Violence and Victimization within a State Prison System

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Abstract
The focus of this paper is upon the victim of assault within the North Carolina prison system. This paper provides the first comprehensive quantitative profile of in-prison victimization. The research to be reported was undertaken to answer four questions: (i) What is the assault rate within North Carolina's prisons? (ii) What are the immediate precipitating causes of this assault? (iii) What common characteristics do the victims of assault possess? (iv) What practical policies could be implemented to reduce the level of assault? Three data bases were used. (i) A sample of records of disciplinary hearings; (ii) Interviews with prison supervisors; (iii) Interviews with prison inmates. A synthesis of these data sets permits us to answer the above four questions. Some of the results which are reported are consistent with common expectations. Others are not. In particular, we show that the rate of unprovoked victimization is much lower than is commonly believed.

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