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Revisiting Future Dangerousness Revisited: Response to DeLisi and Munoz

NCJ Number
206857
Journal
Criminal Justice Policy Review Volume: 15 Issue: 3 Dated: September 2004 Pages: 365-376
Author(s)
Mark D. Cunningham; Jon R. Sorensen; Thomas J. Reidy
Date Published
September 2004
Length
12 pages
Annotation
This article concludes that the methodology and analysis used by DeLisi and Munoz in analyzing the future dangerousness of Arizona death row inmates compared with inmates in the general population suffered from such fundamental flaws and errors that their conclusions were without support.
Abstract
DeLisi and Munoz (2003) analyzed inmate information downloaded from a database maintained by the Arizona Department of Corrections (ADOC). From their analysis they concluded that "Overall, these findings suggest that condemned defendants may be more dangerous than others, a statement sharply discordant with the extant literature regarding the future dangerousness of capital defendants." The most serious methodological lapse in DeLisi's and Munoz's study involved erroneous coding of data for the dependent variable. The dependent variable in their study was serious prison misconduct during the current incarceration. They failed to recognize that the disciplinary records in the downloaded database included disciplinary offenses of all prior incarcerations in ADOC as well as the current incarceration. Also, a reanalysis of the DeLisi and Munoz data set found that they misreported the actual dependent variable. They described the dependent variable as "the sum of eight criminal offenses that are roughly commensurate with the Part I Index offenses in the Uniform Crime Report." In fact, they included three other forms of misconduct in addition to the eight criminal offenses specified. The operational definitions of the criminal offenses or serious prison violence used by DeLisi and Munoz were also incomplete and overinclusive. In addition, their methodology was fundamentally flawed by a failure to hold conditions constant across the experimental groups. A further methodological failure was their failure to obtain a representative sample, as their "simple random sample" of 893 inmates serving determinate sentences and 43 inmates serving life sentences had marked demographic differences from the prison population of the ADOC. Other methodological and analytical flaws were the failure to control for period of observation, problems with collinearity, and lack of precision. The authors of this critique of DeLisi and Munoz analyzed the disciplinary records and current risk classification of all inmates on the Arizona death row in 2003. They found that in averaging 10 years at risk on death row, 82 percent had no serious violent misconduct, and 87 percent were rated by ADOC at the lowest risk of institutional violence. 1 table, 3 notes, and 11 references

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