Scholars have found that family support is an important facilitator of successful reentry from prison to the community. At the same time, they have argued that owing court-ordered fines or fees, also called legal financial obligations (LFOs), can act as an additional barrier to reentry, especially for parents. There remains a need to test how LFOs impact the financial support formerly incarcerated parents receive from their families. The current study responds to this gap by employing logistic regression analyses of the Serious and Violent Offender Reentry Initiative (SVORI) data to test whether owing court fees is associated with formerly incarcerated fathers’ (1) perceptions of available financial support from family and (2) receipt of financial support from family. We find that owing court fees is not associated with perceptions of available financial support. However, owing court fees has a positive, statistically significant association with receiving financial support from family during the first three months after prison release. This relationship remains after accounting for whether the person owes child support or sees their children monthly. Our results suggest that LFOs may create a greater need for financial support among formerly incarcerated fathers, making the financial challenges of reentry a consequence not just for those who were incarcerated but for their loved ones as well.

Research Summary: Governments historically have relied on private organizations to assist with the provision of correctional punishment and services. This reliance continues but has engendered considerable debate that stems from ideological divides. Debate stems as well from a disjuncture between the limited evidence about privatization and calls for evidence‐based policy. In this article, we present a conceptual framework for identifying what is and is not known about privatization and for guiding scholarship and policy. We then discuss key issues that must be addressed to advance knowledge about privatization and productively inform policy debates.Policy Implications: In our review, we highlight that little is known not only about the benefits and harms of private corrections but also about the operations, impacts, and cost efficiency of public corrections. Scholarship on privatization can be used to shed light on contemporary punishment practices and how they impact individuals and influence corrections systems and society.

Although the media gives considerable attention to prison privatization, there have been few assessments of how newspapers portray the debate about it and how that portrayal aligns with what is known empirically about private prisons. This study addresses this gap in the literature by undertaking a content analysis of newspaper articles (N = 131) about private prisons and private Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities, respectively. The results show that few news stories discuss the broad range of factors that scholars highlight as important aspects of the privatization debate. It is also uncommon for news reports, especially those that discuss private immigration facilities, to refer to empirical research or its importance. The implications of this limited portrayal of private facilities are discussed.

Research about school resource officers (SROs) has focussed on their ability to legally intervene and detain or arrest youth. On many campuses, though, their role extends beyond that of law enforcement to include mentorship, counselling, and education. The current study draws on a survey of SROs from the Phoenix, Arizona, Police Department—one of the largest police departments in the United States—to examine what roles SROs prioritize and how they implement their duties. The results show that although one of SROs’ primary roles is that of law enforcer, SROs were more likely to prioritize their role as mentors. SROs also reported that it was school personnel, rather than teachers or the SROs themselves, who most commonly initiated SRO involvement in student misbehaviour, whether in a law enforcement or mentorship capacity. The paper concludes with a discussion about implications for scholarship and practice.

Propensity score matching and regression analyses of the National Inmate Survey are used to examine individuals’ experiences and perceptions of environmental quality in public versus private prisons across key domains of prison life, with an emphasis on needs, behaviors, victimization, and attitudes. No differences are identified for women. Males in private prisons are more likely than men in public prisons to perceive there to be inadequate staffing and are less likely to report maintaining ties with people outside of prison. Men in private prisons are also less likely to report crowding to be an issue. We discuss implications for evaluating a central tenet of privatization: that the quality of private prisons be comparable to, or better than, that of public prisons.

The theoretical logic underlying correctional privatization is that private organizations provide comparable or better services more cost-efficiently than governments. This logic and its mechanisms have come primarily from scholarly accounts. This study advances scholarship and policy on privatized corrections by analyzing interviews of people who have observed privatization in practice. The findings suggest that mechanisms that enhance privatization’s effectiveness and efficiency include: bureaucracy that promotes flexibility, budget flexibility that promotes efficiencies, competition that promotes improved corrections, missions that prioritize effectiveness, and high-quality monitoring. Mechanisms contributing to privatization’s ineffectiveness and inefficiencies are bureaucracy that inhibits flexibility, budget flexibility that promotes inefficiencies, lack of competition, goals that do not prioritize effectiveness, and insufficient monitoring. These findings reveal the importance of accounting for the conditions under which corrections, public and private, are implemented.