As a guiding principle of incarceration, prisons should aim to maintain safe and rehabilitative environments. The key contextual factors that undergird such environments are access to purposeful activities and humane conditions of confinement. Independent authoritative reviews conducted by the...

We observe that countries where belief in the quot;American dreamquot; (i.e., effort pays) prevails also set harsher punishment for criminals. We know from previous work that beliefs are also correlated with several features of the economic system (taxation, social insurance, etc). Our objective...

Why does prison social order vary around the world? While many of the basic characteristics of prisons are similar globally, the extent and form of informal inmate organization varies substantially. This paper develops a governance theory of prison social order. Inmates create extralegal...