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Minors under the age of 18 involved in prostitution, or commercial sex acts, are defined as victims by the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. However, state and local justice systems continued to arrest and incarcerate minors for prostitution after the passage of the TVPA despite widespread agreement that youth involved in commercial sexual exploitation are victims, not offenders. Most youth charged with prostitution have an extensive history of victimization experiences and detaining them often exacerbates their problems, delays appropriate therapeutic responses, interrupts their education, exposes them to youth who commit more serious offenses, and increases justice system costs. The purpose of this study is to describe the characteristics and risk factors (e.g., victimization histories, drug/alcohol use, gang involvement, home type) of justice-involved youth charged with prostitution in the United States. Given that males and females have different pathways to crime/arrest, this study will also test for gender differences in these risk factors using a nationally representative sample of incarcerated youth (Survey of Youth in Residential Placement; Sedlak, 2003). Results indicate this population of incarcerated youth have several risk factors, including extensive victimization experiences during childhood, and that these experiences vary by gender. I conclude with the implications of this research and give several policy and future research recommendation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Despite considerable research directed toward understanding the factors that affect punishment decision-making leading to imprisonment, few studies have examined the influences of punishment decisions within prisons. Punishment decisions made within prisons can affect an individual's liberty during their imprisonment and/or the timing of their release from prison if the punishment results in the loss of sentencing credits or influences parole decision-making. Moreover, if punishment disparities result from these decisions, then some offender groups may endure a greater loss of liberty relative to others. In this study, we examine the factors that influence prison officials' decisions to remove sentencing credits in response to prison rule violations. Analysis of collected data from a Midwestern state prison system reveal that prison officials are primarily influenced by the seriousness and type of the rule violation, along with an inmate's violation history. Other relevant factors include those proximately connected to an inmate's risk of subsequent misbehavior such as gang membership and those that are linked to practical consequences and constraints associated with the organizational environment and particular inmates such as the proportion of their sentence an inmate has served and whether an inmate has mental health problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]