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The Effect of Removing Sentencing Credits on Inmate Misbehavior

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Abstract

Objective

To examine the effect of prison officials’ decisions to remove good time credits in response to prison rule violations on subsequent inmate misbehavior.

Methods

Data pertaining to all inmates admitted to prison in a Midwestern state during 2009 who committed a rule violation were examined using two different methods, a multi-level analysis of a longitudinal person-period dataset and a comparison of the prison misconduct rates for inmates who lost good time during their first year of confinement to those for a matched control group of inmates who did not lose good time.

Results

The multi-level longitudinal analysis revealed that inmates who lost good time in response to a prison rule violation were typically less likely to commit misconduct in the periods after they lost good time relative to periods before inmates lost good time, but the size of the observed effects were small. For the most part, the analyses of the matched sample of inmates who lost good time during their first year of confinement versus those inmates who did not lose good time revealed that losing good time did not affect inmates’ rates of subsequent misconduct.

Conclusions

Findings suggest that good time laws have little to no specific deterrent effects on inmate misbehavior.

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Notes

  1. Inmates can earn good time credits in 32 states, while 37 states have laws that afford inmates earned time credits; many states permit inmates to be awarded both types of sentencing credits (Lawrence and Lyons 2011).

  2. Disciplinary committee members recuse themselves from hearings pertaining to incidents in which they were a witness, reporting officer, or investigating officer.

  3. During the study period, prison officials removed good time in addition to imposing segregation or cell isolation in over 90% of the cases examined. In states with overcrowded prisons (and segregation units), such as the state under study here, it is common for prison officials to impose cell isolation in lieu of segregation.

  4. The study conducted by Drake et al. (2009) could be considered an assessment of the effects of earning sentencing credits on offender behavior, but the researchers were unable to determine if all of the offenders in their sample earned additional release time. On average, however, inmates in their sample earned 60 additional days of release time (E. Drake, personal communication, 3rd November, 2014).

  5. Inmates were removed from the sample if they had served their entire sentence in a local jail, were sentenced to life in prison, or were transferred to/from another jurisdiction (N =153). Approximately 74% of the inmates admitted to prison in 2009 were convicted of a rule violation during the study period.

  6. Not all of the inmates with mental health problems are placed in a mental health unit during their confinement in this Midwestern state. Therefore, the measure of mental health problems does not include all inmates who suffered from mental health problems during the study period. Further, the measure does not assess the severity or recentness of an inmate’s problem. No other measures of inmates’ mental illness were available electronically from the Midwestern state’s Department of Corrections, however.

  7. An omitted variable could be prior sanctions (other than losing good time). We assessed the possibility of including several different measures or prior sanctions; however, each of these measures was highly collinear with prior violation history. We retained prior violation history because its’ correlation with both losing good time and subsequent misconduct was stronger than the prior sanctions measures.

  8. As noted above, the second analysis was limited to inmates convicted of a rule violation during their first year of imprisonment in order to allow for an adequate follow-up period to assess whether losing good time had an effect on inmates’ subsequent misbehavior—most individuals (71 percent) admitted to prison in the Midwestern state during 2009 served less than two years in prison. Further, the majority of inmates who committed a rule violation (91 percent) during their imprisonment did so during their first year, and the majority of inmates who lost good time (70 percent) lost good time in response to a violation during their first year of imprisonment.

  9. Since good time is typically removed in addition to another sanction (e.g., segregation), it is possible that variation in the other sanction between the treatment and control group violated the stable unit treatment value assumption. We examined this possibility and found no significant differences in the other sanction received for those in treatment group versus those in the control group, assuming segregation and room restriction are treated the same. As noted, the prison system in the Midwestern state was severely overcrowded during the time of the study, and room restriction was frequently used by prison administrators in lieu of segregation due to the limited amount of segregation space (i.e., available segregation space in a prison is based on its design capacity).

  10. We used the formula provided by Hanushek and Jackson (1977) to transform the coefficient estimates into predicted probabilities. The other predictors in the model were held constant at their means.

  11. The category 15 days included one seven-day sanction and one 14-day sanction. The category 90 days included one 60-day sanction and one 75-day sanction.

  12. The distributions of the incidence of violent misconducts and the incidence of Class I misconducts were restricted to vary from 0-6 and 0-8, respectively, whereas the distribution of the incidence of misconducts was restricted to vary from 0-42. We restricted the distributions of these measures in order to capture more meaningful variation in these outcomes; less than 2% of the sample committed more than six violent misconducts or eight Class I misconducts, and less than 5% of sample committed more than 42 misconducts.

  13. The distributions of the incidence rate outcomes reported in Table 6 are skewed, and so significance tests were performed after transforming the distributions of the original limited counts of these events to negative binomial distributions and including an offset variable (time at risk) in the models.

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Acknowledgements

This project was supported by grants from the Nebraska Center for Justice Research, a research unit of the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Nebraska, Omaha and the Office of Research and Creative Activity at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. The opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in the publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the University of Nebraska, Omaha. The authors wish to thank Dr. Abby Vandenberg and Dr. Robert Lytle for their assistance with the collection of the data for this study.

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  1. School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Nebraska, Omaha, 6001 Dodge Street, 218 CPACS, Omaha, NE, 68182-0149, USA

    Benjamin Steiner & Calli M. Cain

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  1. Benjamin Steiner
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Correspondence to Benjamin Steiner.

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Steiner, B., Cain, C.M. The Effect of Removing Sentencing Credits on Inmate Misbehavior. J Quant Criminol 35, 89–108 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-017-9372-7

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