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Substance use disorders (SUDs) among community-based offenders are a significant challenge for criminal justice agencies. SUDs are linked with both adverse health risks and increased risk of recidivism. Given the consequences of SUDs, mandated substance use treatment is often required in community supervision. Unfortunately, relapse is extremely common regardless of whether treatment is a condition of supervision. Previous research has identified some factors that can influence treatment outcomes among offender populations, including demographic differences, substance use history, mental health conditions, and criminal history. This dissertation will argue that a more nuanced understanding of the role of health and well-being among community-based offenders is a necessary component in understanding treatment engagement. Health Related Quality of Life (HRQOL), a construct to gauge health and well-being, is often used among medical communities to better understand health impacts on a given population as well as decision-making in treatment compliance studies. However, HRQOL is rarely studied in criminal justice, and has almost never been examined in community offender populations. A robust understanding of health is needed for this population of vulnerable offenders, an understanding that includes multiple dimensions of health including HRQOL. This study sampled a total of 103 offenders from drug court and probation settings, who were mandated to participate in substance use treatment. The health and treatment experiences of this sample of offenders were examined using mixed methods, beginning with quantitative analyses including descriptive, bivariate, multivariate statistical models and structural equation models. The multivariate models and structural equation models examined two main treatment engagement outcomes: whether offenders stayed in treatment and the proportion of treatment sessions attended. These quantitative findings were followed by qualitative analysis of 10 interviews with a subsample of the survey participants who had experienced some level of health difficulty at their baseline survey. Qualitative analyses sought to elaborate on the quantitative findings to provide context for how and why participants were or were not engaging with their mandatory treatment. Results from the quantitative analysis indicate that although criminal history is the most consistent factor influencing treatment engagement, various aspects of health appear to influence treatment success to some extent. HRQOL may influence whether participants stay in treatment. Treatment experiences and health also appear to differ substantially depending on the offenders’ primary drug of use. Offenders who exclusively used marijuana were substantially healthier than their harder drug using peers, and they appear to stay in treatment more easily. Furthermore, both mental and physical health conditions appear to influence treatment attendance among participants who used drugs other than exclusively marijuana. Finally, there were differences in treatment retention depending on whether participants were supervised by drug court or probation, such that drug court participants were more likely to stay in treatment; however, supervision type did not influence proportion of treatment sessions attended. Qualitative findings both provided support for some of the quantitative findings and also illuminated the nuances of the treatment engagement experience of offenders with health difficulties. Interviewees who primarily used marijuana tended to have less severe health difficulties and many did not perceive their use as problematic. Treatment engagement among participants was influenced by their motivation for treatment, whether they had mental health and/or physical health difficulties and the severity of those health difficulties. Logistical factors also influenced treatment engagement, particularly conflicts between treatment requirements and employment and familial relationships. Many of the results presented herein are exploratory and thus require replication; however, some clear directions for future research arise. There is a need to examine the role of health among community based offenders and their ability to comply with mandated treatment with a larger sample. In particular, studies are needed, which include more participants who use ‘harder’ illicit drugs such as opioids and cocaine, as they appear to have more difficulties both with their health and with treatment engagement. Further research is needed on models for Treatment Engagement that include multiple dimensions of health and allow for recursive relationships between health dimensions. Regarding policy and practice implications, the correctional agencies involved should consider re-evaluating the means by which offenders are assigned to supervision and SUD treatment. In particular methods for screening and assessment of SUDs should be re-evaluated, with particular consideration given to the role of offenders’ primary drug of use. / Criminal Justice

This study is an analysis of the role educational programming has played in reforming inmates in American correctional institutions between the Jacksonian era and the 1970s. A case study, "Seminary of Virtue" focuses on the educational curriculum at Philadelphia's famed Eastern State Penitentiary, a cutting-edge institution that originated the Pennsylvania System of penal discipline. "Seminary of Virtue" argues that Eastern State Penitentiary's extensive and aggressive educational program reflected a general American belief that correctional institutions should educate inmates as a way of reducing recidivism and thereby "reforming" them. While Americans remained committed to educating inmates, Eastern State's curriculum evolved during its century and a half institutional life. As its emphasis shifted from the religiously oriented "reform" of prisoners in the early nineteenth-century to a medical model of "rehabilitation" a half century later, Eastern State's educational program evolved, shifting from a curriculum of rudimentary literacy skills, religious instruction and an apprenticeship of sorts to industrial education in the mid-nineteenth century and then finally to a traditional academic curriculum in the first third of the twentieth century. / History

