The Growth of Incarceration in the United States Exploring Causes and Consequences (2014) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
6 The Experience of Imprisonment
6 The Experience of Imprisonment
Pages 157-201
The Chapter Skim interface presents what we've algorithmically identified as the most significant single chunk of text within every page in the chapter.
Select key terms on the right to highlight them within pages of the chapter.
From page 157... ...
. In our synthesis of these diverse lines of research, we sought to find areas of consensus regarding the consequences of imprisonment for individuals confined under conditions that prevailed during this period of increasing rates of incarceration and reentry.
|
From page 158... ...
From the available research, we summarize what is known about the experience of prison generally, how it varies for female prisoners and confined youth, its general psychological consequences, and the particular consequences of extreme conditions of overcrowding and isolation, as well as the extent of participation in prison programming. We also consider, on the one hand, what is known about the potentially criminogenic effects of incarceration and, on the other hand, what is known about prison rehabilitation and reentry in reducing postprison recidivism.
|
From page 159... ...
The assertions made in the pages that follow about broad changes in prison practices and policies, normative prison conditions, and consequences of imprisonment all are offered with the continuing caveat that as prisons vary significantly, so, too, do their normative conditions and their consequences for those who live and work within them. TRENDS AFFECTING THE NATURE OF PRISON LIFE Although individual prisons can vary widely in their nature and effects, a combination of six separate but related trends that occurred over the past several decades in the United States has had a significant impact on conditions of confinement in many of the nation's correctional institutions: (1)
|
From page 160... ...
. Other scholars and mental health practitioners have suggested that the combination of adverse prison conditions and the lack of adequate and effective treatment resources may result in some prisoners with preexisting mental health conditions suffering an exacerbation of symptoms and even some otherwise healthy prisoners developing mental illness during their incarceration (e.g., Haney, 2006; Kupers, 1999)
|
From page 161... ...
. By the beginning of the 1980s, as state prison populations continued to grow and correctional systems confronted serious overcrowding problems, 2 Ruiz v.
|
From page 162... ...
before being permitted to file claims in court. Legal commentators concluded that the PLRA had helped achieve the intended effect of significantly reducing the number of frivolous lawsuits; however, it also instituted significant barriers to more creditable claims that could have drawn needed attention to harmful prison conditions and violations of prisoners' rights (Cohen, 2004; Schlanger and Shay, 2008)
|
From page 163... ...
As discussed in Chapters 3 and 4, during the period of incarceration growth, politicians and policy makers from across the political spectrum embraced an increasingly "get tough" approach to criminal justice. Eventually, advocates of these more punitive policies began to focus explicitly on daily life inside the nation's prisons, urging the implementation of a "no frills" approach to everyday correctional policies and practices.
|
From page 164... ...
As noted at the outset of this chapter, any generalizations about typical prison conditions must be qualified by the fact that prisons differ significantly in how they are structured, operated, and experienced. Official national statistics that address certain aspects of imprisonment are useful for many scholarly purposes, but they have two important limitations: a lack of standardization and sometimes questionable reliability, on the one hand, and the fact that they typically focus on few meaningful indicators of the actual quality of prison life.
|
From page 165... ...
. A National Research Council panel critically examined the nature and quality of data collection performed by BJS -- the agency responsible for providing perhaps the nation's most reliable and relied upon criminal justice data.
|
From page 166... ...
But these indicators, too, were derived from data of questionable reliability; in addition, the analysis omits many important aspects of prison life. No comprehensive national data are routinely collected on even the most basic dimensions of the nature and quality of the prison experience, such as housing configurations and cell sizes; the numbers of prisoners who are housed in segregated confinement and their lengths of stay and degree of isolation; the amount of out-of-cell time and the nature and amount of property that prisoners are permitted; the availability of and prisoners' levels of participation in educational, vocational, and other forms of programming, counseling, and treatment; the nature and extent of prison labor and rates of pay that prisoners are afforded; and the nature and amount of social and legal visitation prisoners are permitted.
|
From page 167... ...
. The prison population was reclassified so that a greater percentage of prisoners were housed under maximum security conditions.
|
From page 168... ...
7. Efforts addressed to the abolition of solitary confinement as a pun ishment, or to the restriction of its use, should be undertaken and encouraged.
|
From page 169... ...
Arizona may be near the far end of the spectrum of prison systems that implemented an especially severe regime of "penal harm" over the period of increasing rates of incarceration in the United States, but other observers have documented severe conditions in other states as well and reached sobering conclusions about the outcomes of incarceration. For example, in an ethnographic study of a modern and otherwise apparently well-run prison in California, Irwin (2005, p.
|
From page 170... ...
. Women also are more likely than men to enter prison with mental health problems or to develop them while incarcerated: about three-quarters of women in state prisons in 2004 had symptoms of a current mental health problem, as opposed to 55 percent of men (James and Glaze, 2006)
|
From page 171... ...
