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Assessing the impact of visitation on inmate misconduct within a county jail

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Abstract

Although state and federal prison populations are larger than jails, the annual number of individuals moving through America’s jails far exceeds those passing through its prisons. Jail inmates arguably experience many of the same pains of imprisonment as prison inmates (see Sykes in The society of captives: a study of a maximum security prison, Princeton University Press, Princeton 1958). Inability to adjust to these deprivations can influence inmate misconduct, and visitation has been shown to reduce imprisonment pains and reduce inmate misconduct within prison populations, but no identified studies have examined the impact of visitation on misconduct within a jail. This population warrants further analysis and this research hopes to fill this gap by exploring whether visitation significantly influences inmate misconduct within a jail population. The results indicated that visitation did not influence minor infractions but did significantly influence inmate participation in incidences of serious misconduct. Implications for theory, research, and policy are further discussed.

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Notes

  1. As shown in the descriptive statistics table, the variable was still slightly skewed but using the natural log improved the distribution. The models were reanalyzed without the log transformation and the results are not meaningfully different.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Administration of Justice, Pennsylvania State University—Beaver, 100 University Drive, Monaca, PA, 15061, USA

    Mari B. Pierce

  2. Department of Criminal Justice, University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI, USA

    Tina L. Freiburger

  3. Department of Communications, Pennsylvania State University—Beaver, Monaca, PA, USA

    John R. Chapin

  4. Department of Criminal Justice, Slippery Rock University, Slippery Rock, PA, USA

    Brittany Epling

  5. United States Marine Corp, Pentagon, VA, USA

    Tyler J. Madden

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  1. Mari B. Pierce
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  2. Tina L. Freiburger
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Correspondence to Mari B. Pierce.

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Pierce, M.B., Freiburger, T.L., Chapin, J.R. et al. Assessing the impact of visitation on inmate misconduct within a county jail. Secur J 31, 1–20 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41284-016-0086-6

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