The Conditional Impacts of Race and Ethnicity on In-Prison Sanctioning Decisions in Ohio

• In Event: Examining the Use, Impacts, and Perceptions of Restrictive Housing

Abstract

Recent calls for research on the impacts of restrictive housing have largely overlooked the fact that we know little about how restrictive housing is used across prison systems. This paper is part of a National Institute of Justice-funded project that seeks in part to answer looming questions about how restrictive housing is used in Ohio state prisons. The goal of this particular paper is to assess the factors that influence prison actors’ decisions to place individuals in disciplinary confinement in response to in-prison infractions. We argue that this process is analogous to court sentencing and so provides opportunities to employ criminal justice and sentencing theories to understand prison actors’ decision making and, in particular, the potential impact of race and ethnicity on such decisions. We use statewide data from Ohio to examine how often restrictive housing is used as an in-prison punishment, the extent to which disparities emerge in its use, and the extent to which those disparities are conditioned by theoretically relevant individual and contextual factors.

Authors

• Joshua Cochran, University of Cincinnati

• John Wooldredge, University of Cincinnati