Each year, approximately one-third of all people admitted to prison in the United States are committed as the result of a revocation of community-based supervision such as probation, parole, or federal supervised release (Carson & Anderson, 2016). Many of these individuals are being incarcerated for technical violations of their supervision - conduct other than the commission of a new crime which is in violation of a condition of supervision. The practice of committing offenders to prison for technical violations of supervision is rather common at the state level. In a 2013 study, for example, Ostermann found that although paroled inmates in New Jersey were less likely than inmates who served their entire prison terms without parole to engage in new criminal conduct following their release, the paroled inmates were just as likely to be returned to prison within three years due to having been charged with technical violations of their supervision. This practice also occurs in the federal criminal justice system, where 70% of the offenders under community-based supervision who are returned to prison each year are recommitted on the strength of technical violations of supervision alone (Administrative Office of the United States Courts, 2017a). A substantial amount of prior work (for example, Apel et al., 2010; Clear, 2007; Petit, Sykes & Western, 2009; Rose & Clear, 1998) has revealed the potentially harmful consequences of imprisonment. Despite this, little research has examined how incarcerating persons for technical violations of supervision compares to widely-available alternative, intermediate sanctions such as home confinement and reentry center placement in terms of ability to prevent the commission of new crimes or continued technical non-compliance. The present study examined these questions, utilizing a sample of offenders in the federal criminal justice system. Propensity score matching was used to construct comparable treatment and control groups, thereby reducing concerns of selection bias. Post-matching analyses suggest the following: 1) the effect of incarcerating offenders for technical violations of supervision is negligible compared to subjecting them to intermediate sanctions with regard to preventing the commission of new crimes; 2) offenders incarcerated for technical violations of supervision are more likely to commit new crimes post-sanction – and sooner – than offenders subjected to intermediate sanctions; 3) offenders imprisoned for technical violations are more likely to engage in subsequent technical violations – and sooner – than offenders subjected to intermediate sanctions; and 4) the greater the intensity of the intermediate sanction (i.e., residential reentry center placement vs. home confinement), the more likely an offender will be charged with a technical violation during service of the sanction. Although the study is subject to concerns about potential sensitivity to unobserved confounders and other limitations, it makes an important contribution to our understanding of a topic which has rarely before been examined. When one considers the financial, public safety, and ethical consequences of incarcerating people for non-criminal conduct, the research has implications for persons under supervision, probation and parole organizations, and the general public alike. / Criminal Justice

Hiring and maintaining quality staff members is crucial in juvenile correctional facilities. Unfortunately, staff turnover is much more common in correctional agencies than other areas of government work. Although several studies have looked at rates and predictors of employee turnover in adult correctional facilities, few have assessed the issue among juvenile correctional staff. Therefore, this study was guided by two main questions: (1) what are the current turnover rates among frontline staff members at Delaware's public juvenile correctional facilities, and (2) what are the main factors that lead to frontline staff leaving? To answer the above questions, this study used a mixed-methods approach consisting of three stages. In the first stage, total rates of voluntary turnover were provided by an administrator from Delaware State's Division of Youth Rehabilitative Services (DYRS) Personnel Department. The voluntary turnover rates for juvenile correctional officers in Delaware's public facilities for 2011 and 2012 were 7 percent and 13 percent, respectively. This is slightly less than voluntary turnover rates from previous studies on juvenile correctional staff. The next two stages of research were designed to assess the best predictors of intentions to leave for Delaware's frontline staff members. Specifically, the second stage consisted of interviews with 14 staff members from five residential facilities across Delaware. The interviews increased our understanding of how aspects of job satisfaction and organizational commitment apply to this particular sample of employees and provided greater insight into two recently developed aspects of employee turnover theory: Job Embeddedness and the Employment Opportunity Index (EOI). More importantly, three aspects of employee turnover for this sample were discovered: commitment to youth, career stepping stone and job expectations. The discovery of new variables supports the idea that it is important for researchers assessing employee turnover to conduct face-to-face interviews with employees prior to analyzing survey data. The final stage of research compared three models of employee turnover. The first was based on Lambert's 2001 model of correctional officer turnover which stemmed from employee turnover theory. The second model was designed to assess improvement in predicting intentions to leave by incorporating two concepts, Job Embeddedness and the Employment Opportunity Index (EOI), that have not been tested in many studies on employee turnover. The last model that was tested incorporated the three new variables that were created based on the interviews in stage two. Intentions to leave was used as the outcome variable in this study. It measures the extent to which a person desires to leave his or her job. It was chosen for two reasons: 1) Samples consisting of employees who have quit can take years to obtain and 2) Assessing employees intentions to leave could be more useful to administrators. The sample for the last stage of this study consisted of 102 frontline staff members from five of Delaware's six facilities. The data for the last portion of this study were analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM). This method was appropriate because it could assess the impact of both direct and indirect measures. However, because the sample size for this study was not adequate to run any of the models in full, ordinary least squares (OLS) regression was also incorporated. Results from the quantitative portion of this study showed that there were several variables that predicted intentions to leave for this sample. Similar to most studies that look at intentions to leave, job satisfaction and organizational commitment were two of the strongest predictors of intentions to leave. In terms of individual characteristics, race/ethnicity was the only statistically significant predictor. What was especially interesting about this result was that when previous studies found a race effect, it was that African Americans had higher levels of intentions to leave. This was not the case for this sample. Along these lines, race/ethnicity was significantly associated with one of the factors from Job Embeddedness, organizational fit, which assesses if employees believe they are an appropriate match for their job. Interestingly, whites had lower levels of organizational fit which resulted in higher levels of intentions to leave. Findings from this study have implications for the correctional literature and employee turnover theory. This study supported a long history of employee turnover studies that have found job satisfaction and organizational commitment to be the best predictors of employee turnover. At the same time, this study also found a new predictor of employee turnover specific to juvenile correctional officers: commitment to youth. This stands to have a major impact on future research on employee turnover, not just for juvenile corrections but also studies in the larger body of employee turnover in that this study made it clear that one model does not fit all workers. The concept, commitment to youth, applies only to employees who work with youths. And, the particular way commitment to youth was measured in the present study would only apply to those who work with at-risk youths. Therefore, this study should be viewed as an important step towards understanding the relationship between commitment to youth and decisions made by juvenile correctional officers. This study also had important implications for administrators of juvenile correctional facilities. A major finding stemming from the interviews, which was subsequently confirmed by the quantitative analysis, was that support from coworkers is vital to the overall performance of staff. In fact, subjects reported that a lack of support from coworkers was the difference between a good day and a bad day, and that it was never the juveniles that created a bad day for staff; it was their coworkers. Based on this finding, it is vital that administrators stress the importance of not only working as a team, but also the importance of respecting fellow staff members, especially in front of youths. To do this, administrators should encourage supervisors to demonstrate this type of behavior every day and stress the importance of it during trainings, especially the impact it can have on the residents; several staff members discussed how the youthful offenders can easily detect bad feelings among staff. / Criminal Justice

