Suchergebnisse

Background: For the past several decades, the U.S. prison system has witnessed a steady and persistent increase in the ages of prison populations. Given the additional costs and burdens placed on prisons as they house older inmates, this aging trend has generated intense interest among policy makers and academics who seek to understand why prison populations are getting older. Objective: This article presents a method for evaluating drivers influencing the change in age distributions among prisoners. Method: We define a methodological approach and demonstrate its application using prison data from four states reporting to the Bureau of Justice Statistics' National Corrections Reporting Program. Results: We find that since 2000, the primary driver of overall growth in the elderly populations in prison (defined as inmates over 50) is the increasing admission age of offenders entering prison. Moreover, changes in offense mix and sentence length/time served over the last decade have had significantly less influence on the age composition of prison populations. We also find that the impact of explanatory factors varies across states and offense types. For example, prison admission and exit rates explain much of the change in elderly drug offenders in New York, but not elderly violent offenders, where admission age plays a much stronger explanatory role. Conclusion: Our analysis offers an effective demonstration that supports the use of this method as an important and informative first step toward understanding components of change that affect the problem of prison aging.

The gap between what people admit about their behavior and what is actually true has plagued social scientists and survey methodologists for decades. This gap would not matter if it did not play an important role in estimation of the extent of the consumption of illegal drugs and/or changing trends in illegal use, both data critical for developing public policy and determining the effects of intervention programming and policy changes. The Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring (ADAM) survey matches anonymous self-reported interview information to a urine test for nine drugs in a probability-based sample of adult male arrestees conducted within 48 hr of their arrest. Using data from 2000-2003 and 2007-2011 collected in 10 U.S. counties, this article looks at how the gap between the truth and reality in self-report varies by the drug reported, by the region of the country, over time, and by characteristics of the user, and discusses the relevance of these findings to policy.

The HIV epidemic in China and Vietnam is on the increase among injection drug users (IDUs). We report on the results of a pilot outreach study in northern Vietnam and southern China to test the feasibility of a peer-driven intervention (PDI) to prevent HIV among IDUs. In the PDI, recruitment relies on a "chain-referral" model in which IDUs carry-out the core outreach activities that salaried outreach-workers/peer-educators traditionally provide. A 6-month follow-up was built into the study design to measure possible changes in IDUs' risk behaviors. The impact results of the pilot study are reported bearing on several different measures, such as changes in IDUs' rates of lending or borrowing used syringes, willingness to enter into drug treatment, baseline and follow-up recruitment success, and effectiveness of serving as peer-educators in the community. The evidence suggests the PDI is highly feasible and deserving of greater research in both China and Vietnam.