{"id":15169,"date":"2023-10-17T17:14:53","date_gmt":"2023-10-17T21:14:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/?p=15169"},"modified":"2025-01-28T11:21:09","modified_gmt":"2025-01-28T16:21:09","slug":"discipline-policies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/2023\/10\/17\/discipline-policies\/","title":{"rendered":"New resource: Prison discipline policies"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"embargo\">In January 2025, Prison Policy Initiative released a report examining prison disciplinary policies, <i><a href=\"\/reports\/discipline.html\">Bad Behavior: How prison disciplinary policies manufacture misconduct<\/a><\/i>. If you&#8217;re interested in learning more about these policies, we recommended reading that report.<\/p>\n<p>Today, the Prison Policy Initiative is publishing a collection of <a href=\"\/data\/discipline_policies.html\">discipline policies<\/a> for all 50 state prison systems, the Washington, D.C. Department of Corrections, and the Federal Bureau of Prisons in our <a href=\"\/data\/\">Data toolbox<\/a>. It includes the discipline policy for each system, a list of offense severity classifications from most to least severe, and links to additional documents to help you understand each system&#8217;s classification scheme.<\/p>\n<p>Advocates, researchers, and lawmakers can use this collection to examine the rules, offenses, procedures, and associated punishments for each prison system, or to answer questions about prison discipline systems such as:<\/p>\n<ul class=\"list\">\n<li>What behaviors are considered &#8220;violations&#8221; in your state&#8217;s prisons? <\/li>\n<li>How are different violations punished? How does the severity of punishment for certain actions compare to others? <\/li>\n<li>How many different rules can be applied to punish a single action, such as a fight, potentially allowing prison staff to pick and choose or &#8220;stack&#8221; violations?<\/li>\n<li>Does your state&#8217;s prison system punish people more harshly than others for similar violations?<\/li>\n<li>What does the severity of punishment for certain actions &mdash; such as refusal to work or organizing a strike &mdash; tell us about the culture and priorities of prisons? <\/li>\n<li>What is the &#8220;justice&#8221; process like inside prisons? How do people defend themselves? Is there due process inside?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>We hope this new policy resource (and others, like our collection of <a href=\"\/data\/doc_policymanuals.html\">DOC policy manuals<\/a>) will help strengthen the movement to end mass incarceration. If you use the discipline policy collection in your work, <a href=\"\/contact.html\">tell us about it<\/a>. Let us know what was helpful, what was not, and what other resources we can provide. If you&#8217;re an organization seeking assistance from our Policy and Advocacy staff, <a href=\"\/contact.html\">drop us a line to let us know how we can help<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><i>Acknowledgement: We thank Prison Policy Initiative alum <a href=\"\/alumns.html#t_Emile_DeWeaver\">Emile Suotonye DeWeaver<\/a> for the initial collection of policy documents and offense classifications.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Our collection of prison discipline policies covers all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and highlights how each system classifies the severity of offenses and punishments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":60,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"coauthors":[92],"class_list":["post-15169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15169","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/60"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15169"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15169\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17045,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15169\/revisions\/17045"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15169"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=15169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}