The Inmate Prison Experience

This collection of some of the best articles dealing with what it is like to live in prison, the authors combine qualitative and quantitative research. The book examines issues of primary concern to inmates, such as violence, race relations, gender issues and inmate-staff relations, and provides greater depth of coverage on the issue of inmate life in prison than standard correctional sourcebooks.The authors examine inmate adjustment to prison, individual adjustment factors, institutional adjustment factors and societal adjustment factors.For individuals interested in understanding the prison inmate experience.

Mary K. Stohr is an Associate Professor and the Chair in the Department of Criminal Justice Administration at Boise State University. She holds a Ph.D. in political science from Washington State University. She has an abiding interest in the nature and operation of correctional institutions and her research and teaching has generally been focused in that direction.

Craig Hemmens is an Associate Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice Administration at Boise State University. He holds a J.D. from North Carolina Central University School of Law and a Ph.D. in criminal justice from Sam Houston State University. He has conducted research on the attitudes of prison inmates and staff, and on the operation of prison drug treatment programs.

There has been research on prisons almost since their creation. Prisons were created with a hopeful, reformist zeal, but very quickly degraded into soulless institutions. De Beaumont and de Tocqueville (1997) in the 1700s examined a number of early American penitentiaries and described the decrepit conditions of many of them. Although such early researchers and observers generally confined their examination of prison life to the surface details, such as recounting the daily routine of prisoners, these descriptions uniformly painted a picture of suffering and degradation. Conditions did not improve much, if at all, in the nineteenth century penal systems. Historians have provided detailed and often horrific accounts of life in the work camps and prisons that was prevalent at that time (Oshinsky 1996; Rothman 1980). As David Rothman (1980, 17) notes in his classic work, Conscience and Convenience: Every observer of American prisons and asylums in the closing decades of the nineteenth century recognized that the pride of one generation had become the shame of another. The institutions that had been intended to exemplify the humanitarian advances of republican government were not merely inadequate to the ideal but were actually an embarrassment and a rebuke . . . the evidence was incontrovertible that brutality and corruption were endemic to the institutions. As social science developed in the early twentieth century, researchers on social institutions turned a critical eye to the prisons. Modern sociological research on prison life dates from Clemmer''s (1940) pioneering work The Prison Community,a study described as "(the first systematic investigation of the prisoner world" (Marquart and Sorensen 1997, 95). Clemmer examined the manner in which inmates interacted with one another, their surroundings, and the correctional staff in an effort to determine how living in prison affected inmates. Clemmer (1940, 299) developed the concept of "prisonization" to explain how a prisoner becomes assimilated into the informal social structure of the prison. Clemmer (1940, 299) defined prisonization as "the taking on in greater or less degree of the folkways, mores, customs, and general culture of the penitentiary." According to Clemmer, inmates, suffering from the "alienative effects of the coercive power exercised by prison officials" (1940, 299) grew increasingly anti-social, and learned not only how to commit crimes, but how to adopt a value system in opposition to the prison administration and, supposedly, in opposition to the value system espoused by the general public. Gresham Sykes, in The Society of Captives(1958) and elsewhere (Sykes and Messinger 1960), developed further Clemmer''s concept of prisonization, explaining the cause of inmate alienation as a reaction to the "pains of imprisonment" (1958, 63-83). Sykes identified five pains associated with prison life: loss of one''s liberty, loss of material possessions, loss of heterosexual contact, loss of personal autonomy, and loss of personal security. Suffering these pains, Sykes believed, caused inmates to become insecure and bitter, and led them to "reject their rejecters" (McCorkle & Korn 1954, 98). The result was that the pains of imprisonment forged an inmate population unified by its shared pains. Prisoners developed their own informal social structure based on their responses to the pains of imprisonment. This subculture reinforced a set of norms and values in opposition to those espoused by the prison staff. This was known as the "inmate code" (Sykes & Messinger 1960, 5-6). Additionally, inmates adopted one of a series of social roles in an effort to mitigate the rigors of prison life. Sykes (1958, 84-108) devised a typology of 11 inmate social roles, including the "tough," "fag," "merchant," and "real man." The "Big House" with its attendant inmate code and social roles, as depicted by Clemmer and Sykes, has many of the components of Goffman''s "total institution" (1961). In his well-known book, Asylums,Goffman discussed how life within a variety of institutions, such as mental hospitals, monasteries, military training camps, and prisons is affected by the institution itself. These sorts of institutions are closed worlds in which the inhabitants live highly regimented, ordered lives surrounded by other inhabitants and from which they are unable to leave or escape. Inmates in these institutions suffer a series of what Goffman called "degradations" (1961, 43). A universal characteristic of these institutions is the pervasiveness of their impact--all who live within them face the same problems of adjustment. Goffman (1961, 22) acknowledged that individuals do bring with them into the institution their individual personas and personal characteristics, but he argued that the institution''s impact is so strong, so all-encompassing, that it strips them of these characteristics, through the process of "mortification." The model of prison life developed by Clemmer and reinforced in some respects by Sykes and Goffman, became known as the "deprivation" model. The deprivation model was challenged by researchers who decried its disregard for the effect of the outside world and individual characteristics on how inmates adjust to prison (Irwin and Cressey 1962; Carroll 1974; Jacobs 1977). These writers noted that an inmate did not come into prison a blank slate, but rather brought with him (but now including her) the code of the streets, which he used in modified form within the prison walls. This was referred to as the "importation model. Scholarship on prisons that has appeared in the last three decades has tended to recognize the interplay between the internal operation and experience for inmates and the outside influences that give the inmates'' lives, their imprisonment, and the existence of the prison itself, context. Oshinsky (1996), in his recounting of the operation of the Parchman Prison Farm in Mississippi in the twentieth century, notes that the historical artifact of slavery serves as the framework for understanding this "farm with slaves" for black inmates. "Blacks came to Parchman as field workers and left the same way. That was their lot in life. Anything more was anathema in a culture where white supremacy and unskilled Negro labor went hand in hand. In Mississippi, rehabilitation was a dangerous word" (Oshinsky 1996: 224). Likewise, in the StatevilleIllinois prison, Jacobs (1977) and in Hacks, Blacks, and Cons,Carroll (1974) describe an existence for inmates that is both a part of, and apart from, that of the larger community. The articles in this book were selected to represent the best and most relevant research on the prison experience. The focus of this book is on what life is like in prison for the prisoners. The amount of research on prison life is tremendous, but much of it is duplicative, ill-conceived, or out of date. We have endeavored to select articles that are current or, even if relatively old, still representative of the best work on a particular issue. We acknowledge that there are other articles that could well have been included, but space constraints preclude the inclusion of every interesting and important article. This book is intended to serve as a starting point for thought and discussion, and for further investigation on the nature of the prison experience for inmates. The collection is divided into four parts and consists of 18 articles. The first section, "Inmate Adjustment to Prison," includes four articles that examine a variety of issues related to adjustment to prison, including the inmate society, the impact of prison on inmate self-esteem, and acculturation and acceptance of prison as a way of life. The second section, "Individual Adjustment Factors," includes five articles that examine some of the individual factors affecting inmate adjustment, such as r