. Also as in male prisons, Owen reports that overcrowding permeated the conditions of daily life at CCWF.
|
From page 172... ...
. Youth transferred to the adult criminal justice system fare worse than those that remain in the juvenile justice system (Austin et al., 2000; Task Force on Community Preventive Services, 2007)
|
From page 173... ...
. The steady decline in the juvenile confinement rate, from 356 per 10 In 2002, Congress modified the disproportionate minority confinement requirement and mandated that states implement juvenile delinquency prevention and system improvement efforts across the juvenile justice system.
|
From page 174... ...
under crowded prison conditions"; "a variety of health problems, injuries, and selected symptoms of psychological distress were higher for certain classes of inmates than probationers, parolees, and, where data existed, for the general population"; studies show that longterm incarceration can result in "increases in hostility and social introversion .
|
From page 175... ...
and in as many as 48 percent of female prisoners (Zlotnick, 1997) , and in 24 to 65 percent of male juvenile inmates (Heckman et al., 2007; see also Gibson et al., 1999)
|
From page 176... ...
Prisoners vary in their backgrounds and vulnerabilities and in how they experience or cope with the same kinds of environments and events. As a result, the same prison experiences have different consequences for different prisoners (e.g., Hemmens and Marquart, 1999; Gullone et al., 2000)
|
From page 177... ...
. Two notable characteristics of the prison environment contribute to the process of prisonization: the necessary structure and routines that can erode personal autonomy and the threat of victimization.
|
From page 178... ...
179) , "a tough veneer that precludes seeking help for personal problems, the generalized mistrust that comes from the fear of exploitation, and the tendency to strike out in response to minimal provocations are highly functional in many prison contexts and problematic virtually everywhere else." Extreme Conditions of Imprisonment We have repeatedly emphasized that even maximum and medium security prisons vary widely in how they are physically structured, in the procedures by which they operate, and in the corresponding psychological environment inside.
|
From page 179... ...
In this section, we consider two prison conditions that are at the extreme ends of the social spectrum of experiences within prison -- overcrowding and isolation. Overcrowding As noted earlier, the rapid increase in the overall number of incarcerated persons in the United States resulted in widespread prison overcrowding.
|
From page 180... ...
The use of doublecelling can place a significant strain on prison services if not accompanied by commensurate increases in staffing, programming resources and space, and infrastructure to accommodate the larger population of prisoners in confined spaces. During the period of rapidly increasing rates of incarceration, legislators, correctional officials, and prison architects came to assume that double-celling would continue, and as noted earlier, the Supreme Court in essence authorized its use.17 The new prisons that were built during this period provided somewhat larger cells, responding to the revised American Correctional Association (2003)
|
From page 181... ...
In addition, overcrowding has systemic consequences for prison systems. Prisons and prison systems may become so crowded that staff members struggle to provide prisoners with basic, necessary services such as proper screening and treatment for medical and mental illnesses (see Chapter 7)
|
From page 182... ...
A number of commentators also have acknowledged the important ways in which decisive judicial intervention and continuing oversight contributed significantly to maintaining prison order and stability, as well as ameliorating the most inhumane practices and conditions during the period of the prison buildup (Feeley and Rubin, 1998; Schlanger, 2003)
|
From page 183... ...
Such units have in common the fact that the prisoners they house have limited social contact in comparison with the general prison population. Among prison systems, there are different types of isolation units, ranging from less to more restrictive in terms of social contact and security.
|
From page 184... ...
prison population resides in isolated housing units at any given time. Although it is impossible to calculate precisely and reliably whether and how much overall change has occurred in the rate at which prison systems have resorted to isolated confinement during the period of increased rates of incarceration, the fact that there are many more persons in prison means that significantly more of them have been subjected to isolated confinement.
|
From page 185... ...
There have been a number of reported cases of isolated confinement for periods of 25 or more years.19 The rest of this section focuses on what is known about long-term confinement in these most restrictive "supermax"-type isolated housing units. By policy, these special units are reserved for inmates believed by correctional officials to pose serious problems for prison operations.
|
From page 186... ...
. Moreover, some empirical evidence indicates that time spent under supermax prison conditions contributes to elevated rates of recidivism (Lovell et al., 2007; Mears and Bales, 2009)
|
From page 187... ...
Moreover, direct studies of prison isolation have documented an extremely broad range of harmful psychological reactions. These effects include increases in the following potentially damaging symptoms and problematic behaviors: negative attitudes and affect, insomnia, anxiety, withdrawal, hypersensitivity, ruminations, cognitive dysfunction hallucinations, loss of control, irritability, aggression, and rage, paranoia, hopelessness, lethargy, depression, a sense of impending emotional breakdown, self-mutilation, and suicidal ideation and behavior.
|
From page 188... ...
