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Guided by the premise that an individual's safety may be more at risk when their routines, personal attributes, or lack of guardianship influence their opportunity for exposure to violence, we examined the factors that influenced victimization risks and safety perceptions among a representative sample of respondents incarcerated at a large Midwestern jail. Results showed that vulnerable individuals such as those who were victimized prior to their incarceration, and those who antagonized others such as those who perpetrated assault, were threatened more often, were more at risk of assault victimization, and perceived more dangerous conditions. Conversely, females and individuals with greater self-control were less likely to have experienced victimization and generally felt safer in jail. Our results illustrate the importance of identifying and protecting individuals who might experience greater safety risks during jail incarceration and should be interpreted alongside research and policy aimed at improving safety and welfare within correctional institutions., Competing Interests: Declaration of Conflicting InterestsThe author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

A considerable amount of research has been directed at understanding the sources of inmate misconduct (offending within prison), whereas few studies have focused on identifying the causes and correlates of prisoner victimization. The sources of inmate victimization should be distinguished from those of offending, however, because the policy implications of each focus differ to some extent. In order to determine the predictors of inmate victimization and stimulate further research on the topic, we systematically reviewed studies of the causes/correlates of prisoner victimization published between 1980 and 2014. Our findings revealed that predictor variables reflecting inmates' background characteristics (e.g., history of victimization), their institutional routines and experiences (e.g., history of misconduct), and prison characteristics (e.g., population size) all influence victimization., (© The Author(s) 2015.)

Objective: To examine the effect of prison officials' decisions to remove good time credits in response to prison rule violations on subsequent inmate misbehavior.Methods: Data pertaining to all inmates admitted to prison in a Midwestern state during 2009 who committed a rule violation were examined using two different methods, a multi-level analysis of a longitudinal person-period dataset and a comparison of the prison misconduct rates for inmates who lost good time during their first year of confinement to those for a matched control group of inmates who did not lose good time.Results: The multi-level longitudinal analysis revealed that inmates who lost good time in response to a prison rule violation were typically less likely to commit misconduct in the periods after they lost good time relative to periods before inmates lost good time, but the size of the observed effects were small. For the most part, the analyses of the matched sample of inmates who lost good time during their first year of confinement versus those inmates who did not lose good time revealed that losing good time did not affect inmates' rates of subsequent misconduct.Conclusions: Findings suggest that good time laws have little to no specific deterrent effects on inmate misbehavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have hypothesized that victimization elicits distinctive effects on women’s pathways to prison and subsequent prison maladjustment, but few researchers have investigated gender differences in this relationship. Using nationally representative samples of men and women housed in state prisons, we examine gender differences in the effects of experiencing different types of nonstranger victimization prior to prison on inmate maladjustment. Results indicate that pre-prison nonstranger victimization affects men’s and women’s maladjustment similarly, with some gender differences—specifically, the effect of being physically assaulted by a nonstranger as an adult on violent misconduct was stronger among men, as was the effect of child abuse on men’s depressive symptoms. Our findings suggest the effects of experiencing nonstranger victimization prior to incarceration on prison maladjustment may be gender-neutral more so than gender-specific. Based on our findings, nonstranger victimization should be deemed important in theories of men’s maladjustment as well as in theories of women’s maladjustment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the original publication of the article, the values in the sentence in "Analysis of Matched Samples" section have been incorrectly published as: "Specifically, inmates who lost good time had a 10% higher probability of committing any subsequent misconduct, a 13% higher probability of perpetrating a violent misconduct, and a 14% higher probability of committing a Class I misconduct." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]