Ebook: Moral Communities and Jailhouse Religion : Religiosity and Prison Misconduct

Meade examines the relationship between religiosity and inmate misconduct. The most important aspect of his work is an attempt to resolve unanswered questions in the existing research about the religiosity-inmate misconduct relationship using a national sample of inmates and rigorous statistical techniques. His basic thesis is that the mixed findings across studies may be attributed to issues concerning selection bias and/or contextual differences in religiosity across facilities. The findings from the studies indicate that selection bias could result in an underestimation of the magnitude of the religiosity-misconduct relationship, but the results fail to support the impact of contextual religiosity effects on misconduct.