Implicit Bias's Influence in Jails
John W. Johnson Sr., Ph.D., CJM
Implicit bias is a polarizing topic that forces people to either support uncovering hidden belief systems or dispute their affiliation with any consequences they may have regarding creating and perpetuating systems of inequity. In either case, there are arguments to both support and oppose your position.
In the criminal justice context, implicit bias research and training have garnered significant support in recent years (Holbrook et al., 2022; Rucker & Richeson, 2021). Contentious interactions between the police and the community have resulted in ample time and resource allocations to examine how implicit bias influences police actions and what tools can address these unconscious partialities (Holmes, 2021; Kahn & Money, 2021). Research and training seem to remain with police officers as they transfer custody of detainees to correctional officers in detention centers’ intake areas.
Failing to explore implicit bias research and movement into the jail environment is a disservice to the same community that experiences implicit bias outside the jail during interactions with law enforcement. Specifically, suppose intentional mitigations are not identified and implemented within a jail system. In that case, those who become justice-involved will only get worse while in custody, resulting in a higher probability of them recidivating. Further, the lack of inquiry into how unconscious biases influence a jail’s management team members conceivably promotes correctional practitioners’ willingness to reject the possibility of its presence.
Failure to understand bias sometimes results in not realizing that the construct influences operations in detention centers. One purpose of this article is to metaphorically bridge common misunderstandings related to the bias to make it more identifiable and thus addressable. Further, distinguishing biases from different and often negative characteristics of racism and bigotry should promote quicker identification; therefore, remedial actions are more actionable.
Bias Versus Racism
To this point, if one embraces a perception of superiority
when comparing themselves with another social group, often with no substantiating lived experiences, racism is considered the reason (T Clingan, 2021). Relatedly, racism, a more explicit form of discrimination by those in power, promotes obvious distinctions between races. If a person of trust forges negative personifications, any subsequent discriminatory behavior could be considered bigotry, not bias (Hutchinson, 2020). Taken wholly, the definition of bias is persistently ambiguous and, accordingly, often goes unaddressed in jails. The construct’s linkage to different, and perhaps, more negative manifestations of human interactions advances vagueness. However, because implicit bias could explain some of the disproportionate aspects of the criminal justice systems experienced by certain groups, clarity must be sought and addressed inside jails if they are to achieve the aim of helping those in custody to reintegrate back into the communities from which they came.
Furthering the unwillingness of jail professionals to accept and understand bias’s prevalence in detention centers is the scarcity of studies to support the claim. As previously noted, many recent studies advance the examination of biases’ effect on police and Black communities’ relationships (Holbrook et al., 2022; Rucker & Richeson, 2021). Individuals arrested by police at purported disproportional rates are confined with jail staff for extended periods, which may mean the natural progression toward expanding the examination of bias in jails should be expected. Literature suggesting this transition remains scant. Therefore, it is incumbent upon correctional leaders to initiate conversations with other member law enforcement agencies, representatives of academia, and interested advocates to establish frameworks for data collection and the ushering of organizational change.
People of color are suspiciously over-represented in jails (Holbrook et al., 2022). With this understanding, jail professionals might develop negative beliefs regarding classes of detainees commonly represented in custody by their work. This thought process could inadvertently influence everyday operations, including:
• classifying detainees,
• responding to grievances,
• disciplining negative inmate behavior, and
• rehabilitative programming,
These are four areas of operational import in jails, and are also susceptible to small incremental decisions that could have substantial effects on penological goals.
Classifications and Misclassifications
Classification is the cornerstone of institutional inmate security (Duwe, 2019). Thus, over-classifying an individual based on predisposing what their custodial conduct will beor the understood blight they might have on acceptable communal behavior can adversely influence a jail’s operations. Experienced professionals within detention centers know that placing incompatible inmates in the same housing area could lead to victimization (Duwe, 2019; Labrecque & Mears, 2019). However, many of these pros are not trained in the nuances of objectively classifying inmates and do not question the resulting assignments, which leads to missed opportunities to provide a check on the decisions of employees who occupy positions of significant influence in jails, a paramount concern if the actions of these classifiers are being influenced involuntarily.
