Gerry Gaes - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Gerry Gaes

Criminology and public policy, Aug 1, 2018

M ore than any other topic, mass incarceration is the preeminent public policy issue that reaches... more M ore than any other topic, mass incarceration is the preeminent public policy issue that reaches beyond our small community of criminologists. Aside from the large body of criminal justice scholarship devoted to this issue, it is a topic debated by politicians and policy makers and rehashed by pundits eager to advance a specific position. It is quintessential criminology touching on many domains both theoretical and practical-life-course research, public safety, justice, racial inequality, community cohesiveness, and state budgeting and finance decisions. The latter encompasses trade-offs between the funding of expensive prison resources and other state and federally funded social programs including higher education, welfare, and medical care. The National Research Council report by Travis, Western, and Redburn (2014) on mass incarceration highlighted collateral social costs including those to the offender's family, community, and the U.S. polity. Mass incarceration calls attention to a form of exceptionalism most Americans prefer not to brag about. We have been at or near the top of the rate of incarceration among the world's countries for many years. The Institute for Criminal Policy Research documents worldwide incarceration rates. Adding inmates in federal and state prisons as well as local jails, the United States had an incarceration rate of 666 per 100,00 in 2015, which was down from its peak of 755 per 100,000 in 2008 (Jacobson, Heard, and Fair, 2017). We are currently second to the Republic of Seychelles, an archipelago nation in the Indian Ocean with 100,00 residents and 799 people in custody. We are still an outlier among modern nation states (Walmsley, 2015). The downward trend in U.S. incarceration since 2008 is much less steep than the growth that drove it to its unprecedented levels. To drive prison

Criminology and public policy, Nov 1, 2011

... This last corollary of the risk principle suggests that we will do no harm if services are no... more ... This last corollary of the risk principle suggests that we will do no harm if services are not provided to low-risk offenders. ... There is some evidence for this phenomenon in the juvenile literature (Osgood and Briddell, 2006), but it is weak. ...

The Prison Journal, Sep 1, 1994

Dramatic increases in the United States' inmate population has raised new concerns about prison c... more Dramatic increases in the United States' inmate population has raised new concerns about prison crowding. Although growth in prison capacity has lagged slightly behind that of the inmate population, there is no consistent evidence that crowding is associated with mortality, morbidity (defined as clinic utilization), recidivism, violence, or other pathological behaviors. This paper reviews the major areas in which prison crowding has been examined. Conceptual, methodological, and empirical criticisms are raised concerning prison crowding and the areas of health, violence, and recidivism. The paper is divided into five sections: I. the political and social context of prison crowding research; II. ecological versus individual level differences in crowding; III. theoretical and empirical problems associated with violence and its relation to crowding; IV. an analysis of inmate illness reporting and its relation to crowding; and V. the degree to which the literature points to consistency in results both within the prison and across other crowded settings. Among several issues discussed in section I, the criteria

Criminal Justice Review, May 7, 2018

Background: Reporting estimates of length of stay in prison populations is a common objective in ... more Background: Reporting estimates of length of stay in prison populations is a common objective in corrections research. Researchers and prison administrators use these estimates for many different purposes. These include projecting future prison operational and capacity needs, describing levels of punitiveness among states, and explaining the drivers of prison growth or decline. Because of their critical importance to so many dimensions of corrections and criminal justice, researchers have compared the merits of various methods to estimate prison length of stay. Objective: This article revisits a survival-based approach for estimating length of stay originally described in Patterson and Preston and uses historical prison data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics National Corrections Reporting Program to compare this method to alternatives. It also describes and tests the merits of extending this method to parametric frameworks. Method: Using 20 years of data in nine states, we model estimates of (1) average length of stay for the 1995 prison admission cohort and (2) length of stay distributions for the 1995 prison stock and compare estimates to true values for these samples over a 20-year period. We compare results derived from adjusted and unadjusted stock-flow calculations, release cohorts, and nonparametric and parametric survival models. Results: We demonstrate that estimates of length of stay using survivalbased estimators consistently perform much better than other estimators and that there are advantages to using parametric estimation techniques over nonparametric ones. Parametric-based estimates are less variable and more reliable on average. Conclusion: We conclude that in the future, stay length estimates should be estimated using survival models like the ones we describe and that data exist which provide the means to do so effectively.

