Objectives: To examine the relationship between sexual abuse and academic achievement in an adolescent inpatient psychiatric population. Individual factors expected to influence this relationship were measured to explore the way they each interacted with sexual abuse and its relationship to academic achievement. Method: Eighty-one adolescent…

This exploratory study used qualitative methodology to examine what pedophiles think about treatment, as well as their daily experience of a treatment program. To this end, twenty-three offenders receiving treatment from the La Macaza federal penitentiary clinic were interviewed using non-directive semi-structured interviews. Comparative analysis…

This paper examines the role of family in the prisoner reintegration process, exploring the views of soon-to-be-released prisoners regarding the family support they expect to receive as well as their assessments of how supportive family members actually were after release. It draws on a study of 413 male prisoners returning to the cities of…

The goal of this research is to test the psychometric properties of the Levels of Attribution and Change (LAC) scale using a segment of a High-Security Federal correctional population. The LAC measures ten causal attributions of a given problem. The theoretical and empirical interrelatedness of these attributions are explored through a range of…

Incarcerated women at a maximum security state facility (N= 216) completed a questionnaire concerning their perceived social support within the prison, structured activities, and perceived support from prison surrogate families. A series of regression analyses evaluated the relationship between social support measures and anger, as measured by the…

Large numbers of correctional institutions rely on volunteers to assist staff in various programs and tasks. At present there exists a paucity of literature describing these programs and/or subjecting them to systematic evaluation. The present study uses self-report data from a sample of active volunteers at a medium-security Southern prison to…

The purpose of this study is to direct attention inside the walls of a juvenile correctional facility to closely examine the experiences and daily lives of adolescent inmates. The ethnographic data for this study were collected through participant-observation and extended interactions in a cottage for violent male offenders in one state's…

Although many correctional education studies have identified various treatment programs as being effective for reducing recidivism, few, if any, of these studies appear to be above reproach when assessing their methodological vigor. This paper highlights the shortcomings in the current post-treatment quasi-experimental design primarily used to…

It has been estimated that as many as one in five adults in England have difficulties with literacy or numeracy skills. Raising the standards of language, literacy and numeracy (LLN) skills amongst all adults of working age in England has become one of the government's highest priorities. Following the launch of the "Skills for Life"…

Post-institutionalized Chinese and Eastern European children participated in two emotion understanding tasks. In one task, children selected facial expressions corresponding to four emotion labels (happy, sad, angry, scared). The second task required children to match facial expressions to stories describing situations for these emotions. While…

Do child molesters hold distorted beliefs (or cognitive distortions) that support their sexual offending? To test this hypothesis, we asked 28 child molesters and 20 inmate controls to read a description of child molestation. Within this vignette, we planted 10 ambiguous descriptions. If child molesters' information processing were driven by…

A growing research base supports the predictive validity of actuarial methods of risk assessment with sexual offenders. These methods use clearly defined variables with demonstrated empirical association with re-offending. The advantages of actuarial measures for screening large numbers of offenders quickly and economically are further enhanced…

Until a recently perceived surge in delinquency, Asian or Pacific Islander (API) youth appeared to be relatively protected from negative developmental outcomes such as delinquency, school failure, and teen pregnancy. However, the increasing rate of API youth entering the juvenile justice system has sparked more in-depth consideration of…

Super-maximum security prisons have proliferated nationally, reflecting a belief among policy makers and corrections officials that such high-cost housing is effective. Yet little is known about the precise goals of "supermax" prisons, whether these goals are achieved, what unintended effects supermaxes may have, and, more generally, whether they…

The current study analyzed a subset of the experimental data collected by Berk, Ladd, Graziano, and Baek (2003) to test whether different intensities of incarceration make inmates more criminal while incarcerated. There were 561 male inmates whose equivalent classification scores indicated they had the same level of risk to commit institutional…