These psychological consequences speak to the importance of regularly screening, monitoring, and treating; sometimes removing prisoners who show signs of psychological deterioration; limiting or prohibiting the long-term isolation of prisoners with special vulnerabilities (such as serious mental illness) ;22 and providing decompression, step-down, and/or transitional programs and policies to help those held in isolation acclimate to living within the prison population and/or the community upon release.
|
From page 189... ...
. move from, at first, being starved for social contact to, eventually, being disoriented and even fright ened by it.
|
From page 190... ...
. Data from BJS's Survey of State and Federal Correctional Facilities indicate that the percentage of state prisons offering basic and secondary education programs grew between the 1970s and 1990 and has remained fairly high (more than 80 percent)
|
From page 191... ...
More recently, certification in specific trades has become important as a way to ensure that skills learned in prison help prisoners transition into the outside labor market. The percentage of state prisons offering vocational training programs has increased slightly over the past 20 years, from about 51 percent to just over 57 percent.
|
From page 192... ...
As of 2005, only 2 percent of federal prisons offered work release programs. In summary, the 2004-2005 figures cited above indicate that only about one-quarter of state prisoners were involved in educational programming, fewer than a third were involved in vocational training, and about
|
From page 193... ...
75) studied vocational training programs in a medium security California prison -- in which fewer than 20 percent of the prisoners participated -- and characterizes the quality of these programs in this way: Several conditions greatly weaken the efficacy of these vocational training programs, most important, the lack of funds and resources.
|
From page 194... ...
They found that when a group of prisoners originally classified as maximum security were randomly assigned to be housed in a medium security facility, the risk of disciplinary problems did not increase. This was true even though, at the outset, the maximum security prisoners "[stood]
|
From page 195... ...
Even those whom prison officials identified as gang members at the time they were admitted to the prison system were influenced by the security level of the prison to which they were assigned and were more likely to self-identify as gang members in higher security than in lower security prisons. Other researchers have found similar results and concluded that time spent in higher security prisons and living under harsher prison conditions is associated with a greater likelihood of reoffending after release (e.g., Chen and Shapiro, 2007; Gaes and Camp, 2009)
|
From page 196... ...
Some research suggests that certain kinds of proactive programs of prison rehabilitation can be effective in neutralizing or even reversing the otherwise criminogenic effects of incarceration. The advent of so-called "evidence-based corrections" has encouraged correctional administrators, policy makers, and officials to place increased reliance on program evaluation and quantitative outcome measures to determine "what works" in prison rehabilitation and postprison reentry programs -- both being evaluated primarily on the basis of how well they reduce recidivism (Cullen and Gendreau, 2000; MacKenzie, 2000; Sherman, 1998; Sherman et al., 1997)
|
From page 197... ...
Other than documenting the impressive success of certain postsecondary prison education programs, research has as yet not resolved the critical issues of what works for whom, when, why, and under what circumstances, as well as the way in which special challenges faced by inmate-students in prison, such as lockdowns, transfers between facilities, and restricted movement, affect their learning and undermine their educational progress. The available research indicates that, when carried out properly, certain forms of cognitive-behavioral therapy, drug treatment, academic programs, and vocational training appear to reduce recidivism.
|
From page 198... ...
This database should include but not necessarily be limited to data on housing configurations and cell sizes; the numbers of prisoners confined in segregated housing, their lengths of stay, and their degree of isolation; the amount of out-of-cell time and the nature and amount of property that prisoners are permitted; the availability of and prisoners' levels of participation in educational, vocational, and other forms of programming, counseling, and treatment; the nature and extent of prison labor and rates of pay that prisoners are afforded; the nature and amount of social and legal visitation prisoners are permitted; the nature and frequency of disciplinary infractions, violence, and
|
From page 199... ...
The extent to which prisoner characteristics, modern forms of architectural and institutional control, decisive judicial intervention, certain kinds of rehabilitative and other programming, and the use of more sophisticated prison management practices have successfully offset the negative impacts of imprisonment, such as those due to overcrowding, deserves further study. Research should also address whether, to what degree, and in what ways improved institutional control and reductions in certain indicators of institutional dysfunction have entailed significant trade-offs in other aspects of the quality of prison life.
|
From page 200... ...
Individual prisoners also vary in the degree to which they are affected by their conditions of confinement. Persons who enter prison with special vulnerabilities -- for example, having suffered extensive preprison trauma or preexisting mental illness -- are likely to be especially susceptible to prison stressors and potential harm.
|
From page 201... ...
Although certain highly disruptive inmates may at times need to be segregated from others, use of this practice is best minimized, and accompanied by specific criteria for placement and regular meaningful reviews for those that are thus confined. Long-term segregation is not an appropriate setting for seriously mentally ill inmates.
|
Key Terms
This material may be derived from roughly machine-read images, and so is provided only to facilitate research.
More
information on Chapter Skim is available.