This study has two primary objectives: first, to examine the characteristics of 75 offenders incarcerated at the Federal Correctional Institution in Talladega, Alabama, using the Pre-sentence Investigation (PSI) Report data, and second, to delve into the phenomenology of the offenders through a lengthy interview process. To achieve these objectives, three offenders types were constructed based on criminal history analysis: First-time Offenders, Repeat Drug Offenders, and Mixed Multiple Offenders. The study found that First-time Offenders were less deviant in all respects than the other two subtypes. First-time Offenders, hailing from lower-middle class environments, were relatively better educated, more skilled, employed for longer periods, and possessed more self-control than members of the other subtypes. First-time Offenders were frequently reared in intact homes with both parents present (or involved in their lives). Repeat Offenders had mostly drug convictions with or without traffic violations and misdemeanors charges. Mixed Multiple Offenders had lengthier arrest histories than other subtypes with a variety of convictions ranging from a simple battery to homicide, rape or armed robbery-indicating a more threatening, violent, and pervasive deviant and/or criminal lifestyle than First-time or Repeat Offenders. Unlike the First time Offenders, both the Repeat Drug Offenders and Mixed Multiple Offenders were relatively less educated, less skilled, employed for less periods of time or sporadically or irregularly employed, and were reared in lower class, broken homes environments with a larger number of family members present. Findings from this study provide a more in-depth understanding of what criminal behavior means to those who commit criminal acts and their life circumstances under which it occurs. These findings will enable social workers to design and implement more effective intervention strategies to assist offenders with their behavioral problems

The purpose of this study was to examine the retrospective perceptions of parent-child relations as measured by the Roe-Siegelman Parent-Child Relations Questionnaire (PCR), personality characteristics as they appear on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) and types of crimes of prison inmates, specifically divided into aggressive and non-aggressive crimes.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

Minorities are significantly overrepresented in America's prison population, and many studies have been conducted to determine possible causes for such a disparity. Few of these studies, however, have examined small stature as a potential contributor to criminal behavior. This study examines the relationship between criminal behavior and stature among American males. The heights, weights, stature scores (a function of the product of height and weight) and the body mass indices of criminals are examined as a whole, as well as by subgroup based on race, locality, and nature of the crime committed. The average weight of the male criminal population is substantially lower than that of the general male population. The center of the height distribution for urban criminals is found to be lower than men who commit crimes in suburban or rural areas, as is the center of the weight distribution for index criminals when compared to non-index criminals. Murderers demonstrate the smallest mean and median heights and weights when compared to the rest of the criminal population. Although small stature can be associated with certain crimes and localities, size cannot be associated with the racial disparity in today's prisons.

This is an explorative study conducted to gain a deeper understanding of the experiences of the criminal life by exploring ex-offenders’ stories and analyzing what possible factors could have had an impact on them. The method used was that of semi structured, narrative interviewing and the theories used to analyze and gain a deeper understanding of the results were those of social constructionist theory, differential association theory, and labeling theory. Firstly, the results showed that the combination of the two factors lack of support and attitudes towards delinquent behavior had markedly contributed to the participants’ way into a criminal life and the misuse of drugs. Secondly, the respondents’ all credited some part of their success in reintegrating to the NGO KRIS, which they stated had significantly helped them during their time in and after prison. Thirdly, the respondents’ attitudes towards life seemed to be an important part of being able to both get clean and stay away from the criminal life. However, all of the respondents had experienced some sort of relapse, being it into drugs or crime.

