Safety in Prison: A Review of the Literature and Theoretical Exploration

While safety is a key consideration in prison management, the empirical literature in this field is underdeveloped in several ways, especially theoretically. In this contribution, we outline a theoretical framework from the criminological literature on safety in non-incarcerated populations, which has extensively examined both objective and subjective safety, as well as their interrelations. This theoretical framework is subsequently applied to the prison literature. We observe that there is an overrepresentation of objective safety parameters like victimization, a lack of consistency across studies measuring subjective safety, and that the link between both objective and subjective safety as well as the links between the different aspects of subjective safety are underexplored. This review concludes with advocating for more comprehensive research on both objective and subjective aspects of safety by means of the proposed framework, in order to get insights into the complex nature of safety in prisons.