High reoffending rates across the world and in-prison misconduct interfere with the safety in society and prison safety. This project increases our etiological understanding of the deterrent and criminogenic effects of imprisonment on in-prison misconduct and re-offending post-release, their interaction with other confinement conditions and our understanding of how perceptions of confinement conditions are formed.

 

Longitudinal quantitative nationwide data of 1900 incarcerated Dutch males from the Prison Project, data of a randomized experimental vignette scenario study among 313 comparable individuals and data of 25 qualitative semi-structured interviews with formerly incarcerated individuals were used in this project.

 

The results of this project are relevant for correctional policies and suggest that prison staffs’ relationships with detained individuals can substantially contribute to order in prison and beyond and illustrate the need to increase our understanding of how perceptions of confinement conditions are formed. Our results suggest that severe sanctions can decrease compliance with prison staff during incarceration and that severely experienced sanctions can also deter from in-prison misconduct and reoffending, in particular, when prison staff is perceived as procedurally just. This illustrates that severe sanctions and procedural just treatment interact with each other. Moreover, how sanctions and treatment are experienced depends on the personality characteristics of incarcerated individuals, and on a variety of other confinement conditions. Carefully balancing the costs and benefits of sanctioning and imposing sanctions in a procedural just way may decrease undesired and increase desired effects of sanctioning.