Prisons cut violence among young inmates by housing them with dignity and mentors instead of more lockdown

the problem

Young adult inmates had the highest violence rates, and tighter control wasn't reducing it

background

what everyone would do

The standard institutional response to a population flagged as high-risk for violence is to tighten control around them: more surveillance, more restriction, faster and harsher separation from the general population when incidents occur — treating the risk itself as the thing to be contained rather than asking what conditions produce it.

what they saw

Vera and MILPA saw that the young adults' violence wasn't purely a control problem — it was substantially a status and structure problem: isolated from any positive adult relationship, stripped of any role that earned them respect, and given no framework for resolving conflict besides the ones the facility itself modeled through force. Pairing them with older mentors who had genuine standing among incarcerated people gave young adults access to exactly the kind of relationship and social structure that tighter control could never provide.

the move

Starting in 2016-17, the Vera Institute of Justice and the MILPA Collective partnered with corrections agencies in Connecticut and South Carolina to redesign specific housing units for 18-to-25-year-olds around dignity rather than restriction: private living space, group dialogue, restorative-justice practices, and — the central mechanism — housing young adults alongside older 'mentor' incarcerated men serving long sentences, who coach them on conflict resolution, family relationships and life skills. In Connecticut, a former solitary-confinement wing was physically converted into community space for the new unit.

why it works

Mentors serving long sentences have credibility with young adults that corrections staff structurally cannot — they aren't the authority young adults are used to being controlled by, and having navigated the same system for years, they can model conflict resolution and self-regulation in terms a young adult raised in the same environment will actually accept. Restructuring the physical space and daily schedule around routines that mirror life outside prison, rather than around surveillance and lockdown, removed much of the raw material for violent conflict — idle time, lack of privacy, absence of any positive role — instead of just monitoring for it more closely, which is why both violent infractions and solitary placements fell together rather than one trading off against the other.

the payoff

A randomized controlled trial of the South Carolina units found residents were 73 percent less likely to receive a violent disciplinary infraction and 83 percent less likely to be placed in solitary confinement than young adults housed under standard conditions in the same facilities. The program has since expanded to seven housing units across five states.

where it breaks

The model depends on the availability of older incarcerated mentors who are both willing and, per program design, appropriately vetted and trained to take on that role, which limits how quickly it can scale within a facility lacking a mentor pool with the right standing, stability and willingness. It also requires corrections staff willing to genuinely cede some of the day-to-day authority a traditional unit assigns entirely to officers, which the evidence suggests reduces staff stress in practice but which a control-first culture may resist adopting. And the approach leans on young-adult-specific dynamics — the peer, status and mentorship mechanisms that work here may not transfer to populations without a natural intergenerational structure to draw mentors from.

what came after

The South Carolina randomized controlled trial gave Restoring Promise one of the stronger evidence bases behind any prison-culture reform to date, and the program has since expanded from its 2016-17 origin in Connecticut and South Carolina to additional housing units in Colorado, Idaho and North Dakota, drawing national media coverage of its results inside participating facilities.

references

1. [1]Restoring PromiseNational Institute of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice, 2024nij.ojp.gov
2. [2]Restoring Promise InitiativeVera Institute of Justice, 2022vera.org

keep it

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• 1979 · NASA / United Airlines (Crew Resource Management)Aviation stopped losing planes to captains who wouldn't listen by making it a subordinate's job to make them
• 1900 · Sanitary District of ChicagoChicago's drinking water was being poisoned by its own sewage at the intake point — so instead of filtering the water after the fact, the city just made its river flow the other way.