With the various studies that point to racial disparities at different levels of the United States' criminal justice system, it is necessary to uncover all places within the system where racial disparities might exist. Understanding that Black inmates are disproportionately represented within the prison system led to the hypothesis that Black inmates receive harsher punishments than White inmates when they violate a rule while in prison. A cross-sectional study, "Survey of Inmates in State and Federal Correctional Facilities, 2004," which was available through ICPSR, was used in order to test the hypothesis. The data were collected from October 2003 through May 2004. For the current study, only inmates who had committed armed robbery, aggravated assault, or murder were in the sample. After the modification of the variables comprised of race, rule violations, and punishment type, the sample size was 652. First, an OLS regression was used in three models, which showed that major rule violations had a significant effect on the type of punishment an inmate received, but race did not. Second, age groups were employed to run an OLS regression within each of the four age groups. This revealed that major rule violations had a significant effect on the type of punishment an inmate received in four of the age groups, but race was not significant in any of the models. Implications and possible explanations regarding these findings are discussed.

The purpose of this study is to add an understanding on the relationship between characteristics of prison population and environmental characteristics of prisons with prison misconduct in the context of Japan, where little empirical research on prison misconduct has been conducted. To aid in the analysis, three theories (the deprivation, importation, and administrative control models) that had been developed in Western countries will be utilized. This study will test thirteen predictors derived from these theories. Using time-series data obtained from annual official reports of Japanese prisons between 1972 and 2019, the relationships between characteristics of prison population (gender, age, violent conviction, criminality, and health problems) and environmental characteristic of prisons or environment-driven characteristics of prisoners (occupancy rate, sentence length, foreign prisoners, drug conviction, and staff-to-inmate ratio) on prison misconduct (total, violent, and non-violent misconduct and refusal to work) were examined through descriptive analysis, graphical portrayal, bivariate correlations, and multivariate analysis using ARIMA (autoregressive integrated moving average) analysis. The results showed that all models can predict prison misconduct partially. Staff-to-inmate ratio was the most consistently significant predictor in this study. Occupancy rate and old age were also significantly related to several types of prison misconduct. Limitations and policy implications are discussed considering these results.