Do Official Misconduct Data Tell the Same Story as the Individuals Who Live in Prison?

• Author: Dawn M. Daggett,Scott D. Camp
• Published date: 01 September 2009
• Date: 01 September 2009
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0734016808329291
• Subject Matter: Articles

428

Do Official Misconduct Data

Tell the Same Story as the

Individuals Who Live in Prison?

Dawn M. Daggett

Scott D. Camp

Federal Bureau of Prisons, Washington, DC

This analysis focuses on misconduct rates and inmates’ perceptions of safety at 10 low-security

prisons. Performance measures derived from two different data sources, inmate survey data

and agency records of inmate misconduct, are compared. The findings demonstrate that the

rankings of the prisons with performance measures derived from inmates’perception of safety

correlate with measures obtained from official misconduct rates. These findings provide evi-

dence regarding the validity and reliability of inmate survey and officialmisconduct data when

assessing conditions of confinement.

Keywords: misconduct; perceptions of safety; inmate survey; prison performance measures

Conditions of confinement and the safety of inmates and staff have been important issues

for correctional staff, administrators, inmates, and researchers. To assess these issues,

various data sources on conditions of confinement and safety have been examined and

reported on in the literature, including operational data, staff surveys, and inmate surveys.

The latter two sources tap into perceptions of safety and security where the former reflects

the official interpretation. Each of these data sources has thepotential to paint a different pic-

ture of the conditions of confinement due to the competing interests of the parties collect-

ing/providing the data.Therefore, this study attempts to assess whether operational data (i.e.,

misconduct rates) and inmates’ self-reports of the safety of the prison tell the same story.

Generally, conditions of confinement and institutional performance measures are gener-

ated using objective data sources. Institutions are ranked based on factors such as rates of

misconduct, GED completions, or similar operational concerns. The exception to this pat-

tern has been the occasional use of prison staff surveys to provide subjective views of

prison conditions. Although these data sources provide valuable information, inmate

surveys are an alternative data source that can potentially provide accurate and pertinent

Criminal Justice Review

Volume34 Number 3

September 2009 428-449

© 2009 Georgia State University

Research Foundation, Inc.

10.1177/0734016808329291

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Authors’Note: Portions of an earlier version of this articlewere presented at the annual meeting of the American

Society of Criminology, Nashville, Tennessee,held in 2004. The authors would like to thank Sean Rosenmerkel

and Angela Boone for their comments on earlier versions of this article.The opinions in this article are those of

the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of either the Federal Bureau of Prisons or the U.S. Department

of Justice. Please address correspondence to Dawn Daggett, Federal Bureau of Prisons, Office of Research and

Evaluation,400 Building, Room 3023, 320 First Street, NW,Washington, DC 20534;e-mail: ddaggett@bop.gov.

Daggett, Camp / Individuals Who Live in Prison 429

information. Where staff spend only a fraction of their day in the institution, inmates

live in the prison. Therefore, inmates are likely to be directly affected by factors such as

physical violence, gang activity, and the stressors that accompany incarceration. In the past,

asking inmates about conditions of confinement sometimes raised concerns for wardens

and other prison officials. One of the major concerns voiced by prison staff is that inmates

view surveys as an opportunity to embarrass prison administrators by providing uniformly

negative comments. If this is true, then inmate survey data would not be a useful method to

assess conditions of confinement, and alternative methods would need to be employed. The

concern expressed by prison administrators is nothing new. The validity and reliability of

survey data has been questioned and subsequently investigated for decades in criminology.

With respect to the prevalence of crime, many works have addressed whether self-report

data substitute for supplements or is irrelevant compared to official statistics (Mosher,

Miethe, & Philips, 2002). The concern here is similar: What is the relationship between

underlying prison conditions on factors such as safety, at least as expressed in official

records, and inmate perceptions of these conditions?

There is a limited amount of literature assessing the validity and reliability of inmate sur-

vey responses. The few studies that have assessed the reliability of inmate data were with

federal inmate samples (Camp, 1999; Camp, Gaes, Klein-Saffran, Daggett, & Saylor,

2002). One study compared the reliability of performance measures from staff and inmate

surveys, concluding that measures regarding prison conditions were more reliable from

inmate rather than staff surveys (Camp, Gaes, Klein-Saffran et al., 2002). An earlier study

demonstrated that organizational measures with favorable measurement properties could be

derived from inmate responses (Camp, 1999). In other words, individual level responses

could be aggregated to the level of the prison (group-level measure) from individual-level

data. The question that has not been addressed is whether the subjective ratings by inmates

regarding the safety of inmates match the objective conditions in the prisons.

The empirical evidence presented in this analysis adds to the extant literature regarding the

usefulness of inmate survey data about the conditions of confinement in prisons. The methods

correlate the rankings of prisons derived from surveys of inmates with rankings derived from

operational data, the so-called objective standard. This study breaks ground in several ways.

First, it provides further evidence of the validity of official misconduct data as one measure of

prisonerversus staffperceptions ofsafety and security. Most researchers outside of corrections,

and even many who do research in correctional agencies, treat official prison misconduct data

with skepticism similar to official arrest data. This study allows us to assess whether official

data tell the same story as do the inmates. Second, the study provides an opportunity to com-

pare and contrast the levels of safety and security reported in different sources of data (official

and self-report). This type of analysis has rarely been done in a prison environment. Finally,

the most important reason for conducting the study is the flipside of the first two questions:

Can inmates provide accurate evaluations of the conditions of confinement in prison?

Literature Review

Prisons have long been recognized as a microcosm of the larger society in which they

exist (Foucault, 1977; Goffman, 1961). Although there are features of prison that are