Genom kvalitativa intervjuer med fem kriminalvårdsanställda och en transidentifierad intagen ville jag bidra med kunskap om hur Kriminalvårdens möten med fängelsedömda transpersoner kan se ut. Syftet med studien var att undersöka normer, värderingar och praktiker som intervjudeltagarna gav uttryck för när det gäller intagna transpersoner. Intervjudeltagarna uttryckte en medvetenhet kring gruppens utsatta position i fängelsemiljön men vittnade samtidigt om avsaknad av såväl riktlinjer som strukturerade arbetssätt i frågorna. Praktiker fokuserade snarare på det avvikande och direkta än det normativa och förebyggande. Intagna själva förväntades begripliggöra sin identitet för omgivningen, samtidigt som insatser riktade mot personalens (o)medvetenhet saknades. Kriminalvården kan sägas bidra till att upprätthålla normativa föreställningar om två binära kön genom att inte tillhandahålla handlingsplaner eller självklara alternativ för personer som sträcker sig mellan, bortom eller är föränderliga mellan de två könskategorierna kvinna och man. Att inte ta ställning illustrerar maktutövning, osynliggörande och kan innebära en kränkning i sig själv. / Through qualitative interviews with five employees in the Swedish correctional system and one trans-identified inmate, I sought to get an understanding of transgender inmates are dealt with in the Swedish correctional system. The aim of this study was to examine norms, values and practices expressed by the interview participants regarding transgender inmates. The interview participants expressed an awareness of the group’s vulnerable position in the prison environment, but also the lack of guidelines as well as structured methods to handle the group. Responses focused on the deviant and direct rather than the normative and preventive. The transgendered inmates themselves were responsible to explain their identity to others. At the same time there were no efforts to make the staff members aware of questions concerning gender identities and/or expressions. The Swedish correctional system can be said to maintain normative conceptions of two binary sexes by failing to provide action plans or natural options for persons with gender identities that extend beyond woman or man, or fluctuate between the two categories. To refuse to take a stand is to exercise power, make transgender inmates invisible, and perhaps even be seen as a violation in itself.

Thesis advisor: James F. Keenan / The United States penal system, fragmented by contradictory impulses toward retribution and incapacitation, is in need of coherent objectives for its prisons and jails. This dissertation draws upon the resources of virtue ethics to suggest a new model of justice, one which claims that a Christian theological framework can offer insight for public correctional institutions. In developing a model of justice as virtue, I incorporate rehabilitative goals and contributions from restorative justice. Advancing beyond these foundations, I draw upon two key sources. First, from a study of virtue and justice in the work of Thomas Aquinas, I argue that the virtue of legal justice - an orientation toward the common good - is the fundamental lens for understanding punishment. The prison can only cultivate justice to the extent that it empowers moral agency and (re-)orients offenders toward right relationship with the community. Second, an inclusive, restorative account of biblical justice - developed particularly from Isaiah, the Psalms, and the New Testament - establishes justice as a saving intervention. Thus, punishment can be a legitimate means but is not constitutive of justice itself. Despite its necessary limitations, the prison must empower the moral agency of inmates through just action, reformulate the role and practices of correctional staff, and facilitate just relationships between offenders and their communities and families. Furthermore, prisons themselves can be understood as moral agents that bear responsibility for cultivating justice in society. For the United States prison, a model of justice as virtue mandates unremitting efforts to transform offenders and the larger community into just moral agents. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2010. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

