W. Wesley Johnson

• Professor
• University of Southern Mississippi

Professional development has numerous meanings. It varies from discipline to discipline and from program to program and often from individual to individual. In 1960s and 1970s, the criminal justice system came under intense scrutiny for their responses to Civil Rights and Vietnam War demonstrations. In response, the federal government allocated mil...

As a criminal justice policy, researchers have encountered numerous problems attempting to evaluate whether supermax confinement achieves its desired goals. Among the many goals of supermax confinement is the incapacitation of the “worst of the worst” inmates. This type of custody, however, has been widely criticized for worsening inmate mental hea...

Since the United States began using incarceration as its cornerstone of punishment for those who transgress the law, this method of discipline has been fraught with problems. One of the most ubiquitous problems found within correctional institutions are the conditions inmates are forced to live in particularly, when penal facilities are overcrowded...

While there is a body of literature and research that focuses on the job of state probation officers, there is scant research on federal probation officers. This chapter reviews prior research on probation officers, then presents a pilot study that is among the first to compare the stressors experienced by state and federal probation officers. Diff...

As a response to an increasing prison population and as a counteractive measure to problematic inmates, many states within the United States have established supermaximum (supermax) prisons or supermax units within existing prison facilities. Many criminal justice researchers have questioned the efficacy of these specialized units. Although the Nat...

In recent years there has been a vigorous debate in the discipline of criminology and criminal justice, concerning the role of faculty members in Criminology and Criminal Justice departments who hold a Juris Doctorate (JD), but lack a PhD. Some argue that faculty members with a JD possess sufficient credentials to be tenure-track faculty members wi...

The political, economic, and social context in which community corrections functions makes it extremely difficult to achieve successful outcomes. The current fiscal crisis, however, is forcing change as many states can no longer support the cost of our 30-year imprisonment binge. As in the past, community corrections will be expected to pick up the...

Punishment and treatment don't occur within a vacuum. Responses in the justice system affect the mental health system, hospitals, clinics, and the welfare system. These systems are inextricably bound to each other. This paper, drawn from the 2009 Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences (ACJS) Presidential Address, discusses issues regarding the crimin...

A number of existing studies have identified various factors that contribute to stress among police officers. This analysis is unique among these insofar as it employs structural equation modeling to specify, in path model format, the influence of participation in workplace decision-making and other variables on employee stress levels. The findings...

This study describes the current situation for female wardens by examining their attitudes toward inmate services, programs, and amenities survival; involvement with correctional staff; and identity as a supervisor through their political affiliations and punishment philosophies. Using Noddings’s “caring ethic,” this study sought to determine wheth...

Stress can be costly not only to individuals but also to organizations. Participatory management has been recommended as a means for reducing probation officer stress. This article via self-report surveys of probation personnel in a southern state considers the relationship of a number of demographic variables with employee perceptions of participa...

This study examines the attitudes of probation officers monitoring intensive supervision probation caseloads in Texas regarding arming probation officers. The results from this survey indicate that intensive supervision officers are a somewhat diverse group and hold a variety of opinions regarding their use of firearms. While the survey respondents...

On February 3rd, 1998, Karla Faye Tucker became the first woman to be executed in Texas since 1863 for the 1983 pickax murder of a Houston man. The execution which culminated months of intense international media coverage primarily focused upon Tucker's gender and status as a born‐again Christian. Public figures with diverse political backgrounds,...

During the recent war on drugs, large numbers of drug offenders were sentenced to probation. Critics of this policy argued that drug offenders belonged in prison. This analysis uses logistic regression to compare 1993 individual level data on felony and non-drug felony probationers. The results of this analysis provide some justification for the ge...

Prison reform has shifted from focusing on length of confinement to emphasis on conditions in prisons. “No-frills” prisons are being championed as more effective deterrents, more economical, and more powerful symbols of retribution. However, this argument has generally been void of substantive information from wardens, those most directly responsib...

This study examines the nature and distribution of job satisfaction in a national sample of 641 wardens of state prisons for adults. The results indicate that these corrections executives are a highly satisfied occupational group, but there is evidence that job satisfaction among wardens has declined since the late 1980s. Measures of social support...

This study explores correlations between economic conditions, crime rates, and federal criminal justice legislation in the United States from 1948 to 1987. We expand on the punishment and social structure literature, inspired by Georg Rusche, by introducing new variables for operationalizing the political economy and criminal justice policy. We con...