Disciplinary Confinement and Misconduct Patterns: An Examination of Gendered Effects

Abstract

Reducing misconduct is a critical mechanism to maintaining prison safety. Disciplinary confinement constitutes one tool used by the corrections system to achieve this goal. Only a handful of studies explore how disciplinary confinement works and fewer examine whether this punishment exerts variable impacts on women. This paper will address this research gap by providing a systematic assessment of the effect of exposure to and length of disciplinary confinement on misconduct patterns with a focus on gender, using a longitudinal dataset, and random effects regression analyses. Results find disciplinary confinement has little deterrent effect on misconduct but gender variation exists. Implications for theory, research, and policy related to the relationship between in-prison penalties, misbehavior, and the gendered prison experience are discussed.