Preface

Summary

we believe that the results of this research should be of interest to a variety of correctional practicioners and administrators, as well as to other researchers or specialized students. Therefore, in writing (and rewriting) this volume we have tried very hard to keep it at a level that should be understandable to an intelligent reader, regardless of background. It has proven to be a difficult task. If we omit or oversimplify too much, we may violate the standards of rigorous evidence and lose the confidence of our academic peers. If we complicate things too much with understatements and caveats, we will convince other readers that they are caught in an unrewarding reprocessed graduate thesis (and our theses were done long ago).

We have not succeeded everywhere as well as we would have liked, but we have tried. We vowed to avoid footnotes in the text and managed to break the habit after only one relapse. The single exception, on the first page, kept us comfortable in getting past the initial stages and should do the same for other academics. We have also minimized the listing of inferential statistics, to the point where the average undergraduate ought to be able to work his or her way through them. Some multivariate analyses are included, but they are offset into discrete sections which the less statistically sophisticated reader can skip with a clear conscience; these sections do strengthen our case overall, but they give very much the same message as those with simpler statistics.