O presente trabalho visa compreender o processo de expansão e consolidação do Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) no sistema prisional paulista e a figuração social que se constituiu nas prisões como resultado da monopolização das oportunidades de poder pelo PCC. Para tanto, conceitos e concepções teóricas de Norbert Elias são utilizados como ferramentas analíticas para o tratamento do material empírico colhido a partir de fontes diversas. O trabalho é composto por dois eixos de análise: eixo horizontal/processual e eixo vertical/figuracional. O eixo de análise horizontal ou processual aborda o fenômeno de um ponto de vista macrossociológico, em que se focaliza o processo social de desenvolvimento do PCC tendo em vista fatores sociais, políticos e administrativos que direta ou indiretamente estão atrelados a ele. Ainda como parte desse eixo de análise, o processo de expansão do PCC é considerado em termos das várias etapas que o compõem, tendo em vista o papel da violência física direta no exercício do seu poder. O eixo de análise vertical ou figuracional tem como objetivo a compreensão da dinâmica social produzida a partir deste processo. Considerando uma figuração social como ponto de partida da análise, denominada figuração pré-PCC, procurou-se apresentar as transformações ocorridas no universo prisional e que constituíram uma nova figuração social. A nova figuração social produzida a partir da hegemonia do PCC é constituída por uma teia de interdependência individual mais longa e complexa, com uma maior divisão funcional e integração social entre os seus componentes. Diante desta nova forma de dependência, os controles sociais sobre o comportamento individual foram ampliados e centralizados na posição ocupada pelo PCC. A estrutura e organização do PCC, sua dinâmica política e o controle social que adquire a forma de imposição do autocontrole individual, são questões centrais nesta parte do trabalho. O eixo vertical é finalizado com uma discussão sobre a relação de dependência do PCC em face da administração prisional, em que o dispositivo do Regime Disciplinar Diferenciado (RDD) é central na manutenção do equilíbrio de poder que garante a hegemonia do PCC e a estabilidade da ordem social do universo prisional. Uma reflexão que perpassa todo o trabalho e que é desenvolvida no capítulo final coloca em discussão a pacificação social que é vista como o efeito mais expressivo do processo de consolidação do poder do PCC. Neste sentido, a fragilidade deste processo é apontada a partir da sua natureza conjuntural e das bases precárias nas quais está apoiado o poder hegemônico do PCC. / The present work aims to understand the process of expansion and consolidation of the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) in São Paulo prison system and the social figuration that is formed in prisons as a result of the monopolization of the opportunities by the power of PCC. To this end, concepts and theoretical conceptions of Norbert Elias are used as analytical tools for the treatment of empirical data collected from various sources. The work consists of two lines of analysis: axis horizontal / vertical axis and procedural / figurational. The horizontal axis analytical or procedural approaches the phenomenon from a macrosociological point of view, which focuses on the social development of the PCC with a view to social, political and administrative problems that are directly or indirectly linked to it. Also as part of the analysis area, the expansion of the PCC is considered in terms of several steps that compose it, owing to the role of direct physical violence in the exercise of its power. The vertical axis or figurational analysis aims at understanding the social dynamics produced from this process. Whereas a social figuration as a starting point of analysis, called figuration \"pre- PCC\", tried to show the changes in the prison world, which constituted a new social figuration. The new social representation produced from the hegemony of the PCC consists of a web of a longer and more complex individual interdependence, with greater functional division and social integration among its components. Given this new form of dependency, the social controls on individual behavior have been expanded and centralized in the position occupied by the PCC. The structure and organization of the PCC, its political dynamics and social control which takes the form of imposition of individual self-control are central issues in this part of the work. The vertical axis is concluded with a discussion of the dependence of the PCC in the face of the prison administration, where the device Regime Disciplinar Diferenciado (RDD) is central in maintaining the balance of power that ensures the hegemony of the PCC and the stability of the order social of the prison. A reflection that permeates all the work that is developed in the final chapter calls into question the social pacification that is seen as the most significant effect of the consolidation of power of the PCC. In this sense, the fragility of this process is identified from its contextual nature and the precarious foundations on which rests the hegemonic power of the PCC.

