Do Overcrowding and Turnover Cause Violence in Prison?

Brown v. Plata: prison overcrowding in California.

California's prisons are currently designed to house approximately 85,000 inmates. At the time of the U.S. Supreme Court's 2011 decision in Brown v. Plata, the California prison system housed nearly twice that many (approximately 156,000 inmates). The Supreme Court held that California's prison system violated inmates' Eighth Amendment rights. The Court upheld a three-judge panel's order to dec...

Prison violence: perspectives and epidemiology.

Violent crime receives considerable media attention. Its importance to the community is such that it is used as a yardstick against which to judge the effectiveness of social policy and the performance of governments. Programs and interventions to reduce violence and its consequences are needed given the level of community concern and the impact violence has on both the victim and society. Many...

Urban Violence, Prison Conditions and Human Dignity

This paper is about a situation that perhaps represents one of the most radical and profound challenges to the reality of the consensus that contemporaneous western societies – and Brazilian society in particular – claim they share regarding the equality and essential or ontological dignity of mankind. It is an attempt to investigate how Brazilian society, immersed in a context of fear as a res...

Ward overcrowding and assaults on staff: cause and effect?

Saliva testosterone and criminal violence in young adult prison inmates.

Free testosterone was measured in the saliva of 89 male prison inmates. Inmates with higher testosterone concentrations had more often been convicted of violent crimes. The relationship was most striking at the extremes of the testosterone distribution, where 9 out of 11 inmates with the lowest testosterone concentrations had committed nonviolent crimes, and 10 out of 11 inmates with the highes...