Journal of Experimental Criminology, Jan 20, 2016

Objectives This study examines the effect of prison versus community sanctions on recommitment to... more Objectives This study examines the effect of prison versus community sanctions on recommitment to prison and compares two levels of community supervision, community control (house arrest) and probation, evaluating whether the findings are contingent on the type of matching methods used in the analysis. Methods Logistic regression was conducted on unmatched and matched samples. Exact, coarsened exact, and radius-matching procedures were used to create a selection on observables design. Matching variables included current offense, demographics, criminal history, supervision violations, and a rich set of Florida Sentencing Guidelines information culled from an official scoring sheet. Florida judges use this instrument to sentence offenders within the framework of the state determinate sentencing system. Results The results show that with exact matching, there is no effect of imprisonment on recommitment, while the other procedures suggest a specific deterrent effect of imprisonment. All four analysis methods showed that offenders under community control are more likely to reoffend than those under normal probation. Analyses between the matched and unmatched prison observations demonstrate that the matched set of prisoners is composed of offenders who have less extensive criminal records and less serious conviction offenses than unmatched offenders regardless of the matching algorithm.

PsycEXTRA Dataset, 2004

This executive summary covers the highlights of the report Prison Rape: A Critical Review of the ... more This executive summary covers the highlights of the report Prison Rape: A Critical Review of the Literature, which analyzes obstacles and problems that must be overcome to effectively measure sexual assault at the facility level. Each bold heading in this summary refers to the same bold heading contained in the larger report. Federal Legislation. The Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 calls for research and policy changes to minimize sexual victimization of incarcerated juveniles and adults. The Act also calls for a zero tolerance policy; national standards for the detection, prevention, reduction, and punishment of prison rape; collection of data on incidence; and development of a system to hold prison officials accountable. Also, the Bureau of Justice Statistics is to design a methodology to assess the prevalence of prison sexual assault and monitor adult prisons, jails, and juvenile facilities. In the findings section of the public law, there is a claim from unnamed experts that a conservative estimate of victimization suggests that 13 percent of inmates in the United States have been sexually assaulted. Defining Sexual Victimization-Prevalence and Incidence. Research should distinguish various levels of sexual victimization from completed rapes to other forms of sexual coercion. Any measurement process will have to distinguish between the prevalence and incidence of the events. Prevalence refers to the number of people in a given population who have ever had a sexual assault experience. Incidence refers to the number of new cases. This distinction is important, because prevalence can be high, but the number of new cases is low due to some kind of intervention or enforcement of policy. Prison Rape Literature. Aside from one study conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) in 1997, all other studies conducted in the United States included fewer than 50 prisons in total. In 2000, BJS reported there were 1,668 federal and state prisons. There has also been one study of sexual victimization in a jail system. In 1999, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported there were 3,365 jails in the United States.

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Mar 1, 1981

162 PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY BULLETIN make an attempt to severely test a theory and it s... more 162 PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY BULLETIN make an attempt to severely test a theory and it stands up, we have gained greater confidence in it or (as Popper says) its "truth-like" (verisimilar) qualities. Piatt (1964) has described a cumulative method of ...

Justice Quarterly, Jun 1, 1993

Do we know what "works" in the way of rehabilitative treatment in corrections? Not yet. Has the o... more Do we know what "works" in the way of rehabilitative treatment in corrections? Not yet. Has the old "nothing works" literature been invalidated by new reviews of research claiming to show, through meta-analysis, that treatment really does work, at least when it is "appropriate?" Not likely. Would production of this knowledge enhance the ability of prison officials to do their job? Not ever. Their job, and their highest duty, is to administer justice, not treatment. Individualized treatment muddles the message of punishment, making it less principled and not necessarily more humane. A "confinement model" of imprisonment is proposed, which rejects rehabilitation as an official goal and yet allows for programs of work, education, and other activities within the mission of a prison.

Justice Quarterly, Sep 1, 2003

This paper presents results of multilevel analyses of prisoner misconduct for the population of o... more This paper presents results of multilevel analyses of prisoner misconduct for the population of over 120,000 federal prisoners incarcerated during June 2001. Prior research has focused upon individual-level explanations of inmate misconduct, but this study explicitly examined whether prisons vary in their influence upon inmate misconduct. This paper demonstrated that model specification makes a difference in our understanding of which variables are related to misconduct. Second, the paper demonstrated that type of misconduct is important for understanding the effects of covariates of misconduct. Finally, the paper demonstrated the ease by which results of multilevel models can be used to compare the performance of prisons.

Federal Sentencing Reporter, Jul 1, 1993

Environment and Behavior, 1988

A prison setting was used to examine self-report and biochemical evidence of architecturally medi... more A prison setting was used to examine self-report and biochemical evidence of architecturally mediated crowding stress. Further, the relationship among illness complaints, perceived crowding, and urinary catecholamines was explored. Inmates of a federal corrections institution provided urine samples assayed for epinephrine and norepinephrine, and they supplied self-report data on their perceptions of crowding. Infirmary records were reviewed for each inmate's health history. Inmates resided in one of three housing types that varied in degree to which privacy and crowding were afforded. Housing type with the lowest social density was a private cell, while open dormitories had the highest. An intermediate level of social density was represented by inmates in partitioned dormitories or cubicles. Lower levels of social density were expected to be associated with lower perceived crowding, lower levels of urinary catecholamines, and fewer health complaints. Across all inmates, perceived crowding was positively correlated with levels of urinary catecholamines. Single cell inmates reported less crowding and exhibited lower levels of urinary catecholamines than

Criminology and public policy, Jul 1, 2002

Private prisons incarcerate 5.3 percent of the sentenced, adult population in the United States. ... more Private prisons incarcerate 5.3 percent of the sentenced, adult population in the United States. Despite the growing use of private prisons, little systematic information has been collected to allow correctional administrators and other policymakers to gauge the general performance of the private sector. To help rectify this shortcoming, the present study presents selected results from a 1999 survey of all private prisons operating in the United States or in U.S. territories.

