UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item DELINEATING DEMOGRAPHIC PATTERNS: ANALYZING PARTICIPATION IN PRISON MISCONDUCT AND EDUCATIONAL PROGRAMS(2024) Shepherd, Gwynne Laurel; Tahamont, Sarah; Stewart, Robert; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)While it is acclaimed that participation in educational programming reduces the likelihood of an individual engaging in misconduct, the body of literature describing prison misconduct and educational programming participation largely treats the two as isolated processes. However, the contexts of how prison education and misconduct intersect are obscured in the limited scholarship. Using the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ Survey of Prison Inmates collected in 2016, individuals were categorized into four groups (1) “Rule Breakers” who only participated in misconduct, (2) “Students” who participated in only educational programming, (3) “None” who participated in neither, and (4) “Both” for those who participated in both. Weighted cross-tabulations of each group were conducted across multiple demographic characteristics to determine the demographic distribution within each group. The findings of this analysis demonstrate that the characteristics of race, level of prior educational attainment, and age all show disproportional distributions depending on group participation. Additionally, this analysis could inform prison policy, emphasizing the importance of providing educational opportunities even for those who engage in misconduct. Such policies could offer broader societal benefits, reducing recidivism and aiding reintegration.Item WOMEN IN ORANGE: HOW WOMEN IN PRISON ADAPT, NAVIGATE RELATIONSHIPS, AND MAINTAIN IDENTITY(2023) Philippon , Cassandra Nicole; Porter, Lauren; Ellis, Rachel; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The body of literature describing women’s prisons and the adaptations of women in prison largely overlook the role femininity plays in structuring life in the single-sex space of a women’s prison. Virtual, semi-structured interviews were conducted with fifty-six women housed at a women’s prison in Arizona. Participants described providing care for others and care for the self. Life in the prison was therefore structured primarily around care, which refers to a feeling of concern or interest, providing for the needs of someone, or paying close attention to doing something to avoid harm.Item Do Cellmates Matter? A Study of Prison Peer Effects under Essential Heterogeneity(2014) Harris, Heather Michele; Reuter, Peter; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study examines prison peer effects in an adult prison population in the United States using a unique dataset assembled from the administrative databases of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections. The members of a first-time prison release cohort were identified and matched to each of the cellmates with whom they shared a double cell. These data were then linked to arrest history data from the Pennsylvania State Police. Criminological theories of social influence expect unobserved and difficult to quantify factors, such as criminality, to affect criminal behavior both independently and through intermediate decisions, including the choice to maintain prison peer associations. Those theories, therefore, implicitly assume the presence of essential heterogeneity, which helps to account for the response heterogeneity observed in studies of social influence. This study introduces the concept of essential heterogeneity to criminology and is the first to apply a method to address it, local instrumental variables, to estimate causal social interaction effects. The analyses presented in this study demonstrate that there is considerable response heterogeneity in prison peer effects. That response heterogeneity is attributable to essential heterogeneity, as implicitly expected by criminological learning theories. However, the null average effects estimated do not accord with the predictions of criminological learning theories, including differential association, balance, and prisonization theories, each of which expects peers who are, on average, more criminally experienced to exert criminogenic effects. The presence of essential heterogeneity indicates that estimating average prison peer effects does little to adequately characterize the relationship between social interactions with cellmates and releasee reoffending behaviors. Within the null average prison peer effect estimates lies tremendous variation in marginal prison peer effects. Some marginal prison peer effects are significantly criminogenic, while others are significantly crimino-suppressive. That substantial variation in the measured effect of prison peers on reoffending persists despite rigorous analysis and the inclusion of robust theoretically relevant controls suggests that future work should focus on creating constructs more appropriate to the task of determining who is harmed and who is helped as a result of interactions with prison peers.Item The Image of Reintegration(2011) Kucia, John; Ambrose, Michael; Architecture; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Architecture plays a role in the image of the convict during his return from prison to society. The prisoner, in a critical moment of his life between prison and freedom, is viewed with distrust in a venue largely misunderstood by society. Can architecture support the image of the halfway house as a place between, where the convict is exposed to society and the world is exposed to the convict, where mutual understanding can lead to a more positive return of the convict to society? Program, form, and context will be examined through the mediums of analog (drawings, collage, physical models) and digital (drawings, models, animations) representation. A site in Washington, DC will be determined based on pragmatic issues such as visibility, geographic relationship to schools, and neighborhood density, as well as a site that reflects and characterizes the "between" condition of the convict. Programmatic development of the halfway house will involve understanding of the needs of both occupants and society in order to establish new patterns and seeking places of overlap for social interactions to occur. Lastly, formal development will engage the between space as a means of deliberating the social, political, and aesthetic meanings of the halfway house.