Official incidents of inmate-on-inmate misconduct at a women’s prison: using importation and deprivation theories to compare perpetrators to victims

Abstract

Importation and deprivation theories have long been used to explain prison misconduct and victimization among male inmates. However, the key variables from these theories have rarely been tested on female inmates. In addition, many of these existing studies use combined samples of males and females, while ignoring female-only samples of prisoners. Using data from official misconduct reports collected from 2007 to 2012 from a large women’s prison in Ohio, the current study sought to compare the characteristics of perpetrators of inmate-on-inmate misconduct to their victims. Findings reveal that variables from both importation (age, race, and current violent offender status) and deprivation (mental health status and prior violent disciplinary reports) theories were significant in predicting perpetrator vs. victim likelihood. Policy implications and suggestions for future research are discussed.

Keywords:

• Women prisoners
• inmate misconduct
• importation theory
• deprivation theory

Notes

1. Bivariate correlations were obtained for all of the independent variables. None of the correlations were over .50. Variance inflations factors were all under 4. These indicate that multicollinearity was not an issue.