Advancing the potential of adverse outcomes of misclassifications is that newly assigned inmates will not voice concerns regarding a housing location. The lack of questioning of these decisions from staff or inmates could lead to ill feelings toward certain inmates and deny opportunities to determine if biases are afoot. The reviews mentioned above should also prove prudent as inmates become more acclimated to their environment; they will communicate their concerns. Addressing these anxieties is essential if institutional safety is the aim of the jail’s administration. Moreover, responding to grievances will require more resources than assessing the classification system that maybe contribute to their filings.
Inmate Grievances
Grievances are platforms inmates use to convey prevalent and emergent issues within a jail system (Calderone, 2022). Biased beliefs (even those unconsciously derived) about those that filed grievances could lead to the intentional or unintentional invalidation of presented concerns from a group of individuals who are not renowned for their education or writing skills. Besides possibly demeaning a grievant, if issues are continually unaddressed, it could encourage detainees to resolve their matters in less productive ways, which may increase violence (Butler, 2019).
A high unsubstantiated rate of grievances could ostensibly aid in protecting a jail from litigation (Smith, 2022); however, increased levels of dismissed concerns could indicate a biased review process or responders. Therefore, data associated with these documents could identify a need for further assessment, even if the initial indications advance penological
interests. And again, if the grievance process frustrates the inmates attempting to use it, the process could promote actions that violate acceptable institutional behavior, resulting in disciplinary reviews and sanctions. These concepts underscore the importance of ensuring that information about grievances is habitually collected and reviewed by leadership within the jails; failure in this regard, as previously stated, more likely than not, will result in inmate activities that contradict an environment of order.
Inmate Discipline
Wayward behavior in a jail must be addressed swiftly and fairly if the order is to be maintained (Vuk & Doležal, 2019). However, if the actions and behaviors result from inmates’ unresolved attempts to remedy issues, due consideration should be given to why undesired outcomes occur. The likelihood of a reassessment of claims is unlikely in jails, primarily because organizational cultures do not promote them, and time constraints do not allow them. Current circumstances being what they are, connecting negative inmate behaviors with biased employee decisions related to grievances is highly unlikely. Thus, increased emphasis should be on ensuring that the due process of the disciplinary process is jealously preserved.
A jail’s inmate disciplinary process should be delineated in a clear policy that is frequently reviewed by persons who dole out the judgments and those (or representatives) most impacted by the same. Failing to develop and manage an operating document that clearly outlines how the discipline process should be followed could cause convoluted adherences and inconsistent rulings, ideal situations for the manifestation of biases.
Recognizable indications that bias could be embedded in the disciplinary process include the frequency with which inmates with specific demographics face disciplinary sanctions or extended confinement time compared to others. These findings could be explained under the guise of security. Therefore, intentional effort must be made to determine if responses to inappropriate behavior are appropriately aligned with established penological interests stemming from objective and reasonable expectations.
Inmate Programs
Often, jails’ core missions have elements of rehabilitation. Despite these publicly communicated objectives, ensuring inmates have opportunities in the enterprise often falls short of shared expectations. As the literature suggests, public-safety agents are not immune from implicit bias’s impact on their decision-making (Joe, 2020; Rucker & Richeson, 2021). Inmate programming is traditionally designed to be rehabilitative. As might be expected, rehabilitation only occurs if participation is consistent. Because detainees’ movements within the jail are governed by staff, any inhibition to attending programs, such as failure to provide program information or lackluster efforts to escort inmates, could be adversely prohibitive to meaningful changes in inmates’ behavior.
