Male County Jail Inmates: A Profile and Self-Reported Human Service Needs by Race

Abstract

With the enactment of the Second Chance Act in 2008, social workers have a greater opportunity for intervention to break the cycle of recidivism. To develop interventions, however, social workers require profiles of incarcerated people and their perceived human service needs. Unfortunately, previous research has focused on prison and not jail inmates and lacks race-differential data. In this article the authors address this gap in the literature by describing the scope of the problem and presenting a profile of male inmates and their perceived service needs by race upon entry into a major urban county jail.

Keywords:

• Jail
• inmates
• offender reentry
• needs assessment
• social work

Notes

The authors want to thank the project's national advisory committee members: Alfred Blumstein and Jonathan Caulkins of Carnegie Mellon University; Martin Horn of the New York Departments of Correction and Probation; Stephen Ingley, a former President of the American Jail Association; Nancy La Vigne, a senior researcher at The Urban Institute, Washington DC; and Calvin Lightfoot, a former warden of the Allegheny County Jail (ACJ) and who initiated the ACJ Collaborative. Some information in this article was extracted from the report by Yamatani (2008).

Support for this study came from the Allegheny County Jail Collaborative, and the Human Service Integration Fund (represented by over dozen major philanthropic foundations of the Greater Pittsburgh region).

1. These numbers came from interviews with state and federal inmates in 2004 and jail inmates in 2002.