Many prisons today use sanctions to discipline prisoners, including segregating them from other inmates, transferring them away from other inmates, and removing them from rehabilitation programs. A new longitudinal study that sought to determine the effect of these sanctions on recidivism found that prisoners who had greater exposure to formal sanctions were more likely to re-offend 1, 2, and 3 years after release; formal sanctions involve punishment for misconduct after a rules infraction board finds an inmate guilty.