Beyond the Gates: Teaching Race and Politics in Brazil in a Prison Education Program

The project of liberatory education is fraught with complications in a Small Liberal Arts College or SLAC environment. Authors bell hooks and Paulo Freire look to an ethics of care, love, and mutual restoration of humanity through teaching openly and freely. My initial teaching experiences as an assistant professor revealed that this liberatory aim could not be fulfilled at the college campus, so I taught in a prison college education program. The goals of this article are: 1) to elucidate the complicated relationship that a woman faculty of color at the intersections of multiple identities has in adjusting to the SLAC environment; 2) to expound upon my weekly exit from campus and entry into prison education as a vehicle to advance institutional goals for outreach and social justice; 3) to interrogate prison education epistemologies and describe the counternarratives and practical strategies developed in a course on Race and Politics in Brazil to decolonize the curriculum; and 4) to express the realities of teaching a Black-centered, intersectional course in an all-male maximum security prison setting. It was through this practical prison teaching experience that I stretched the limits of my practice of education and found a temporary home in which to do so.

Situational Risk Factors for Inmate-on-Staff Assaults

This study examines whether situational characteristics of incidents involving inmates and correctional staff are related to the occurrence of inmate-on-staff assaults. The analyses compare assaultive and non-assaultive incidents at an all-male, maximum security prison. The results of logistic regression models show that several situational characteristics (time, location, behavior of inmates, and actions taken by staff) differentiate between inmate-on-staff assaults and non-assaultive incidents. The results suggest that inmate-on-staff assaults can be reduced through the use of situational crime prevention, as well as training on signs indicating an assault is likely, the effective use of protective strategies, and de-escalation techniques.

Measuring the Effectiveness of Deradicalisation: The Development of MIKRA Risk Assessment

Instruments for identifying risk of terrorist offenders could help counterterrorism practitioners define parameters of effective rehabilitation and detect a change in risk level of offenders before and after treatment. This study aims to develop Motivation-Ideology-Capability Risk Assessment, known as MIKRA, to examine the level of risk of terrorist offenders. The study involved Indonesian counterter-rorism experts and practitioners for examining the construct validity of MIKRA and terrorist offenders at a maximum-security prison for analysing the external and criterion-related validity. External validity was implemented by comparing offenders’ MIKRA scores with their risk categories reported by Counterterror-rism Special Task Force. Internal consistency reliability (Cronbach’s Alpha) was also applied to examine MIKRA’s psychometric properties. The results indicate alpha reliability α= 0.933. Furthermore, offenders’ MIKRA scores are correlated significantly with categories of risk released by the official, but not correlated with the non-offenders’ scores. This means MIKRA is valid to investigate risks of terrorist offenders.

“They Still Know I’m Their Momma”: Incarcerated Mothers’ Perceptions of Reunification and Resuming a Caregiver Role

Using in-depth interviews with mothers incarcerated in a maximum-security prison, the current study explores incarcerated mothers’ own perceptions and expectations regarding reunification with their families. For many of these mothers, reunification was an exciting prospect, but they recognized that the transition may not be easy for themselves, their children, or their children’s caregivers. Notably, while past research has treated reunification as including assuming care of children, our study suggests that some women view reunification strictly as rebuilding relationships with their children without plans to assume caring for them. We discuss implications for policy and programming for institutional and community corrections.

CLUSTER ANALYSIS FOR GROUPING OF PRISONER PERSONALITY IN THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 4.0 ERA

Industrial revolution 4.0 has affected all fields, including Indonesian Ministry of Law and Human Rights whose conducting a revitalization of correctional service where capacity was the main point of clustering is now changing into clustering based on change in behavior of the prisoners, which then used as recommendation for placing prisoners into Minimum Security, Medium Security and Maximum Security Prison. Prisoner’s Personality will show a prisoner’s tendency to behave and to think. Personality can be measured through Big Five Personality Model consisting of Openness to Experience, Concientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism. To simplify the placement process, the K-Means Clustering method is used. Of 137 prisoners assessed from Rangkasbitung and Serang Prison, 27 prisoners being placed to Medium Security prison, 52 prisoners to Maximum Security prison, and 58 prisoners to Minimum Security prison.

Η επίδραση του τύπου φυλακής στην επιθετικότητα και την ψυχική υγεία των κρατουμένων στις ελληνικές φυλακές

Prisons differ in the degree of autonomy they provide to inmates. The objective of this study is to measure the impact of the prison environment, as reflected in the prison types, on prisoners’ self-reported aggression and mental health. This question becomes even more relevant since the recent bill opposing the set-up of a Type-C maximum security prison in Greece. The hypothesis is that the greater the degree of "security" (i.e., closed and judicial prisons being of a higher level of security compared with rural), the more likely the prisoners will be to exhibit aggression or poorer mental health. To test this hypothesis, a Multivariate Analysis of Covariance was used with prisoners’ age and imprisonment years as covariates. Prison type had a statistically significant effect on hostility and verbal aggression (with the highest levels recorded in the judicial prisons) and on depression (with lower levels in the rural prisons). In contrast, the effect of prison type on anger-physical aggression and anxiety was not significant. The results underline the importance of the prison environment and the needfor further strengthening of the rural prisons that will help minimize the physical and psychological risks for the inmates.

Crisis Intervention Team Training in a Correctional Setting: Examining Compliance, Mental Health Referrals, and Use of Force

The Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) model was developed as a specialized police-based program in which officers are trained to safely interact with individuals with mental illnesses. In 2011, the Minnesota Department of Corrections adapted this program for corrections. This study compares prison incidents involving CIT officers to a comparison sample of non-CIT incidents on a number of outcomes, including gaining compliance from people in custody (either immediately or as an incident unfolds), making mental health referrals, and using force against people in custody. We conducted a content analysis of reports describing 500 incidents in an all-male, maximum security prison and estimated multivariate binary logistic models to control for characteristics of situations, incarcerated people, and employees. The findings provide some support for implementing CIT training in a correctional setting, but some less encouraging results show that improvements to the program are still needed.