Women are the fastest growing prison population in the United States. Thus, women prisoners are increasingly contributing to the societal and financial costs of incarceration and recidivism.  Although research on women in prison is emerging, very little is known about women in prison compared to their male counterparts.  Women in prison have high rates of mental health and substance use problems, which are often related to their trauma histories, including childhood physical victimization and childhood sexual victimization. These mental health and substance use problems often contribute to adjustment problems in prison and in the community upon release.  Thus, a better understanding of how previous victimization histories, mental health problems, and substance use problems relate to recidivism has important implications for assessment, transitional planning, and reentry programming.

Dr. Stephen Tripodi has spent the past two years working on a research project entitled, “Pathways to Recidivism among Women Prisoners with Histories of Victimization: Implications for Assessment, Transitional Planning, and Reentry.”  This community-based research project with the North Carolina Department of Correction is funded by The Center for Behavior Services & Criminal Justice Research, which is an NIMH funded Center run through Rutgers University. The purpose of this project is assess the influence previous victimization has on recidivism among women prisoners along with identifying and assessing contributors to recidivism for women prisoners with histories of victimization.

Research team members interview women prisoners who are between 30 and 120 days away from release from one of two prisons in Raleigh, North Carolina.  In the interviews, prisoners participating are asked questions from several standardized measures to obtain information on: childhood victimization, substance use and mental health histories, adult victimization, social support before incarceration, and perceived social support upon release.  So far, 196 women have been interviewed to date, and the research team anticipates interviewing approximately 50 more participants in the summer of 2012.  The researchers will then obtain follow-up data from North Carolina Department of Correction databases starting one year after release.

This research will have a major impact in contributing to the understanding of adult mental health and substance use problems between women who were sexually abused as children and women who were physically abused. It will also provide vital information on the relationship between the frequency of childhood victimization and suicidality; as well as the relationship between childhood victimization and adult psychosis.  This research is of interest to an international audience as evidenced by Dr. Tripodi being invited to make presentations on the project to a conference on women, crime, and punishment in Israel, the Academic and Policy Conference on Correctional Health in Atlanta, and the the British Society of Criminology in July of 2012.

In the future, Dr. Tripodi hopes, with grant support, to develop women-specific prisoner reentry programming that contains appropriate assessment and targeted interventions allowing women prisoners to address their victimization symptoms and related mental health and substance use problems before transitioning back to their communities.

Contact Dr. Tripodi directly at (850) 645-1572 or stripodi@fsu.edu.