Prison Policy Initiative releases “Bad Behavior: How prison disciplinary policies manufacture misconduct”

Brian Nam-Sonenstein and Nell Haney have authored this new Prison Policy Initiative report titled “Bad Behavior: How prison disciplinary policies manufacture misconduct.”  The subheading of the report highlights its coverage and themes:

Prison disciplinary systems are supposed to provide safety, security, and the orderly operation of corrections institutions. In some cases, they’re even supposed to aid in rehabilitation. However, our analysis of policies in all state prison systems and testimony from dozens of incarcerated people show these unfair and unaccountable systems are counterproductive, traumatizing, and lengthen prison stays.

This extensive new report merits a close review, and here are excerpts from the very start:

Every prison system has a lengthy disciplinary policy laying out the rules incarcerated people must follow, as well as the procedures and punishments they’ll face if they don’t.  If we think of prisons as miniature walled-off cities, then disciplinary systems can be understood as the quasi-legal system within them, governing the daily lives of incarcerated people.  These policies are supposed to ensure safety, security, and order by deterring and punishing misconduct.  In practice, however, prison discipline is a system of petty tyranny with devastating, long-term consequences. Corrections officers enforce rules arbitrarily, often doling out punishments for mundane behaviors and survival strategies while interrupting access to programming and services that can make a meaningful difference in people’s lives.  Harsh sanctions are handed down following unfair and unaccountable proceedings wherein it is nearly impossible to defend oneself from the charges.

The end result is a disciplinary system that plays a key role in keeping people in prison longer.  Misconduct records discredit incarcerated people in parole and clemency proceedings, while traumatizing disciplinary punishments like solitary confinement increase the chances they’ll be arrested again someday in the future.  These outcomes are never seen as failures of disciplinary systems; instead they are interpreted as personal failures to live up to the system’s expectations….

In this report, we examine the landscape of disciplinary rules and punishments in all 50 state prison systems to get a “big picture” view of how they are designed and how they function as a central aspect of prison life — one that has been overlooked for too long.  Using our collection of state prison disciplinary policies and building off our past work analyzing data on these systems and the impact of punishments like fines and fees, we explore the rules, procedures, and sanctions common to most systems.  We also surveyed nearly four dozen incarcerated people to get their firsthand experiences because these systems are so opaque and cannot be well understood by reading policy alone….

We found that there are profound similarities between problems with the “free world” criminal legal system and internal prison disciplinary systems. However, prison disciplinary systems are far more unfair and unaccountable.  In both systems, minor offenses trigger the vast majority of cases. Both systems have procedures that lack fairness, but prison disciplinary processes are missing even the most basic constitutional protections afforded to defendants in the criminal legal system, like the right to legal representation.