Do Correctional Facilities Correct Our Youth?: Effects of Incarceration and Court-Ordered Community Service on Personality Development

Millions of individuals are currently incarcerated in the United States. However, little is known about the effects of incarceration on personality development, particularly during the critical life stage of adolescence. In a large longitudinal sample, adolescents and young adults (N = 7,736) regularly completed personality measures and assessments of court-ordered punishments over more than ten years. Using propensity score weighting and multilevel growth curve modeling, we found that personality prospectively predicted the likelihood of incarceration and court-ordered community service. Specifically, individuals who were higher in sensation seeking, impulsivity, and depressive symptoms were more likely to be incarcerated—results for community service youth mostly mirrored these findings. Mixed evidence was found for patterns of trait change. Incarcerated, community service, and non-offending youth were similar in several ways—all increased on sensation seeking and self-esteem and decreased on impulsivity over the 10-year period. However, between-person models found that incarcerated youth evidenced a greater decrease in depressive symptoms and a slower decrease in impulsivity, and youth assigned community service increased more quickly on sensation seeking than their non-offending peers. Within-person analyses also suggested personality differences, for example, sensation seeking was lower after incarceration while impulsivity was higher compared to before. Overall, this work highlights that personality predicts incarceration and court-ordered community service in youth and that personality changes linked with these experiences do not have a uniformly “corrective” pattern of change, with few effects observed overall and some in seemingly unfavorable directions.