The influence of prisons on inmate misconduct: A multilevel investigation

Abstract

This article presents the results of multilevel analyses of prisoners' misconduct for the population of over 120,000 federal prisoners incarcerated in June 2001. Prior research has focused on individual-level explanations of inmate misconduct, but this study explicitly examines whether prisons vary in their influence on such misconduct. The study demonstrates that model specification makes a difference in our understanding of which variables are related to misconduct, that the type of misconduct is important for understanding the effects of covariates of misconduct, and that results of multilevel models can easily be used to compare the performance of prisons.