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Sep 1, 1978

Two studies were performed to assess the interpersonal concerns of subjects in the forced complia... more Two studies were performed to assess the interpersonal concerns of subjects in the forced compliance paradigm. The first study counterposed dissonance and impression management theory predictions in a 2 x 2 design by varying the public versus private nature of the counterattitudinal behavior and by assessing attitudes with the usual pencil-and-paper method or with a bogus pipeline technique designed to create strong pressures toward sincere reporting. Attitude change occurred only in the Public/Pencil-and-Paper condition and thus supported an interpersonal or impression management interpretation. The second study examined the effect of measuring the critical attitude a second time in the mode not experienced in the first assessment. This three-group design (Pencil-and-Paper/Bogus Pipeline, Bogus Pipeline/Pencil-and-Paper, Control) demonstrated that attitude change occurred only in the Pencil-and-Paper/Bogus Pipeline condition and was maintained on the second assessment when measured by the bogus pipeline. A common-factor analysis of the secondary measures in the second study demonstrated that the Pencil-and-Paper/Bogus Pipeline subjects reported a great deai of negative arousal such as embarrassment and guilt, while the subjects in the Bogus Pipeline/Pencil-and-Paper condition reported feeling manipulated and constrained. The findings of both studies were interpreted as consistent with impression management theory.

Crime & Delinquency, Jul 1, 2005

Criminologists and correctional practitioners worry that prisons encourage criminal behavior amon... more Criminologists and correctional practitioners worry that prisons encourage criminal behavior among inmates, i.e., that prisons are criminogenic. The current study analyzed a subset of the experimental data collected by Berk, Ladd, Graziano, and Baek (2003) to test a new inmate classification system in California and demonstrated that this effect does not necessarily exist.

Journal of Experimental Criminology, Feb 18, 2009

Most prison systems use quantitative instruments to classify and assign inmates to prison securit... more Most prison systems use quantitative instruments to classify and assign inmates to prison security levels commensurate to their level of risk. Bench and Allen (The Prison Journal 83(4):367-382, 2003) offer evidence that the assignment to higher security prisons produces elevated levels of misconduct independent of the individual's propensity to commit misconduct. Chen and Shapiro (American Law and Economics Review, 2007) demonstrate that assignment to higher security level among inmates with the same classification scores increases post-release recidivism. Underlying both of these claims is the idea that the prison social environment is criminogenic. In this paper we examine the theoretical premises for this claim and present data from the only experiment that has been conducted that randomly assigns inmates to prison security levels and evaluates both prison misconduct and postrelease recidivism. The experiment's results show that inmates with a level III security classification who were randomly assigned to a security level III prison in the California prison system had a hazard rate of returning to prison that was 31% higher than that of their randomly selected counterparts who were assigned to a level I prison. Thus, the offenders' classification assignments at admission determined their likelihood of returning to prison. There were no differences in the institutional serious misconduct rates of these same prisoners. These results are contradictory to a specific deterrence prediction and more consistent with peer influence and environmental strain theories. These results also raise important policy implications that challenge the way correctional administrators will have to think about the costs and benefits of separating inmates into homogeneous pools based on classification scores.

Journal of Criminal Justice, 1983

Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment, Mar 1, 2003

This study examines gender similarities and differences in background characteristics, the effect... more This study examines gender similarities and differences in background characteristics, the effectiveness of treatment, and the predictors of post-release outcomes among incarcerated drug-using offenders. The sample of 1,842 male and 473 female treatment and comparison subjects came from a multi-site evaluation of prison-based substance abuse treatment programs. Three-year follow-up data for recidivism and post-release drug use were analyzed using survival analysis methods. Despite the greater number of life problems among women than men, women had lower three-year recidivism rates and rates of post-release drug use than did men. For both men and women, treated subjects had longer survival times than those who were not treated. There were both similarities and differences with respect to gender and the other predictors of the two post-release outcomes. Differences in background characteristics and in factors related to post-release outcomes for men and women suggest the plausibility of gender-specific paths in the recovery process.

Perceptual and Motor Skills, Jun 1, 1976

ABSTRACT