MQPL Survey Dashboard

The dashboard below, developed by the Center for Criminal Justice (CCJ) at Loyola University Chicago in collaboration with the John Howard Association (JHA), reflects responses to the Measuring the Quality of Prison Life (MQPL) survey in Illinois.

The MQPL is a detailed survey that gathers prison residents’ views on the quality of life in the facilities where they are held. Originally developed by criminologists at Cambridge University in the early 2000s, the MQPL is routinely used to monitor prison climate and improve prison effectiveness in England, Wales and other European countries. It yields stable, valid measures of various aspects of a prison’s social environment, including humanity, mutual respect, order, fairness, and staff professionalism, providing prison administrators and the public with a tangible way to compare institutions, isolate problems, and assess progress toward shared goals.

In 2022, by agreement with JHA, the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) made an adapted version of the MQPL available to people in its custody.

Surveys were distributed in paper form on a rolling basis in each of IDOC’s secure facilities in 2022 and 2023, and more than 8,700 completed surveys from 28 prisons were returned to JHA by mail. Complete results by prison can be found on JHA’s webpage, along with results from a companion Staff Quality of Life Survey (SQL).

CCJ worked with JHA to analyze survey responses and create an online dashboard showing MQPL results in a comprehensible visual format. The dashboard allows users to compare institutions across various MQPL dimensions, to focus on specific issues like staff-resident relationships, and to filter results by demographic and other characteristics.