With an increasing demand on natural resources, more efficient prospecting techniques need to be developed. One important tool is geophysical methodologies. As technology develops so do these methods and availability of high-resolution information; however if this information is not properly corrected biased results are achieved. This thesis intends to explore common limitations faced by modern geophysical surveys. Processing and interpreting of geophysical data is often accomplished in frequency domain due to speed and efficiency; however this often leads to non-geologically correct results. A spatial domain filter based on potential field signal curvature analysis is a proposed alternative. By isolating specific curvatures, one is isolating specific frequencies, which are generated by sources at particular depths. The method was applied to synthetic and real-world datasets. Following filtering two analytic routines were applied, which showed that the spatially filtered datasets provided cleaner results. Terrain corrections have always been applied to gravity datasets, but rarely are terrain corrections implemented as a pre-processing step in magnetic survey interpretation. Therefore, interpretations based on anomalies from non-corrected magnetic data may be of non-geological features. In a magnetic survey conducted in the mid-eighties, magnetic lows were associated with alteration; however, at that time of initial interpretation no terrain correction was applied. This dataset was revisited and terrain corrected, which showed that the magnetic lows were associated with unaccounted bathymetry. The Bathurst Mining Camp (BMC) is one of Canada's most important base metal mines, but is threatened by a fluctuating mineral resources market. By using high resolution geophysical surveys potential mineral reserves may be located. However, in order to do so a better understanding of geology is necessary, which is often difficult due to limited outcrops. Through the processing and interpretation of recent geophysical datasets, a revised geological map of a selected portion of the BMC has been developed. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc)

