Received: 27 April 2018 Revised: 18 October 2019 Accepted: 16 December 2019 DOI: 10.1111/1745-9125.12241 ARTICLE Long-term consequences of being placed in disciplinary segregation* Christopher Wildeman1,2 Lars Højsgaard Andersen2 1Department of Policy Analysis and Management, Cornell University, and ROCKWOOL Foundation Research Unit 2ROCKWOOL Foundation Research Unit Correspondence Abstract Christopher Wildeman, 227C Day Hall, Office Being placed in restrictive housing is considered one of the of the Vice Provost for Research, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853. most devastating experiences a human can endure, yet a Email: [email protected] scant amount of research has been conducted to test how this experience affects core indicators of prisoner reentry Funding information Rockwool Foundation such as employment and recidivism. In this article, we use Danish registry data, which allow for us to link penal con- ∗ Additional supporting information ditions to postrelease outcomes, to show how the reentry can be found in the full text tab for this article in the Wiley Online Library at outcomes of individuals placed in disciplinary segregation, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ which is placement in restrictive housing because of disci- crim.2020.58.issue-3/issuetoc. plinary infractions, compare with those sanctioned for in- The authors would like to thank the anonymous Criminology reviewers and Co-Editor Brian D. prison offenses but not placed in segregation. The results Johnson for their helpful feedback. The authors from matched difference-in-differences analyses show that thank the ROCKWOOL Foundation for pro- Danish inmates placed in disciplinary segregation experi- viding funding. Sara Wakefield, Chris Muller, Andy Papachristos, and seminar participants ence larger drops in employment and larger increases in at Cornell University, Princeton University, the risk of being convicted of a new crime in the 3 years the University of California—Berkeley, the after release from a correctional facility than do Danish University of Chicago, Duke University, the University of North Carolina, the University of inmates who were sanctioned for a serious offense but not Texas, Vanderbilt University, and Washington placed in disciplinary segregation as a result. Because being University—St. Louis provided excellent feed- placed in disciplinary segregation, and restrictive housing back on an earlier draft of this article (or on a presentation of it). more broadly, is so common, these results indicate that restrictive housing placement may be a key moderator of the effects of incarceration that merits more attention from criminologists, provided the associations shown here rep- resent causal effects and generalize. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2020 The Authors. Criminology published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of American Society of Criminology Criminology. 2020;58:423–453. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/crim 423 424 WILDEMAN AND ANDERSEN KEYWORDS incarceration, inequality, registry data, restrictive housing, solitary confinement By all accounts, being in restrictive housing1 is an extreme experience. Inmates who are placed in restrictive housing exist in solitude for all but (at most) 1 to 2 hours per day and complete all activities, with the possible exceptions of bathing and taking exercise, in their cells (e.g., Haney, 2018; Kapoor & Trestman, 2016, p. 200; Mears et al., 2019). Restrictive housing generally takes one of three forms: 1) administrative segregation, 2) disciplinary segregation, or 3) protective custody. Administrative segregation often maps on to modern conceptions of the “supermax” prison (e.g., Haney, 2018; Reiter, 2016). Rather than being linked with specific dis- ciplinary infractions that take place in prison, inmates in administrative segregation are placed there over concerns about their capacity to cause disruption, especially violent disruption, within the com- munity.2 Although estimating exposure to restrictive housing and the share of inmates placed in dif- ferent types of restrictive housing is inordinately difficult because of data limitations, inmates placed in administrative segregation almost certainly experience the greatest exposure to restrictive housing, sometimes stretching to years or even decades. They are also probably most likely to remain in prison for the remainder of their lives. In addition to the three forms, which represent the formal versions of restrictive housing, informal restrictive housing may also occur, in which inmates are de facto confined in solitude yet are just not recorded or counted as such. Long durations in restrictive housing and low reentry rates to general society may be normal out- comes for inmates in administration segregation, but inmates placed in disciplinary segregation and protective custody likely have shorter stays in restrictive housing and are more likely to reenter society. Inmates in disciplinary segregation are in restrictive housing as a sanction for disciplinary infractions; protective custody is used when inmates request isolation for protection or are perceived by officials to need to be kept in isolation for protection. Academic research on restrictive housing has generally taken four forms. The first has been focused on the ethics of restrictive housing placement, with restrictive housing—more often called “solitary confinement “in this literature—considered to be cruel and unusual punishment that must be abolished (e.g., Bennion, 2015; Gawande, 2009). The second, which is related but more empirical, has been focused on the consequences of exposure to restrictive housing—often extremely long exposure in “supermax” facilities—for the mental health of inmates. Although some working in this area have claimed that there is definitive evidence that restrictive housing damages—or even destroys—mental health (e.g., Haney, 2018), others have argued that the lack of appropriate data makes it difficult to determine exactly how, if at all, restrictive housing placement affects mental health (e.g., Kapoor & Trestman, 2016; Labrecque, 2016; Morgan et al., 2016). The third form has been focused on how restrictive housing placement rates affect rates of violence against inmates and staff in the facility (e.g., Briggs, Sundt, & Castellano, 2003) and on how placement in restrictive housing affects the probability of future infractions (e.g., Labrecque & Smith, 2019; Morris, 2016). As such, the third area of research has been broadly aimed at how restrictive housing affects safety and security in facilities, an issue that is obviously of the utmost importance to those working in corrections. A fourth and final area has been focused on how placement in restrictive housing affects postrelease outcomes, with special attention on recidivism (e.g., Butlter, Steiner, Makarios, & Travis, 2019; Mears & Bales, 2009). Although prisoner 1We use the term “restrictive housing” rather than the terms “solitary confinement” or “the hole.” 2Of course, in-prison infractions could also play a role in placement in administrative segregation. WILDEMAN AND ANDERSEN 425 reentry is common among inmates who spend time in restrictive housing, this area is probably the smallest of the four, and the methods used to this point, propensity score matching in one case and covariate adjustment in another, are a significant limitation. This relative inattention to the long-term consequences of placement in restrictive housing is unfor- tunate for several reasons. First, if the often-extreme psychological difficulties that result from being placed in restrictive housing are indeed a result of that experience, these difficulties are likely to spill out to other domains, making it difficult for inmates to refrain from criminal activity, gain and maintain employment, and prosocially engage with society (Andersen, 2004; Gordon, 2013; Grassian, 2006; Haney, 2003; Smith, 2006). Given how well documented the effects of mental health are on labor market outcomes (e.g., Ettner, Frank, & Kessler, 1997) and criminal activity (e.g., Moffitt, 1993), moreover, it is reasonable to expect long-term consequences of restrictive housing placement on these broader outcomes, assuming, again, a causal effect on mental health. Second, knowing how restrictive housing placement affects former inmates’ outcomes not just in terms of mental health but also in other domains provides a more complete assessment of the positive and negative long-term consequences of restrictive housing than we currently have. As a large number of inmates cycle through restrictive hous- ing each year, this is not merely an academic concern as better identifying its consequences provides insights into how one prevalent condition of confinement affects how former prisoners fare. Despite the importance of testing the long-term consequences of restrictive housing placement,3 doing so is exceptionally difficult because it requires 1) information on inmates who are placed in restrictive housing, as well as on those who are not; 2) linking with information on core postrelease outcomes and preadmission outcomes; and 3) low levels of attrition. Each of these conditions in and of itself would represent challenges as the number of studies using data including any information on prison conditions (e.g., Kreager et al., 2016), linking administrative data