Doctoral Dissertation Research - Effects on a Captive Audience: Civic Engagement Post-Incarceration

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PI: Henry A. Brady and Amy E. LermanSES: 0617505For an increasingly large segment of society, incarceration has replaced some of the more traditional life events as a defining experience. This is particularly true among ethnic minority and low-income populations; African American men are significantly more likely to spend time in prison than in the military, and are twice as likely to spend time in prison as they are to earn a Bachelor's degree.In this study, I seek to address the question of whether some types of prisons may actually have negative effects on inmates, once they leave the institutional environment. The experience of incarceration may inculcate people with particular values, identities, attitudes towards authority, and coping mechanisms, and some of these lessons may discourage pro-social participation in community life. In other words, living within some types of prisons may teach people ways of thinking and behaving that actually diminish their likelihood of returning to society as productive, law-abiding citizens.The goal of this project is to draw clear connections between specific characteristics of prisons and a variety of individual outcomes, from recidivism, to social and family relationships, to employment and participation in community organizations. This study takes advantage of several unique opportunities. Most centrally, because inmates are essentially assigned at random to prisons in California, and because prisons in the state differ dramatically in their culture, this research uses a natural experiment to establish the impacts of different prison cultures on the attitudes and behaviors of individuals once they leave prison.As a key part of measuring each prison's culture, I have undertaken a survey of Correctional Officers in the state of California. The survey will gather critical data on a host of topics at each of California's prisons, including understaffing, staff preparedness and training, institutional violence, quality of rehabilitation programs, level and types of gang activity, and officers' attitudes towards inmates and towards correctional policy. At the same time, I have also gathered a wide variety of data from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation on the attitudes and behaviors of parolees. Some of these data come from a program adopted by the state only a few months ago, and this study will represent the first time they have been analyzed for use in social research.It is my hope that this study will shed light on a variety of different ways that laws and institutions can affect the attitudes and behaviors of citizens. This represents a significant contribution to scholarly work in the areas of institutional bureaucracy and policy effects. Yet the far broader impact of this research will be on those communities that each year absorb a growing number of citizens released from America's penal system.Despite the panoply of research on prisons over the last several decades, little work has addressed the effects of penal policies on society at large. Prisons are often researched as isolated communities, rather than as extensions of the low-income neighborhoods, cities and towns from which most incarcerated people come. As a result, prisons are generally considered to be distinct from community life rather than seen as playing a central role in the myriad problems of poverty and crime that many communities face. Meanwhile, some 650,000 citizens each year move back and forth, and often back again, between those communities and the prison system.By identifying how the particular experiences people have while incarcerated affect the civic attitudes and behavior they assert once they return to society, it may be possible to design institutions that increase people's potential for healthy post-release reintegration, and help them return to society as a benefit to, rather than a burden on, the communities to which they return.