More illustrative of bias toward inmate programs are communicated beliefs, directly or tacitly, that they are not salvageable. Often jail staff promotes this belief using microaggressions, probably in jest, but significant when the challenges of the supervised population are considered. Some examples of these microaggressions are telling an inmate, “You spell well,” or “I believe what my team is
saying.” The irony of these actions by jail staff is that most of those living in detention centers are members of the communities in which they reside, family members in some cases. These seemingly innocuous could deflate the spirit of individuals who had decided that they would try to “exercise the demons” that influenced the actions that led to their incarceration. An antithetical outcome to rehabilitation. Evidence suggests that individuals released from custody as ill-prepared or worse than when they were arrested increase the probability of them recidivating and returning to the same system that failed them (Butler, 2019)—making the officers’ actions influence prophecies.
The topics introduced in this article are not all-encompassing. Jails are filled with people managed by people. As such, there will always be at least the potential that individualized thoughts and subsequent actions to include those with biased origins are unavoidable. This reality: however, should not alleviate jail administrators from attempting to mitigate this avenue of potential adverse treatment of the incarcerated. Accordingly, provided below are some suggestions for addressing implicit biases in the jail setting.
Recruitment
The recruitment and hiring should include precise mechanisms that will flag potential applicants with information in their files or exhibit behaviors that suggest bias. Traditionally, organizational leaders hire those who have previously served in the Armed Forces. Decisions to recruit these individuals are understandable, as jails are paramilitary organizations. Nevertheless, it must be understood that military recruits are trained to identify and overcome those identified as enemies. Therefore, if not correctly trained away, this belief can morph into these employees identifying inmates in a like manner.
The paramilitary elements of a jail’s control and command system are primarily connected to responding to emergency incidents that, despite popular thoughts, happen infrequently.
Many jails are shifting their organization’s mechanistic (centralized decision-making) element to more organic (all staff involvement) principles. This shift in philosophy supports the expansion of the recruitment pool to include applicants with mental health and social work backgrounds.
Pre-service Training
Many states require that correctional officers be provided with training or certification before working in a jail. This requirement has resulted in a more professionalized jail workforce. However, training is only as successful as adopted curriculums and those facilitating the training. Correctional training academies focus on informing recruits not to trust those in custody. For instance, offices are strongly advised not to allow inmates to breach reactionary gaps and to limit conversation with inmates so as not to be manipulated. The root of these theories is officers’ safety; if unbridled, they can embed the biases that will ultimately influence how recruits interact with those who are, in considerable measure, only accused of a crime. These training cultures have resulted in amplified calls for modifications to training to include intentional humane interactions that could offset this possibility.
Policy Development
Agency policies are essentially a guide for employee behavior. However, this fact should not minimize their significance. These operating documents should be examined to determine if their content and tone align with mission statements and are free of esoteric philosophies that could promote unbalanced treatment of the inmate population. For example, through policy language, jail administrators should examine if staff is given an exorbitated amount of flexibility on when they can deploy force or how they provide services. Because jail leaders are often far removed from everyday operational functions, it is incumbent upon them to gather input from staff more closely involved. This process will shorten the time when practices outpace policies, thereby limiting the chances of misalignment and safe harbors for implicit and explicit biases.
Conclusion
Implicit biases are attitudes and beliefs that affect individuals unconsciously (T Clingan, 2021). Because of the nature of correctional work, it is easy for these unwitting preferences to be prevalent but not seen. As such, it is suggested that jail administrators establish, enhance, or maintain data and review processes that increase the likelihood that different operational matters, such as those listed above, are consistently reviewed and courses corrected as needed. This article is written generically to highlight how implicit biases, admittedly unconscious, could creep into jail matters if circumstances are such that their possibility of existence is not considered. This notion might seem pollyannish to some, but what is less debatable is that implicit thoughts are just actions away from explicit activities.
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Dr. John Johnson is an Assistant Director employed by the Miami Dade Corrections and Rehabilitation. He is also a Past President of the American Jail Association. He can be contacted about the article’s content at (305) 790-4632 or John.Johnson@miamidade.gov
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