About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline
LOG IN
LOG IN

9 Crim. Just. Rev. 69 (1984)
The Effects of Prison Crowding upon Infraction Rates

handle is hein.journals/crmrev9 and id is 133 raw text is: THE EFFECTS OF PRISON CROWDING UPON INFRACTION RATES OBIE CLAYTON Department of Sociology University of Massachusetts/Boston Harbor Campus Boston, Massachusetts 02125 TIM CARR Director of Systems Georigia Department of Offender Rehabilitiation 952 East Tower Floyd Office Building Atlanta, Georgia 30334 ABSTRACT During the 1970s the prison populations grew at an alarming rate and researchers became interested in the effects of crowding on inmate behavior. Paulus, McCain, and Cox (1975; 1978) and D'Atri and Ostfeld (1975)found empirical evidence of physiological changes occurring in crowded prison populations. Other researchers have also uncovered deleterious effects due to crowded prison conditions. Unfortunately, the work in crowding has lagged behind other areas in corrections and there are few accepted paradigms. This research attempts to expand the current studies and, in doing so, examine the effects of crowding upon several groups of criminal offenders. The research is based upon a sample of 21,500 inmates, plus a subsample of 1,300 teenage prisoners. An analysis of variance and covariance found no crowding effects for the prison population as a whole. However, strong crowding effects were found among young black violent offenders. For this group, crowding was a stronger predictor of infraction rates than any of our control variables (age, time served, home county population density, race, or type of crime). We interpret these results as artifacts placing high-risk inmates in the largest, most crowded prisons. The American criminal justice system is facing a serious prob- lem revolving around the public's demand for more severe punish- ment of convicted criminal offenders (Blumstein, 1980). However, this push for increased incarceration comes at a time when prison overcrowding has become so acute that several federal courts have suggested that current prison conditions brought about by the increased populations constitute cruel and unusual punishment (Bell v. Wolfish, 1979). Overcrowded prisons, in addition to producing inhumane living conditions for the prisoners, also produce many management prob- lems for the prison officials. One of the most important problems confronting officials centers around prison discipline. Studies by Paulus, McCain and Cox (1975), Megargee (1976, 1977), Far- rington and Nuttel (1980) and other researchers have documented that overcrowded prisons experience greater disciplinary problems than non-crowded prisons. In a study of the federal prison system, Nacci, Teitelbaum, and Prather (1977) found that significantly higher rates of inmate assaults occurred during times of high density, but only among inmates of inmates of juvenile-youth and young adult facilities. Megargee (1977) also found a relationship between crowding and disruptive behavior in a study of 18-25 year- old inmates of the Federal Correctional Institution in Tallahassee, Florida. Megargee suggested that the rate of disruptive behavior was more strongly related to high density than to high population. Given the findings from these studies and the fact that a dispro- portionate number of inmates are young suggests that more research is needed in the area of prison crowding. Also, the preceeding studies illustrate the methodological problems associ- ated with crowding research; namely, whether the unit of analysis is the individual inmate, or an aggregation such as the year end population. The literature on urban crowding has shown that aggregation can grossly distort the intercorrelations among vari- ables (Paulus, 1978), because heterogeneous populations contain- ing diverse statistical characteristics are compressed into single data points. Like urban populations, prison populations are hetero- geneous, and are constantly changing in composition. Significant changes in population size are normally accompanied by equally significant changes in population characteristics. Nacci et al.(1977) and Megargee (1977) based their infraction- rate studies on aggregate statistics. Specifically, Megargee com- pressed three years' activity in a 550-man prison into 96 sets of data points, depending upon the reporting period for particular vari- ables. A further limitation is that neither of these infraction-rate studies controlled for salient inmate characteristics that might have convaried with population changes, such as age, urban-rural back- ground, type of crime, race, or time served. The infraction studies also shared a built-in problem that appears to be inherent in any archival study of crowding: changes in density are always accompanied by the physical movement of inmates from one place to another and, hence, into association with different individuals and different dominance hierarchies. In Megargee's study, the movement came in great bursts when an entire dormitory in an eight-dorm prison closed for renovation. His finding that infraction rates were correlated with density but not with popula-

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Purchase Access

Contact us for annual subscription options:

Contact Us

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

Log In

profiles profiles most