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Prison Population Continues to Boom
Mary Stohr was interested in justice issues long before she started work as a correctional officer beginning in 1983 — even before she took her first criminal justice class as a Washington State University undergraduate student. In fact, it was bred into her almost at birth by her family (her dad was a brick layer and an agent for his union in Yakima, Wash.) and later by an unlikely group of educators — the nuns at her 1960s-era Catholic school.
“The nuns were into peace marches, sit-ins, hunger issues,” she said. “It was a good introduction to social justice.”
Because of her upbringing, she wanted to become a police officer, but poor eyesight disqualified her for the job. So she became only the second woman hired as a correctional officer at a men’s prison in the state of Washington. After being promoted to a counselor her last two years, she decided to return to school at Washington State University to earn her master’s in criminal justice and then a doctorate in political science.
Following three years teaching at New Mexico State, Stohr is now a professor in Boise State University’s Criminal Justice Administration Department. And she is still involved in researching social justice issues and trying to make things 
right. Stohr has served as principal investigator for a number of victimization surveys for the State of Idaho, looking at the incidence of crimes ranging from burglary, assault and rape to domestic violence, sexual harassment and child abuse.
With her husband, Craig Hemmens, chair of Boise State’s CJA Department, she also published a book in 2003 on how inmates are affected by the prison experience, and the two teamed up as principal investigators on a project to research a residential substance abuse treatment for state prisoners.
That project is aimed at those who have violated their parole through the use of controlled substances. Because the program is still relatively new, their research has been mostly observational, consisting of staff and inmate surveys and looking at the attributes of other, successful programs.
“The best programs have superstructure funding for skilled staff, staff running the programs, modeling by those practicing treatment and the ability for participants to make mistakes and recoup,” Stohr said. Extensive care after a participant leaves the program is also crucial to success.
“There’s no ideal program for every individual, but certain attributes seem to work for people,” she noted.
Currently, Stohr is chair of the Offender Population Forecast Advisory Committee for the Idaho Department of Correction. In an effort to better plan for an influx of inmates, the IDOC asked stakeholders to be part of the process, creating the advisory committee.
The IDOC gathers data on who is coming into the prison population, where they are coming from and how long they’re staying, on average. After compiling the numbers, they turn the data over to the committee for analysis. “We then figure out what we know, such as that the population and demand are growing, and how we can better plan pieces of it,” Stohr said.
Those pieces include using archival data to determine how many will be out on parole at a time in order to plan staffing and treatment. The group also looks at sentencing and other trends compared to other states. Their analysis shows that a couple of years ago, average sentences for Idaho inmates were six months longer than the national average. At roughly $20,000 per year for each male inmate, that extra stay was costing taxpayers an additional $10,000 per person — and that figure is even higher for women’s prisons and juvenile offenders.
According to the committee’s latest report, Idaho’s offender population will only continue to grow in the near future, fueling concerns over housing, programming and budget.
The report indicates that female incarceration rates are expected to increase at more than 7 percent per year, while the male population is expected to grow at just under 5 percent per year. While this sounds dire, it’s actually good news when compared to the committee’s previous report that had anticipated those numbers at 14 and 7.5 percent respectively.
But Stohr’s work encompasses more than just crunching population data. Among her recent research projects is a survey looking at correctional roles and ethics in Idaho’s jails and prisons. Results show a high level of ethics among correctional workers, especially in the jails and women’s prisons. And although men and women both scored well, women scored higher overall.
“The big issues (in corrections) are the use of force and respect for coworkers,” Stohr said. How correctional officers treat one another, and even how inmates treat one another, has a huge effect on how correctional officers feel about their jobs and how well they do them, she said. What they view as the most important aspect of their job is also important. Whether prisons and correctional officers are in a service or security role is a debate that extends all the way through the system, even to policing, probation and parole.
“We found a large role for service” in the job, Stohr said, noting that in general, men’s and women’s opinions were similar. There were, however, a few exceptions “A woman’s capability to do that job was one of those,” Stohr said. “Men thought women could do the job, but women were more certain of it.”
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