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Parole as an Effective Way to Lead to Better Behavior Essay

Decent Essays

Parole as an Effective Way to Lead to Better Behavior I chose an article that used deterrence theory to test the use of parole as an effective way to lead to better behavior among incarcerated prisoners. The article is titled "Parole as Institutional Control: A Test of Specific Deterrence and Offender Misconduct" published in The Prison Journal in March of 2000. Many prior studies are mentioned in the article about other sorts of research that have been done involving deterrence theory and some have found positive correlation between some punishments and the reduction of specific misbehaviors. This article is based on deterrence of parole as a way of controlling prisoners that are institutionalized. The sample consisted of …show more content…

The researchers used control mechanisms in the test so that there would not be variations within the group. Since the test was trying to prove that specific deterrence would decrease misconduct after the review board denied parole hearings and an increase in bad behavior for prisoners that were granted parole hearings. The results revealed that time (prereview and postreview) was a big factor having to do with misbehavior of prisoners. "A main effect for time was uncovered, with postreview misconduct reports being significantly greater than prereview reports, F(1, 231)=23.46, p*.001" (Pease,42). This fact did not prove the study's theory that after reviews behavior would get better, but in fact misbehavior increased after the board reviews. That test was an overall reading, but when looked at in a smaller perspective the test did show that the misbehavior was increased more by the prisoners that were allowed to have parole hearings. "A Time x Decision interaction effect revealed that misconduct reports increased significantly only for those offenders granted parole hearings, F(1, 231)=7.85, p*.01" (Pease, 42). These results show that prisoners that were denied hearings were less likely to misbehave compared to prisoners that were granted hearings, but not significantly. Since the previous study did not show any significant results the researchers realized that since there was a longer period of time in postreview of course there was

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