There has been a stunning build-up of prisons and a growing trend in prison privatization in the last 30 years, including the rise of maximum security units. The goal of my dissertation is to understand the ideological, historic, political, and economic processes behind the changes in the criminal justice system of the United States. I analyze this problem from multiple angles—labor and policy history, discourse and public opinion, and race in America. The aim of this analysis is to uncover the reasons why crime legislation became progressively more punitive, reaction to African Americans gains in post-Civil Rights more hostile, and the manifold ways in which these phenomena drive the expansion of the prison system and its increasing privatization. In the process of this expansion, a racial caste system which oppresses young African Americans and people of color has become recast and entrenched. Specifically, I offer the notion that in the last three decades, punitive crime legislation focused on African Americans and served to deal with labor needs and racial conflict with harsher penal legislation; in doing so, it depoliticized race, institutionalized racial practices, and served the interests of private prison businesses in new ways oppressive ways. Using interdisciplinary methods which weave together qualitative and quantitative analysis, I find that punitive crime policies in the last thirty years used the concept of crime as political currency by government officials in order to appear tough on crime, and by business representatives interested in exploiting the prison industry. The conflation of business and political interests, and the recasting of crime as a race problem, served to taint public institutions and media dissemination with racist imperatives which stereotyped poor African Americans. The end result is a constant re-positioning of young black males as fodder for economic exploitation. The dissertation also addresses the high cost of imprisonment and the multiple social problems brought from shifting inmates from wards of the State to profit-making opportunities in the hands of private entrepreneurs. The result is high numbers of recidivism, and a growing underclass of people who will always be unemployed or underemployed and return to low income communities that suffer from the endless cycle of poverty and imprisonment. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2014. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Made available in DSpace on 2016-08-10T10:53:36Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 MIRLENE GARCIA NASCIMENTO.pdf: 927909 bytes, checksum: 394650094ccdb4367a5fc87e9975c92d (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012-06-11 / The conditions of deprivation freedom contribute to the increased vulnerability of the prison population to HIV infection, also increasing the rates of morbidity and mortality in HIV. This reflects a serious public health problem in the prison system can function as a mechanism aglomerator these types of infections and shedding is a source for the general population. Objective: To identify the epidemiological profile of HIV infection in the prison population in Prison Complex of Aparecida de Goiania, estimating the prevalence of infection, socio-demographic and risk behaviors for infection. Methods: This was a cross-sectional quantitative study. The sample consisted of 1157 subjects of both sexes in schemes and provisionally closed detention. A questionnaire and performed serology for detection of HIV. Results: Individuals incarcerated males differ from females on the marital status and sexual orientation. It was shown a greater proportion of individuals incarcerated male over female in the use of drugs and inhaled or sniffed about the history of previous imprisonment. The individuals in the transitional incarceration differ from individuals in a closed regime for sex, age, marital status, mastery of reading and writing, education level and county of residence, also in relation to sexual behavior in relation to the history of transfusion blood and blood products, tattooing and previous incarceration history. The prevalence of HIV in Prison Complex of Aparecida de Goiânia during the period June-December 2011 amounted to 0.90% (95%) and 0.71% (95% CI 0.03 to 3.45) among female subjects and 0.98% (95% CI 0.51 to 1.77) among males. Bivariate analysis of risk factors associated with HIV infection, showed no statistically significant difference between individuals seropositive and seronegative for HIV in relation to socio-demographic characteristics and risk behavior. Conclusion: The prevalence was lower than that found in several national and international studies, other data is equivalent to the literature. We conclude that it is necessary to introduce measures that provide effective and targeted at reducing vulnerability to infection, continuing education, aiming to prevent transmission of the virus in the prison environment, but also to the external environment through the visitors of the institution. / As condições de privação liberdade contribuem para o aumento da vulnerabilidade da população encarcerada à infecção pelo HIV, aumentando também as taxas de morbi-mortalidade em relação ao HIV. Esta situação reflete um grave problema de saúde pública em que o Sistema Prisional pode funcionar como um mecanismo aglomerador desses tipos de infecções e constituir um foco disseminador para a população geral. Objetivo: identificar o perfil epidemiológico da infecção pelo HIV na população carcerária no Complexo Prisional de Aparecida de Goiânia, estimando a prevalência da infecção, aspectos sócio-demográficos e comportamentos de risco à infecção. Métodos: Tratou-se de um estudo quantitativo com corte transversal. A amostra foi de 1157 sujeitos, de ambos os sexos, nos regimes provisório e fechado de detenção. Foi aplicado questionário e realizada sorologia para identificação do HIV. Resultados: Indivíduos encarcerados do sexo masculino diferem de indivíduos do sexo feminino quanto ao estado civil e opção sexual. Foi evidenciado maior proporção de indivíduos encarcerados do sexo masculino em relação ao feminino quanto ao uso de drogas inaladas ou cheiradas e quanto ao histórico de encarceramento prévio. Os indivíduos em regime provisório de encarceramentos diferem dos indivíduos em regime fechado quanto ao sexo, idade, estado civil, domínio da leitura e escrita, grau de escolaridade e município de moradia, também em relação ao comportamento sexual, em relação ao histórico de transfusão de sangue e derivados, tatuagem e histórico de encarceramento prévio. A prevalência da infecção pelo HIV no Complexo Prisional de Aparecida de Goiânia no período de junho a dezembro de 2011 correspondeu a 0,90% (IC 95%) sendo de 0,71% (IC 95% 0,03 - 3,45) entre sujeitos do sexo feminino e de 0,98% (IC 95% 0,51 1,77) entre os do sexo masculino. Análise bivariada de fatores de risco associados à infecção pelo HIV, não evidenciou diferença estatística significativa entre os indivíduos soropositivos e soronegativos para HIV em relação ao características sócio-demográficas e de comportamento de risco. Conclusão: A prevalência foi inferior à encontrada em diversos estudos nacionais e internacionais, os demais dados é equivalente às literaturas. Conclui-se que, é necessária a implantação de medidas eficazes e direcionadas que proporcionem a redução da vulnerabilidade à infecção, educação continuada, com objetivo de prevenir a transmissão do vírus no ambiente prisional como também ao meio externo através dos visitantes da instituição.