Encountering Correctional Populations. Kathleen A. Fox
the age of twenty-one on the day of data collection.1 Most of these youths are in placements that screen them for educational, substance abuse, and mental health needs (Sickmund and Puzzanchera 2014), which may be important sources of existing data for researchers.
Instead of “jail” or “prison,” juvenile facilities are often collectively called “residential placement” and can include halls, detention centers, reception and diagnostic centers, shelters, group homes, ranches or wilderness camps, training schools, and residential treatment facilities (Hockenberry, Sickmund, and Sladky 2015). Juvenile institutions also vary in terms of their level of security. For example, while most lock youths in their rooms at least part of the day, often at night, a small percentage of institutions do not secure youths in the areas where they sleep, even at night. Moreover, while some facilities (about one-quarter) have security features that resemble adult correctional institutions (e.g., fences and razor wire), others do not even lock doors and have no fences (e.g., about 80 percent of group homes).
It is important to remember that, like adult offenders, more juvenile offenders (54 percent, in 2013) are sentenced to probation than facilities (Hockenberry and Puzzanchera 2015). This means that focusing only on institutionalized youths ignores more than half of the juvenile correctional population. Although the Federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) is currently funding the Census of Juvenile Probation Offices in order to learn more about juvenile probation, there is actually little current national information on probation officers, the numbers of juveniles on probation, or the particulars of their sentences (see OJJDP 2016). Still, these youths are an important group of juvenile correctional clients, and they—along with their supervising agencies and officers—can provide a rich source of information for researchers.
Correctional Officers
Nationally, jails employ nearly 200,000 correctional officers (n = 173,900), of which most are male (71 percent; Minton et al. 2015). The last known count shows that federal and state prisons employed 295,261 officers, 10,769 administrators, 51,993 clerical/maintenance staff, 11,526 educational workers, 46,016 professional/technical employees, and an additional 29,489 other (unidentified) employees (Stephan, 2008). Correctional officers are often exposed to stressful situations given job demands and the risk of victimization. A recent study found that 36 percent of prison correctional officers felt tense or anxious while at work, although the vast majority of officers reported feeling “generally pretty calm on their shift” (Steiner and Wooldredge 2015, 809). Jail staff face similar situations. Jail staff report that the danger they experience on the job is moderately high (Lambert et al. 2004). The daily shift for correctional officers and inmates is structured in large part by daily routines. For example, each jail and prison typically follows a predictable schedule with planned inmate counts, meals, recreation, religious services, counseling, and education services.2 Of course, there also are a myriad of unplanned events that can and do arise in correctional institutions, including but not limited to physical altercations, injuries, shakedowns, and medical emergencies. Data collection and researcher’s presence in jails must fit into the facility’s planned and unplanned schedule of events because correctional institutions are highly structured environments that cannot easily change their daily routines to accommodate researchers. Yet, staff are often willing to make arrangements for researchers to collect data among inmates with minimal disruption to the typical daily events at the facility.
OUR EXPERIENCES CONDUCTING RESEARCH WITH CORRECTIONAL POPULATIONS
Before discussing the nuts and bolts of the lessons we have learned over the years, we thought it might be useful to give readers some background on our research endeavors that inform this work to provide some context regarding the tips we share.
Kathleen A. Fox is an associate professor at Arizona State University. Much of her research examines the victimization of offenders, especially among those who are incarcerated. She has personally interviewed prison inmates, read the details of prison inmates’ crimes buried within their files, surveyed jail inmates across fourteen different jails, and examined the official records of incarcerated juvenile gang members as they reentered their communities. She has lead teams of researchers and research assistants, received grant funding, gained access to correctional populations, and maintained positive relationships with correctional agencies. All of this occurred when she was an undergraduate student, doctoral student, and pretenure assistant professor at a Research I university. Her experience underscores the point that while collecting original data is very time consuming, it also can be compatible with (even complementary to) the constraints of one’s other demanding career goals, including the race toward tenure.
Jodi Lane has been a professor at the University of Florida since 1999 and generally studies fear of crime and other attitudes toward the justice system and juvenile corrections. She has worked on two major grant-funded research projects studying juvenile correctional populations, as well as a number of other unfunded projects involving offenders and justice system personnel. Most recently, she was a principal investigator on an Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) and Florida Department of Juvenile Justice (DJJ) project designed to evaluate the implementation of faith-based programming in juvenile correctional facilities (2004–2008). She also was a researcher on the RAND Corporation study of the South Oxnard Challenge Project in the late 1990s, using experimental methods to evaluate a multiagency approach to serving youth on probation. While in graduate school during the early to mid-1990s, she was a project researcher on the federally funded evaluation of the Orange County (California) Gang Incident Tracking System, working with twenty-two police agencies to collect gang data. In addition, she has supervised and collaborated with multiple graduate students on projects involving correctional populations and staff, especially those in jails, work release, and on probation and parole.
Susan Turner is a professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). Trained as a social psychologist, she also serves as director of the Center for Evidence-Based Corrections. Turner worked at the RAND Corporation for over twenty years before she entered academia. Over her career, she has led a variety of research projects including studies on racial disparity, field experiments of private sector alternatives for serious juvenile offenders, work release, day fines, and a fourteen-site randomized design evaluation of intensive supervision probation with nearly two thousand offenders. Turner’s areas of expertise include the design and implementation of randomized field experiments and research collaborations with state and local justice agencies. At UCI, she has assisted the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation in the development and validation of a risk assessment tool as well as evaluations of targeted parole programs. She is also involved with a number of organizations evaluating the impact of Arts in Corrections programs on correctional institutions and offenders.
HOW THIS GUIDEBOOK IS ORGANIZED
Following this introductory chapter, this book is organized into four substantive chapters. Chapter 2, “Gaining Access to and Building Rapport with Correctional Populations,” presents tips for (a) identifying who grants access to correctional populations, (b) how to ask for permission to access correctional populations, (b) typical steps needed to obtain permission, (c) when to obtain access in conjunction with other research tasks, (d) convincing staff members to buy in to the research, (e) convincing the target population to participate, and (f) improving participation rates among offenders, correctional staff, and families of juvenile clients.
The third chapter, “The Types of Correctional Data That Can Be Collected,” describes (a) existing major national data sources, (b) using existing correctional administrative data, (c) pros and cons of collecting your own data (e.g., surveys, interviews, focus groups, and observations), (d) program evaluation, (e) collaborating with agencies for hybrid data collection, (f) how to measure recidivism, and (g) data analysis skills needed for different types of data gathering.
The fourth chapter, “Informed Consent Process and Research Ethics,” focuses on (a) institutional review board approval for different types of data gathering, (b) how to avoid harm to client participants, correctional staff, and researchers, (c) safety of the research team inside correctional facilities, (d) balancing participant benefits with researcher safety, (e) what to do if an inmate touches you, (f) what to do if you are accidentally locked inside a dorm alone