The staff of correctional facilities voluntarily work in prisons. It seems plausible that the professionals, officers, and administrators engaged in such employment may have unconscious feelings of a desire or need for punishment. This topic does, in fact, appear common in the jokes and casual conversation in such facilities, perhaps indicating such an underlying theme. Indeed, those employees ...

An ‘efficiency wage’ model developed for Western economies is reinterpreted in the context of Stalin’s Russia, with imprisonment – not unemployment – acting as a ‘worker discipline device’. The threat of imprisonment allows the state to pay a lower wage outside the Gulag than otherwise, thereby raising the “surplus” left over for investment: this externality provides a reason for coercion over ...

BACKGROUND The value of screening for mental illness has increasingly been questioned in low prevalence settings due to high false positive rates. However, since false positive rates are related to prevalence, screening may be more effective in higher prevalence settings, including correctional institutions. We compared the yield (i.e. newly detected cases) and efficiency (i.e. false positives)...

PURPOSE To study HIV-associated risk behaviours among young offenders. METHODS Juveniles aged 12 to 19 years entering correctional facilities in British Columbia volunteered in an unlinked anonymous study. Logistic regression was used to identify factors associated with high-risk sexual behaviours and injection drug use (IDU). RESULTS Despite low HIV prevalence (0.25%), patterns of risk beh...

The aim of this longitudinal research was to assess and monitor adjustment (operationalised in terms of anxiety) of 60 prisoners as they entered prison and one month later. Results confirmed very high levels of anxiety on admission, which reduced after one month, but still remained significantly higher than adult population norms. Given that Correctional Officers (COs) play an integral role in ...

My attention was first called to this disease in an outbreak of beri-beri at Meiktila Jail in 1808 ; at that time I thought the disease was due to a micrococcus, which I found in between the starch cells in jewary, in the granary of the jail ; I had also found it in pigeon's excreta from the roofs, and thought I had also found it in the blood and in pigeon's blood. But my series of experiments ...

Little is known about the efficiency of health care in correction settings. This article reports an efficiency analysis of health care in state correctional institutions (SCIs) in a single, mid-Atlantic state from 2003 to 2006. A two-stage data envelopment analysis was used to estimate the technical efficiency of prison health care and determine inmate and institutional characteristics that wer...

BACKGROUND Aboriginal representation in Canadian correctional institutions has increased rapidly over the past decade. We calculated "years of life lost to incarceration" for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians. METHODS Incarceration data from provincial databases were used conjointly with demographic data to estimate rates of incarceration and years of life lost to provincial incarcerati...