Characteristics of stalking in prison inmates serving time for offenses other than stalking

ABSTRACT

In an effort to understand the correlates of stalking, 62 male federal prisoners with one or more convictions for stalking (n = 54) or a subsequent arrest for stalking (n = 8) were extracted from a larger group of 3,039 federal prison inmates on whom file data had been collected. Comparisons between this group of 62 inmates and the remaining 2,977 inmates with no history of stalking revealed more extensive histories of violence, mental health difficulties, and alcohol abuse in the former. Constructing a control group of 62 non-stalking inmates from the larger sample of 2,977 non-stalking participants by matching stalking and non-stalking inmates on age and race, it was discovered that differences in past violence toward significant others persisted while differences in mental health difficulties and alcohol abuse did not. Findings such as these suggest that when more stringent criteria are used to construct control and comparison groups for research on stalking, differences between stalking and non-stalking participants on all but past history of violence toward intimates tend to disappear.

KEYWORDS:

• Stalking
• federal prisoners
• violence history
• mental health disorder
• substance abuse

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethical approval

This study was originally approved by the Bureau of Prisons Research Committee and then later by the Kutztown University Institutional Review Board (IRB).

Notes

1. The original LCSF asks about arrests rather than convictions but because the electronic records upon which the current dataset was based listed prior convictions rather than prior arrests, all LCSF arrest items were evaluated as convictions.

Additional information

Funding

The author received no funding for this study.