Angry Inmates Are Violent Inmates: A Poisson Regression Approach to Youthful Offenders

Abstract

The importation model of inmate behavior posits that pre-confinement characteristics and behaviors contribute to inmate misconduct; however most of this research has centered on criminal history and not psychosocial characteristics that might predict misconduct, namely anger. Controlling for 14 confounds, including psychiatric symptoms, age, race, gender, commitment offense type, and four measures of prior delinquency, anger significantly predicted sexual misconduct, staff assaults, and aggressive misconduct and approached significance in predicting ward assaults. ROC-AUC analyses indicated that the MASYI-2 angry-irritable scale had significant but modest classification power, with sensitivities ranging from .58 to .66. Suggestions for future research are provided.

Keywords:

• prison violence
• institutional misconduct
• anger
• inmate
• Poisson regression