Sanctioning and Punishment in Prisons: An Examination of the Institutional Disciplinary Response to Formal Inmate Misconduct

Inmate misconduct, and the formal disciplinary proceeding that follow official misconduct, is a common occurrence within correctional institutions. Decisions regarding punishment sanction post-disciplinary proceeding are important because they have direct implications for inmate freedom of movement within the institutional setting, yet this decision point has rarely been the subject of empirical research. Research that does look at this decision point commonly focuses on the presence or absence of a single category of disciplinary punishment – that being solitary confinement or disciplinary segregation. As such, prior research fails to observe the full range of post-disciplinary punishment options.

Addressing this gap in the literature, this study provides the first rigorous empirical examination of the inmate-level characteristics that influence punishment outcome following guilty institutional misconduct proceedings. Guided by criminal sentencing literature, the inmate- level characteristics are divided into groups of legal factors, quasi-legal factors, and extra-legal factors. Representing a significant advancement beyond prior research, this study operationalizes punishment outcome in two ways – as an interval-level ordered sanction severity scale and as individual punishment categories. A series of multivariate models with sample selection corrections are estimated to model the direct and interactive effects of the legal, quasi-legal, and extra-legal inmate characteristics on punishment outcome.

Results of the fully-saturated direct effects models reveal a consistent pattern across both operationalizations of the punishment outcome. The legal factor of misconduct offense and the prosocial behavior quasi-legal factors of working a prison job and program involvement are significantly related to punishment outcomes. The quasi-legal factor representing criminogenic risk and the extra-legal factors of inmate gender and race/ethnicity are not significantly related to punishment outcomes. When the direct effects models re-estimated on samples split by inmate gender and race/ethnicity, however, the extra-legal factors of gender and race/ethnicity condition the effects of some of the legal and quasi-legal factors on punishment outcome. Results of this study suggest that, holding constant the effect of legal misconduct-related factors, disparities exist in post-disciplinary sanctioning based on inmate race/ethnicity and gender.