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Introduction!

Prisoners are deprived of physical security, personal freedoms, social ties, and cheap and reliable pleasures and activities. They have no control over their surroundings, little personal privacy, and an unstable and frequently unpleasant daily routine. They are often subjected to violence, threats, and humiliation. These and other aspects of going to prison might be expected to have severe and harmful psychological consequences.

This view has been widespread throughout the history of prison and the prison literature. It has been expressed as some of the most fundamental objections to imprisonment, both on the part of those who end up in prison, those who supervise it, and those who respond to the problems of its inhabitants, such as penal reformers, criminologists, psychiatrists, and social workers.

These responses and shared public attitudes have no doubt influenced the way in which we have studied the psychology of imprisonment. Attention has been devoted primarily to the personality types best equipped to cope with, or to be punished by, imprisonment, and to the psychopathologies observed among the prison population.

Nobody would deny that going to prison can be a highly stressful experience; most prisoners probably suffer from anxiety and depression to some degree immediately after incarceration, but most seem to adjust within a period of a few weeks. Other severe negative psychological effects have been described in more specific subpopulations, such as first offenders, younger offenders, drug misusers, male homosexuals, non-white prisoners, and prisoners placed in very restrictive and harsh conditions of solitary confinement. However, many categorizations and investigations of this type are anecdotal or impressionistic; and even when providing systematic data, they focus on a very limited range of complaints during the first year of imprisonment.

The experiences and day-to-day life of prisoners in the short to medium term, as well as subsequent adjustment and distress, have been rather neglected. The first few days and weeks after incarceration, especially in a mixed prison population, are a period of considerable stress, anxiety, and depression.

However, the level of distress typical of imprisonment can produce appears to be more modest than one might have predicted on the basis of everyday complaints and the brief or very specific studies cited earlier. It was reported that the deployment of prison officers to work with new prisoners was less immediately necessary each year, in subsequent years of their careers, in March than earlier in the year, and postulated that the differential predictability of being sent to prison was responsible for the decrease. However, prisoners are, at this time, particularly prone to the risk of suicide.

Background and Significance

By early 2008, the United States had nearly 1.6 million prisoners in 1,594 state prisons, 3,280 local jails, 102 federal prisons, 993 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,498 community correctional facilities, and 2,415 run by private agencies. The number of people behind bars is continuing to rise.

Roughly 1 in 100 Americans are already behind bars, and the number will increase. Men born in the 1960s, 1 in 9, have already served time. For those who seek to help them rebuild their lives when they are released, it is important to understand how cliques might assist or discourage those efforts. While much has been written on the subject of external help for sex offenders, not much attention has been given to internal dynamics that might also help or sabotage efforts to help inmates rebuild a crime-free life back in the real world.

This study will investigate clique formation among a random sample of offenders. These cliques, created and sustained by members, will have distinct psychological and social effects on members of the prison as well as professionals who treat them. Social support, acting as a source of counselling and security, and social pressure, acting as a level of informal supervision, are two potentially important psychological aspects of clique formation.

This study will use both survey and participant-observation methods to understand how these mechanisms assist or hinder the efforts of prisoners to recreate crime-free lives.

Purpose of this Study

The purpose of this research was to study the subject differences in psychological and behavioral consequences of imprisonment. Since two general types of prediction concerning the impact of imprisonment exist, it was felt that the subjects’ coping styles and behavioral tendencies should be used in predicting length of stay and change of furlough privileges, respectively.

The results of this study indicated the differences in privacy, emotional strains, and behavioral regulation observed between two groups of subjects who are interned at the Illinois State Penitentiary. Consequently, it was found that subject differences predict changes in the prison environment partially through differential rates of adjustment rather than differences in initial behaviors.

The study of individual differences in responsiveness to prisonization has unique importance relative to other areas of social science research. To begin with, the setting is characterized by striking regulatory controls over many different areas of adaptive behavior.

Consequently, the intra-institutional bases for behavior patterns that contribute most significantly to the interaction process can be observed with precision and utility that is extremely limited in less controlled settings. It is imperative that more be learned regarding degrees and types of response to the prison environment if the contemporary debate on criminal justice theory and practice is to be based upon adequate judgment and reasoning. The present project, therefore, should offer insight into subject differences in their capacity as prison residents.

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