RT Article
T1 Towards a typology of prisoners’ awareness of and familiarity with prison inspection and monitoring bodies
JF European journal of criminology
VO 20
IS 1
SP 228
OP 250
A1 van der Valk, Sophie
A2 Aizpurua, Eva
A2 Rogan, Mary
LA English
YR 2023
UL https://krimdok.uni-tuebingen.de/Record/1839930306
AB Inspection and monitoring bodies have an important role in the protection of prisoners? rights. Although these bodies are seen as widely beneficial, there is limited research examining their operations in practice. This study addresses this gap in the existing literature by identifying unique profiles of prisoners based on their familiarity with prison oversight bodies. In addition, the relationship between profiles and key factors (personal characteristics, sentence-related variables and those related to life in prison) was examined using multinomial regression. Participants were 508 males randomly selected from three prisons in Ireland. Data were collected between November 2018 and February 2019, using self-administered surveys. Latent class analysis revealed four subgroups of prisoners characterized by distinct patterns of awareness and contact with prison oversight bodies: (1) Low familiarity (44.1 percent); (2) High awareness with low contact (26.4 percent); (3) High familiarity with the Visiting Committees but low with other oversight bodies (14.2 percent); and (4) High familiarity (15.4 percent). Notably, the largest group was the low familiarity group, and few prisoners belonged to the high familiarity group. Nationality, sentence length, confidence in staff and complaint usage were linked to class membership. The results of this study point to the importance of increasing awareness of inspection and monitoring bodies among prisoners in general, and among certain groups in particular.
K1 Human Rights
K1 Inspection
K1 Latent Class Analysis
K1 Monitoring
K1 Prison
K1 prisoners’ rights
DO 10.1177/1477370821998940