NCJ Number
216453
Journal
Criminal Justice and Behavior: An International Journal Volume: 33 Issue: 6 Dated: December 2006 Pages: 683-705
Date Published
December 2006
Length
23 pages
Annotation
This study compared the disciplinary behavior of 1,897 inmates serving Life-Without-Parole (LWOP) sentences to that of 7,147 inmates serving sentences of 10 to 30 or more years in Florida prisons.
Abstract
Results indicated few disciplinary differences between the LWOP inmates and the inmates serving other types of long-term prison sentences. Rates of violent misconduct among LWOP inmates were similar to the other long-term inmates held at the same custody level. The findings suggest that corrections departments should reexamine the weight assigned to sentence length in institutional classification decisions because there is little evidence that long-term prisoners create greater security risks. The findings support a dispersal rather than concentration model for the confinement of LWOP and other long-term inmates. Such judicial downgrades in level of security are unlikely to negatively impact corrections facilities. Research methodology involved an examination of the official computerized data files on 7,147 inmates serving 10 years or longer and on 1,897 LWOP inmates in Florida. All the inmates in the sample entered the Florida Department of Corrections (DOC) between January 1998 and December 2002 and remained in prison on December 2003. Data under examination included disciplinary behavior, demographic information, conviction offense, sentence, and institutional information. Data analysis involved the use of survival analysis to predict the time to the commission of a potentially violent act in prison. A Kaplan-Meier procedure was then used to test the bivariate relationship between sentence length and predicted survival time. Follow-up studies should compare other large-scale samples of LWOP with other long-term inmates. Tables, figure, notes, references