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This research compared the recidivism rates of groups of releasees from privately and publicly operated prisons. The study consisted of 198 male releasees from two private facilities in Florida who were precision matched with releasees from public prisons. Recidivism over one year was measured in alternative ways. The private prison group had lower rates of recidivism. Those released from private prisons who reoffended committed less serious subsequent offenses than did their public prison counterparts. The two groups were similar in how long it took for rearrest or for the first recidivism event to occur.

The article I wrote with Matthew J. Bronick for this journal in 1984 assessing the quality of doctoral programs in deviance, criminology, and criminal justice is criticized by Lawrence F. Travis in the present issue. The Travis critique focuses on two primary concerns. First, he raises a series of objections to the use of citation-based measures of the caliber of faculty, contending that assessments of quality ought to be qualitative in nature. Second, he criticizes our use of sociology-based doctoral programs as a standard of comparison for evaluating independent doctoral programs in criminology and criminal justice. Although Professor Travis makes some valid points regarding the limitations of all measures that social scientists have available to them currently, I remain convinced of the validity of my 1984 findings and am confident that citation-based measures remain a useful indicator of the quality of faculty research. I think that the comparison with sociology also remains valid; although criminology is developing rapidly as an independent field, the vast majority of active criminologists today were trained in sociology and retain ties to that discipline.

This study. based on an analysis of data obtained from a randomly selected sample of 239 inmates of a maximum security federal penetentiary, assesses the explanotory power and relative importance of variables related to prisonization in the previous literature. While support for hypotheses derived from the importation and deprivation models was found, our analysis. consistent with earlier research, reveals that the proportion of variance in prisonization which can be accounted for is not high. Still, our findings underline the necessity of moving toward an integration of existing theories of prisonization rother than attempting to view them as contradictory perspectives.

Research involving the social roles adopted by inmates is important. This article discusses the means of acquiring information on the type of position that an inmate has assumed and how this might aid those who are interested or involved in attempts to alter the attitudes and behavior of those inmates. The article's purpose is to examine both the extent to which this approach can discriminate between types of inmates and its potential as a predictor of other important aspects of adaptation to confinement.

An increasing amount of pressure has been directed toward juvenile court operations, much of which has focused on the hypothesized abuse of the broad discretionary decision-making power that has traditionally been vested in the court. In this paper, we attempt to examine the extent to which factors not directly associated with the nature of the alleged offense may alter the probability that a juvenile w.11 be referred for a formal hearing in the juvenile court, a step which many analysts feel may have the unintended function of promoting rather than inhibiting subsequent involvement in delinquent behavior. Based on an analysis of 346 cases, our findings show that a number of variables that are not of direct legal relevance do exert a significant influence on the dispositional process, but the magnitude of this influence is not as great as many have been led to expect given the orientation of some explanatory models, particularly those based on the propositions of the labeling school.

Of the growing number of criticisms directed at various facets of the juvenile justice system, none is more common than the contention that the informality of the juvenile court encourages discrimi...

While information regarding the doctoral programs in any discipline is of obvious and considerable relevance both to those in the discipline and to those seeking access to the best possible sites for graduate training, our knowledge about the quality of doctoral programs continues to be based on little more than speculation and highly ambiguous measures of institutional or departmental prestige. This study attempts to fill this gap for those who have special interests in the related fields of deviance, criminology, and criminal justice by ranking the thirty-six most significant doctoral programs in the nation by means of data derived from the Social Science Citation Index. Perhaps the most striking of our findings—and certainly to us the most distressing finding—is that those departments ranked by our measures as being the highest quality are consistently those which exist within the broader structure of departments of sociology. Given our firm conviction that the discipline of criminology is far, far more than that aspect of it which is closely related to issues of substantive significance to the field of sociology, we can only speculate that those in leadership positions in the growing number of independent schools or departments of criminology or criminal justice are not meeting their obligations to the discipline whose vitality and prospects depend so heavily on the quality of their judgment.

Numerous authorities have argued convincingly that what have been termed "status offenses" should be removed from the jurisdiction of the juvenile court. Perhaps the most cogent rationale that has been advanced in this regard flows directly from the statutory and procedural inequity that is clearly demonstrated by this vaguely defined set of offenses. Unfortunately, many advocates of reform have gone on to argue that a substantial body of empirical research has shown that (1) status offenders are not a significant threat to society because they have not been and generally will not become involved in more serious offenses and (2) any movement toward more serious involvement stems more from the stig matizing consequences of formal legal processing than from any other source. Such assertions are based on insufficient or nonexistent empirical evidence. Indeed, this analysis, based on an examination of the offense histories of a large sample of juveniles who appeared before one of two urban juvenile courts on one or more occasions during a five-year period, shows that many juveniles charged with status offenses have previously been charged with other types of offenses, that juveniles whose first court appearance involved a status offense are more likely to recidivate than those first charged with a misdemeanor or a felony, and that there is little or no evidence to support the contention that legal processing is associated with subsequent involvement in more serious delinquency. '

This research, based upon an analysis of data obtained from separate studies of three institutions for male offenders, treats variations in the impact of confinement as problematic and develops a model which conceptualizes prisonization as an independent variable that is likely to have both short- and long-term consequences. Our findings reveal that prisonization encourages opposition to the prison, a short-term consequence of confinement. These attitudes are likely to effectively block institutional rehabilitative efforts and to increase problems of social control for the organization. This, in turn, may inhibit successful reintegration into society upon release. Despite the ability of the model to predict attitudes which arguably encourage antisocial behavior, longitudinal data are clearly necessary to adequately test any model which attempts to predict post release behavior.

This study, essentially an extension of the recent work of Akers et al., represents an attempt to evaluate the utility of two theoretical paradigms in accounting for illicit drug use in a prison setting. Based on self-report data obtained from a sample of 273 adult felons who were confined in a medium security penitentiary, the analysis presented demonstrates that virtually all of those inmates who reported drug use within the prison had also used drugs prior to their confident. Thus, contrary to the implications of the “deprivation model,” but fully consistent with those of the “importation model” this particular pattern of prison behavior is clearly not a direct function of the conditions of confinement. Instead, while the structure of the prison may well influence the probability that those who have used drugs prod to con/unmet will continue to do so while in prison, drug use appears to be an example of a type of behavior within the prison which is best predicted by preprison socialization and experience.

Discriminant analysis of both observational and records data from two juvenile court systems is used to assess differences in the type and activities of the people involved in legal processing of status and nonstatus offenders. The analysis indicates that there are differences between the processing of the two categories of offenders; however, contrary to expectations, the most powerful discriminating variables (detention and petitioner) are not those related to the degree in which the justice system has implemented the formalities mandated by the Gault decision. It is concluded that statutory distinctions between legal categories of juveniles have virtually no relevance for the degree of formality with which these cases are processed by the courts.

stitutions, they become participants in the informal inmate organization. As is true when individuals become participants in more conventional organizations, inmates typically move into one of a number of the positions making up the structure of the prison society. Thus, if it were possible to develop a reliable means of acquiring information on the type of position that an inmate had assumed, we would be better able to understand and predict attitudinal and behavioral changes that might occur from confinement.

Theoretical conflicts and contradictions tend to be more apparent than real. They commonly are based on little more than the choice of quite different levels of analysis, dissimilar operationalizations of key concepts, or a host of other factors that can foster significant misconceptions. From time to time, however, one encounters theoretically and substantively significant situations within which very matter-of-fact contradictions do exist. The purpose of this Article is to address one such contradiction in contemporary criminological theory and research. More specifically, the past two decades have witnessed a mas