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Prison Crowding Research Reexamined

Federal Bureau of Prisons

This article reviews prison crowding research. In the first section, the legal, political, and social context of prison crowding is evaluated. The second section explores the relationship between crowding and violence. It is argued that most prison crowding studies do not investigate intervening mechanisms that may account for a relationship between crowding and violence, if and when a relationship is found. Furthermore, it is suggested that one reason for the inconsistency in the results of such studies is that researchers have failed to examine the proximal causes of violence as well as the formal mechanisms prison administrators use to control or limit violence. In the third section, I reexamine the evidence on the most consistent finding in the crowding and health area, that dormitories are associated with higher illness reporting rates than are other types of housing. I conclude that this finding is probably an artifact of selection bias. Furthermore, illness reporting is the result of a complex set of circumstances that is affected as much by psychological and sociological causes as by the health status of the inmate. Despite the prevailing sentiments about the harmful effects of crowding, there is little consistent evidence supporting the contention that short- or long-term impairment of inmates is attributable to prison density. The purported consistency of findings is challenged in the fourth section. One reason for the lack of consistency may be that researchers have failed to consider management interventions under periods of high confinement and have failed to account for conditions other than crowding that affect inmate debilitation.

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