicating that the effects of urbanization dominated proximity to dairy production. Black inmates were consistently shorter than their white counterparts. The well-known midcentury height decline is confirmed among white men and is extended to blacks as well.

Patterns of Rule-Violating Behaviors and Adjustment to Incarceration among Murderers

The importation and deprivation models were used to examine the patterns of rule violation among groups of seldom studied, long-term inmates who have no hope of being granted parole, murderers sentenced to life without parole or death. Age and race were found to be consistent predictors of prison rule violations, with younger Black inmates being most likely to commit assaultive violations and to be among a group of high-rate offenders. During the first 10 years of their incarceration, these lifers and death-sentenced inmates exhibited a stable pattern of rule violating congruent with previous research on long-term inmate populations.

Prison Norms for Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices

Prison norms for the Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices were developed using 1126 male inmates in a prison in Nevada. 556 of the men were white, 480 black, 55 Mexican, 19 Cuban, 9 Asian, and 7 Native-American. Norms were provided for three age categories—under 35 years, ages 36 to 54, and all ages combined. Normative information was presented for white inmates, black inmates, and all ethnicities combined. There was substantial overlap in distribution of scores by black and white inmates.

An Assessment of the Megargee Typology in Lifelong Criminal Violence

The Megargee Typology, an inmate classification system, was examined to determine its effectiveness in predicting institutional adjustment and future recidivism. The MMPI scores of black inmates from the medium-security prison caught up in prison riots were classified into the ten typology groups conceptualized in this procedure. The inmates in the five typologies that are alledgedly reported to be most assaultive and violence prone were compared with those in a nonviolence prone typologies relative to (1) type of offense for which incarcerated, (2) incidences of violence while incarcerated, and (3) recidivism and future violent criminal activity. Chi-square analyses revealed no significant differences between the two sets of typologies in relation to any of the three criteria. Implications of the results and suggestions for future research are discussed.

Speech, Language and Hearing Disorders in an Adult Penal Institution

It has been speculated that the prevalence of communicative disorders among prison inmates is considerably higher than that found in the general population, but research regarding inmate speech and hearing disorders is limited. This study investigated the nature and extent of communicative disorders in an inmate population of a medium-security penal institution in southeastern Virginia. The results of the screening indicated a slightly lower prevalence of stuttering, higher prevalences of articulation, voice, and hearing disorders, and more deficient receptive vocabulary skills than found in the general population. Some dialectal variations among black inmates are noted and the possible influence of linguistic-cultural interference on the results is discussed.

Personality, Intellectual, and Behavioral Differences between Black, Chicano, and White Prison Inmates in the Utah State Prison

There is very little literature on racial characteristics of prisoners. What literature is available seems to be historical and theoretical rather than empirical. The proportion of blacks in the prison population was 15 times greater than that of the Utah population. The proportion of Chicanos was three times greater in the prison than in the state population. The present correlational study compared 668 Caucasian, 103 Chicano, and 73 black inmates on 47 variables considered relevant to the prison setting. Religious differences were prominent as were differences in scores on standard intelligence tests. Chicanos tended to be more assaultive. Blacks posed less escape risk, and fewer blacks used alcohol. Blacks scored as better adjusted on Bipolar Psychological Inventory Scales relating to feelings of personal inadequacy. Other differences were found.