How can restrictive housing be prevented or reduced? Conceptual, methodological, and theoretical issues confronting research and policy

Daniel P. Mears and Ryan M. Labrecque

Journal of Criminal Justice, 2025, vol. 99, issue C

Abstract: This paper identifies conceptual, methodological, and theoretical limitations in research on restrictive housing (RH) that confound efforts to understand the use and impacts of this widely debated form of housing and to create and evaluate efforts for preventing or reducing its use and for developing effective alternatives. The limitations include confusion about what RH entails, the problems it seeks to address, and relevant evaluation outcomes. This confusion extends, in turn, to efforts to understand how to prevent or reduce the housing or to create alternatives. Successful advances require understanding the problems that RH is intended to address, causes and theoretical mechanisms that contribute to the problems, which causes have the greatest effect and can be influenced, and how they can be targeted successfully while minimizing potential harms. Creating effective alternatives requires identifying strategies that can achieve the same or greater benefits, have comparable or fewer harms, and do not contribute to use of RH through net-widening. We conclude that clarity about these types of conceptual, methodological, and theoretical issues is necessary for advancing research and for limiting the use of RH while enabling prison systems to achieve their broader organizational goals.

Keywords: Restrictive housing; Use; Impacts; Alternatives; Effectiveness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004723522500087X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jcjust:v:99:y:2025:i:c:s004723522500087x

DOI: 10.1016/j.jcrimjus.2025.102438

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Criminal Justice is currently edited by Matthew DeLisi

More articles in Journal of Criminal Justice from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().