New Directions in Correctional Research

Abstract

Research in the area of corrections is expansive in its breadth, impressive in its depth, and grows with each year that passes. We know so much more about the correctional enterprise than we knew even just a decade ago, and yet there is still so much uncharted territory and so much we could learn. In this article, we review key research findings in the four areas of mass incarceration, community corrections, institutional corrections, and prisoner reentry. We focus specifically on the past 10 years and, with an eye toward mapping uncharted or underexplored territory, we offer directions for future research in these areas. Although it is impossible to provide a comprehensive roadmap for future corrections research, we hope to have identified sufficient new directions to further (and perhaps even complicate) understandings of corrections in the broader context of justice research.

Keywords:

• community corrections
• corrections
• mass incarceration
• parole
• prisoner reentry
• probation

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank two anonymous reviewers and Nicole Rafter for comments that vastly improved the quality of this article.

Notes

1. We recognize from the outset that, in making key points, we can only cite a tiny portion of the extant research over the past decade and encourage the reader to turn to more exhaustive contemporary reviews of correctional research for more expansive treatment of each these topics.

2. Although see Matthews for a critique of this assumption (Matthews, 2005).

3. It is important to note, that Apel and colleagues (2010) have recently argued that these observed marriage effects might actually be statistical artifacts.

4. We see concerns about the impacts of reducing prison populations voiced long before we actually see any of those potential impacts come to fruition. When a divided US Supreme Court affirmed a lower federal court ruling mandating the reduction of prison populations in California last year, Samuel Alito noted in his dissent that reducing prison populations to alleviate over-crowding was “gambling with the safety of the people of California” (Mears, 2011).

5. Without taking away from the evidence-based, what-works movement, we remain concerned about the pure random assignment model of knowledge that this movement sometimes presupposes. The randomized experiment is often both impractical and unethical in the correctional setting and there are profound limits to what we could learn in corrections were we to insist that the only way we can really know what works would be to devise experiments that would meet the often aspired to but rarely realized gold-standard in research design. In an article that focuses on new directions, it seems important to acknowledge that there have been a number of recent attempts to overcome these limits. For example, to approximate random assignment, there has been an increasing interest in the use of propensity score models in correctional research (Apel et al., 2010; Sweeten & Apel, 2007; Wright & Rosky, 2011).

6. In critically reviewing correctional programming research, we do not meant to imply that individual studies of program effectiveness or meta-analyses of those studies are not valuable, indeed they are. We instead would argue that they need to be supported by research that approximates randomized trials. It is not that randomized trials are so necessary, it is that other approaches necessarily leave us with equivocal results.

7. For an up to date catalogue of the Urban Institute’s full portfolio of reentry related research, see http://www.urban.org/justice/corrections.cfm