How can restrictive housing be prevented or reduced? Conceptual, methodological, and theoretical issues confronting research and policy

This paper identifies conceptual, methodological, and theoretical limitations in research on restrictive housing (RH) that confound efforts to understand the use and impacts of this widely debated form of housing and to create and evaluate efforts for preventing or reducing its use and for developing effective alternatives. The limitations include confusion about what RH entails, the problems it seeks to address, and relevant evaluation outcomes. This confusion extends, in turn, to efforts to understand how to prevent or reduce the housing or to create alternatives. Successful advances require understanding the problems that RH is intended to address, causes and theoretical mechanisms that contribute to the problems, which causes have the greatest effect and can be influenced, and how they can be targeted successfully while minimizing potential harms. Creating effective alternatives requires identifying strategies that can achieve the same or greater benefits, have comparable or fewer harms, and do not contribute to use of RH through net-widening. We conclude that clarity about these types of conceptual, methodological, and theoretical issues is necessary for advancing research and for limiting the use of RH while enabling prison systems to achieve their broader organizational goals. • Evidence on the use and impacts of restrictive housing is limited. • Conceptual problems undermine accurate comparisons across studies. • Methodological problems interfere with accurate generalizations from studies. • Challenges exist in identifying how to prevent or reduce restrictive housing. • The nature or status of alternatives to restrictive housing is unclear. • These problems complicate meaningful advances in research and policy.