The Sources of Violent and Nonviolent Offending among Women in Prison

Abstract

This study involved an assessment of the relevance of women’s background characteristics for predicting their offending in prison. Data were collected from over 650 women confined in a large prison for women in a Midwestern state, and the relative effects of these factors were examined. Findings revealed that background characteristics reflecting social demographics (e.g. race, sexual orientation) and women’s life experiences (e.g. abuse as a child) were relevant for predicting women’s violent and nonviolent misbehavior in prison.

Keywords:

• inmate
• prison
• women
• rule violation
• gender

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Official measures of rule violations are potentially biased due to under-detection or under-reporting on the part of prison staff (Hewitt, Poole, & Regoli, 1984). Although official measures of rule violations have been determined to be valid indicators of inmate behavior (Steiner & Wooldredge, 2014a; Van Voorhis, 1994), readers should keep the limitations of these measures in mind when interpreting the findings.

2 We excluded drug violations from the nonviolent infraction category because there is a preference in the literature to treat these types of rule violations separately (Harer & Steffensmeier, 1996; Steiner & Wooldredge, 2013). We considered examining drug violations separately, but too few women engaged in these offenses (<5%) during the study period to generate reliable estimates.

3 All of the individual items used in the scales are listed in Wright, Steiner, & Toto, 2017.

4 Mental health problem included diagnoses for anxiety (dissociative and somatoform disorders), anxiety (general anxiety and panic disorders), bipolar disorders, dementia/organic disorders, depression and major depressive disorders, developmental disabilities, dysthymia/neurotic depression, impulse control disorders, personality disorders, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), psychosis/psychotic disorders, schizophrenia, sleep/movement/eating disorders. Most of the women with a mental health problem were diagnosed with more than one of these disorders (60%). The most common diagnoses were for PTSD, depression, and anxiety (dissociative and somatoform disorders).

5 Few studies of the effect of relationships on women’s institutional behavior have been conducted, and our results are counter to the findings of Van Voorhis and colleagues (Van Voorhis et al., 2010; Wright et al., 2007); however, this is likely due to the fact that we examined different aspects of relationships in the current study (e.g. support) rather than only measures which tapped relationships outside of prison (as Van Voorhis and colleagues examined).

6 Particularly relevant for this study could be differences in how officers treat some female inmates (e.g. blacks, sexual minorities) compared to others. We are unaware of any studies of differential treatment pertaining to these groups among women, but some ethnographic studies have uncovered that female inmates are “officially” charged with prison rule violations at higher rates than men (Bloom et al., 2003). On the other hand, Steiner and Wooldredge (2014a) compared the predictors of self-reported assaults, drug, and property offenses to the predictors of comparable measures of officially detected rule violations, and observed that, regardless of the type of data examined, men and women had similar odds of committing an assault and males were more likely to commit a drug offense. They found no differences in rates of self-reported property offenses between men and women, but men had higher rates of officially detected property offenses, suggesting that officers may have been more likely to officially charge men with property offenses compared to women. Nonetheless, it remains unclear if particular groups of women are treated differently within prisons. Future studies should investigate this possibility.

Additional information

Notes on Contributors

Benjamin Steiner is a professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He holds a PhD from the University of Cincinnati.

Emily M. Wright is a professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Her research involves neighborhoods, intimate partner violence, victimization, exposure to violence, and female offenders. She has received funding from federal, state, and local entities for research regarding exposure to violence and victimization. Her research has appeared in Criminology, Child Abuse & Neglect, Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, Justice Quarterly, and Trauma, Violence, & Abuse.

Sara Toto is a doctoral student in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. She holds an MA in criminal justice from the University of Nevada, Reno. Her primary research interests include institutional and community-based corrections.