Team from Sociology Conducts Survey of Ohio Prisoners
In 2004, Paul Bellair (Sociology) embarked on an ambitious research project with the assistance of several graduate student researchers, including Ryan Light (Sociology), Jim Sutton (now Assistant Professor, California State University-Chico), and participants in a research practicum he designed: the administration of a survey intended to examine life-course determinants of crime and desistance among male inmates in four minimum security prisons in Central Ohio. The survey was administered through structured face-to-face interviews which will ultimately be completed with a minimum random sample of 250 prisoners, using an event history calendar that allowed subjects to recall important events over the 18-month period prior to the date of incarceration. As the project grew from the initial 100 participants, Paul and his research team faced a number of challenges (among them: the State of Ohio’s prohibition on offering rewards or payment to inmate participants), but yielded an impressive sample and considerable data on the key events and social supports available to respondents. These rich data thus enable researchers to examine key premises of life-course-centered theories of crime and desistance, such as the work of Robert Sampson and John Laub: What events and social supports matter for the onset and continued participation in crime? Further, researchers are able to examine the neighborhood context of recidivism, an understudied area.

Though the data are self-report data gleaned from a population of prisoners, some of whom are substance users, they nonetheless hold up well under tests of reliability. For example, Paul and Jim found strong correlations between respondents’ initial responses and retests conducted three weeks later. Further, the nature of the interview technique (face-to-face) increased the researchers’ confidence in the data. As a result, the data have already been used by several researchers on the project to examine research questions of interest.

At the most recent annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology, a special session was organized to highlight the project. Paul, Jim, and Sociology PhD students Anita Parker and Grace Sherman presented research using the data from the project. Grace’s project examined the informal social control premises of Sampson and Laub’s theory. She found that legal employment is an important predictor of subject’s participation in drug dealing and property and violent crime. Anita examined Bandura’s theory of self-efficacy, and found that the types and frequency of both witnessed and experienced abuse, as well as the levels of positive parenting in childhood, are related to later self-efficacy.

However, these studies are only the beginning of the research expected from the project; while the project has required a substantial outlay of time and effort on the part of the research team, the data will serve as an important resource for both academic and applied researchers. Paul and his team are to be congratulated for their ambitious effort to look beyond official data to capture the often diverse circumstances of offenders’ lives. Their work will serve to bolster existing theory and research on the life-course and neighborhood contextual determinants of offending and desistance.