Correlates and Actuarial Models of Assaultive Prison Misconduct Among Violence-Predicted Capital Offenders

• NCJ Number: 233373
• Journal: Criminal Justice and Behavior Volume: 38 Issue: 1 Dated: January 2011 Pages: 5-25
• Author(s): Mark D. Cunningham; Jon R. Sorensen; Mark P. Vigen; S. O. Woods
• Date Published: January 2011
• Length: 21 pages
• Publication Format: Article
• Publication Type: Research (Applied/Empirical)
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

This study examined the degree to which individual-level factors associated with potentially violent conduct among inmates were related to violence among the worst offenders, those offenders released from death row and serving the remainder of their sentence in the broader prison population.

Abstract

Correlates of prison violence and the classification accuracy of an actuarial model were examined from retrospective review of the disciplinary records of former death row inmates in Texas ( N = 111) who had been predicted to commit future violence at trial and subsequently obtained relief from their death sentences between 1989 and 2008. Correlates of "potentially" violent infractions included age (inversely), intellectual capability (inversely), prior violent crime arrest, and gun-only weapon used in murder (inversely). An actuarial scale constructed from the sample was modestly (area under the curve [AUC] = 0.690) associated with combined violence on death row and in the broader prison population, as were scales constructed previously from other samples (AUC = 0.609 to 0.656). Although AUCs for serious assaults in three models were relatively high (AUC = 0.799 to 0.831), low base rates result in these actuarial scales having high false positive rates (e.g., 76 percent) in identifying offenders who will commit serious prison assaults. Tables, notes, and references (Published Abstract)