In recent years, harsher sentences have been pursued in criminal offenses leading to an increase in the use of incarceration. Prisons, largely unable to keep up with this demand, have become overcrowded in most areas. In response to prison overcrowding, some jurisdictions have begun to experiment with electronically monitored house arrest. This thesis is composed of a literature review and proposed study of recidivism in electronic monitoring (EM) programs. The literature review is composed of a general review of the history of corrections, a review of literature on electronic monitoring programs and social bond theory. The history of corrections serves to partially explain the emergence of electronic monitoring programs as an outcome of the adoption and failure of other forms of intermediate sanctions. The present state of electronic monitoring, including a description of the technology incorporated in these programs, the extent to which EM programs are implemented, and their cost effectiveness are discussed. In addition, some legal implications of its use are discussed. A review of previous research indicates numerous gaps in the existing evaluation of electronic monitoring programs. Because of these gaps many research questions are not sufficiently answered by the literature review. The rate of recidivism for EM programs compared to that of other correctional programs remains unclear. The underlying factors that affect the recidivism rate for EM programs also remains unclear. In addition, the effects on the offender, the offender’s family, peer group, and employment are not identified. The two reasons responsible for the inability of previous studies to adequately assess the rate of recidivism for EM programs compared to standard probation of parole and the underlying factors predicting recidivism are the exclusion of variables pertaining to the effects of electronic monitoring on the offender as well as the lack of theory needed to understand the relationships of recidivism, and type or correctional program. Literature on social bond theory is reviewed in order to provide theory to the examination of recidivism in electronic monitoring programs. Beginning with an explanation of Hirschi’s original work (1969), the review extends to empirical literature on the social bond. Finding this literature to be strongly supportive of social bond theory, it is adopted as a structure to examine recidivism. Primarily used in the study of delinquency, social bond theory is adapted to apply to the study of adult populations and recidivism, and the possible effects of EM on the social bond is discussed. A proposed research study is then presented examining the effects of EM on social bond factors and subsequently recidivism. The relevance of control variables, including length of sentence, type of offense, and prior convictions are discussed as well as the measurement of variables related to social bond theory. A structural equation model is developed that incorporates the control variables, bond variables, program variables, and recidivism, allowing for a simultaneous estimation of their relationships, using LISREL 8. It is hypothesized that EM programs, more than standard probation and parole positively affect the social bond of an offender to his or her family, peer group, and employment. In addition, it is believed that a stronger social bond to the institutions of family, peer group, and employment results in a lower incidence of recidivism. / Master of Science

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between Tennessee wardens’ leadership practices and correctional officer job satisfaction. Utilizing the Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI), the relationship between correctional officers’ perception of the warden’s leadership practices and the LPI norms were examined. Additionally, utilizing the LPI, the relationship between self-ratings of the warden’s leadership practices and the observer rating of the LPI were assessed. Lastly, utilizing the Job Satisfaction Survey (JSS) and observer LPI, correlations were examined between the correctional officers’ job satisfaction and their perception of the warden’s leadership practices. Findings of this study showed lower correctional officers ratings of the wardens on the five LPI subscales than the inventory’s norms. In a comparison of the LPI wardens’ self-perception and the correctional officers’ observer perception, correctional officers rated the wardens lower than the wardens rated themselves. The overall ratings of the correctional officer Job Satisfaction Survey (JSS)were neutral. However, of the nine JSS subscales, the results identified the nature of their work and supervision as the most positive. Pay, contingent reward, and promotional opportunities were rated as the primary reasons for job dissatisfaction. Additional findings indicated a positive relationship between job satisfaction and each of the five subscales of the LPI. / Doctor of Philosophy in Leadership

This is a phenomenological study on the experience prison inmates at Sweden's largest prison, Kumla, have of their prison library. Conversations in five focus groups with a total of 26 inmates, that took place in the last two months of 2023, form the foundation of the findings in this study. A qualitative thematic analysis shows that the inmates' experience of the prison library consist of four separate, but equally important, parts. The first part is the librarian, who the inmates see as someone neutral and willing to help. The second part is the usage of the prison library’s services, which manifests in reading books and magazines borrowed from the library, an activity that allows for feelings of cognitive escape. The third part is the visit to the physical library, which functions as a grativational pull away from a life of crime and towards a better life. The fourth part is comprised of the benefits the prison library have in terms of rehabilitation, the value the library brings for the future of the inmates. This study concludes that a prison library can have positive impacts on the inmates' lives, during incarceration and after release. This is a two years master's thesis in Library and Information Science.

Incarceration of offenders has been relied upon as the dominant sentence option through the years to address the objectives of punishment. Research has shown that the above-mentioned approach does not match the current lifestyle anymore. Correctional centres (prisons) not only in South Africa, but across the board are faced with the same challenge. This is of course not a problem of the Department of Correctional Services alone, but that of the entire justice system. It is therefore obligatory for Justice to join hands with society in accordance with the White Paper on Corrections in South Africa (2005:63-68). Playing a major role in all above-mentioned bodies is Parliament, without which the whole justice system would not exist, let alone functioning. The victims of crime would most probably not condone any soft approach towards treating offenders, worse with alleviating overpopulation by releasing inmates from correctional centres. It is the researcher's submission that the effects of overpopulation coupled with inmate's human rights, as entrenched in the Constitution becomes the major driving force to address overcrowding in our correctional centres. / Penelogy / (M.A. (Penelogy))