Theoretical Models of Adaptation to Imprisonment - Essay Example

EVALUATION OF THEORETICAL MODELS OF ADAPTATION TO IMPRISONMENT 17 March Introduction Adjusting to life behindbars can always pose severe challenges to individuals convicted to serve different sentences. For this reason, there is need to understand these challenges, the characteristics of more or less adapted prisoners, and how individuals have adapted to these conditions of imprisonment. The ways the prisoners adjust to life in prison differ and that significantly affects their lives. Often, the social characteristics of detainees and the realities of confinement do not dawn well in individuals, hence most resort to violent behaviour and misconduct in the prison facilities. Consequently, the change of environment requires one to develop changes so as to adjust to the new life behind bars. To better understand how prisoners cope with life in confinement, scholars have devised theoretical models explaining the variations in different responses from prisoners. The models either focus on individual characteristics or immediate environmental settings that may seem alien to a person. This paper discusses the deprivation model that focuses on the pressures the inmates’ face, the importation model that gives a dissection of how the system and situations outside the immediate prison conditions affect individuals, and the combined model, which mainly focuses on governance and monitoring of inmate behaviour. Deprivation Model According to Reid (2011), the deprivation model’s primary influences to adjustment in prison life are the deprivations experienced in prison and the pains of confinement. Inmates get deprived of their liberty, heterosexual relationships, restricted motion and family ties (Reid 2011). In addition, they face imminent danger of insecurity, loss of control and need for goods and services they enjoyed in the free world. According to Dhami, Ayton and Loewenstein (2007, p.1086), “prisoners ranked missing somebody as the most severe problem, followed by missing social life, feeling that life is wasted, and missing sex”. The model explains the adaptations that individuals will develop in relation to the aspect of confinement like institution type and prison sentence. Diverse patterns of getting used to prison life emerge when analysing prisoners who have spent different amounts of time in prison. For instance, first-time prisoners will show limited behavioural adaptations compared to long-term inmates, who demonstrate increased involvement in work and other activities and reduced casual interaction with other inmates. The most deprivation that inmates suffer from is loss of liberty, which includes not only confinement, but also restrictions within the institution that cut any family ties, friends and the outside world (Hensley 2002). According to Hensley (2002, p. 1), “people who are incarcerated are required to live in a world where their movements are restricted and their behaviour contained”. Rejection and isolation pose a threat to self-conception of the inmate and needs to be rendered harmless by warding it off or turning it aside for the prisoner to endure and adjust to prison life. For inmates to adapt, deprivation increases individual opposition and produces inmate camaraderie and development of an inmate culture. The social culture inmates develop for them to adapt is in the form of analogous norms and values, language and social roles. Cullen and Wilcox affirm that inmates will build a social system based on solidarity among inmates and antagonism towards prison wardens (2010). Sometimes though, inmates may demonstrate other reactions to prison life, such as attempts to escape or psychological withdrawal. Inmates can adapt to prison life upon entering the facility through mortification rituals, degradation and becoming institutionalized. A new individual will grow out of interactions with other prisoners and guards, as well as following routine rituals of the institution. Adaptations can take the form of the inmate cooperating with the system by staying out of trouble and doing the sentence with minimal conflict or stress aiming at his or her earliest release date. According to Dhami, Ayton and Loewenstein (2007), withdrawal as an adaptation can be in the form of physical separation from the rest of the inmates, little or no communication, depression or self-mutilation and committing suicide. Resistance is the most profound form of adaptation that inmates engage in to feel secure in prison. It may involve riots and disturbances at one point or other forms of non-cooperation. Forms of resistance depend on pressures on inmates, their past and experiences, and the extent to which they feel that their confinement is fair and just. Importation Model This model attributes adaptation to individual characteristics rather than the prison environment. Jewkes and Bennett (2008, p. 130) point out that it “was postulated in challenge to the deprivation model (also called the ‘indigenous’ or ‘functional’ model)”. According to Huey, it is the model characteristics which determine individual behaviour and that inmate conduct cannot be assessed only by the prison culture, but also external behaviour patterns and values imported from the outside (2008). These characteristics, norms and values therefore contribute to inmate adjustments for particular groups. The imported characteristics may be associated with pre-prison life and they include education, employment, drug use, relationships, or previous imprisonment. Individuals who have gone through the hard life before find it easier to adapt to the physical challenges like being hurt or taken advantage of by other inmates. Individuals with education or who have had employment find it hard to adjust to the demanding life of prison. Therefore, the characteristics which one imports from their pre-prison life greatly affect how they adjust. Individuals will adapt by forming social classes within prison, such as inmates who are drug addicts who will change by associating with fellow cohorts. The importation model explains why most inmates commit suicide because they fail to reconcile their pre-prison life and their present situation. Most will adapt by living in denial and others by withdrawal. In essence, the characteristics of an individual define how well they are going to adjust to prison life, although they may not have the power to perceive the combined effects of the general status prior to prison. Hochstetler and DeLisi explain that the importation model focuses on the reason for more cases of suicides among inmates in prison associated to prior mental and psychiatric issues such as depression, drug and alcohol dependency, anxiety and previous suicide attempts, all of which easily get imported to the confinement facility (2005). The disorders are much elevated among inmates, making it difficult to screen and predict any possible suicide based on the mental health indicators. However, prison suicide cases evaluations reveal that eventual suicide cases during imprisonment were either judged as low risk or undetected, based on symptoms of mental illness. In addition to psychiatric disorders as the primary imported factor for prison suicides, race, and ethnic experiences also contribute to suicides. All these factors work because the prisoner has failed to adjust to the new reality in prison, or is still living his or her their past. Adaptation becomes difficult and the only way to eases whatever pain a prisoner is undergoing is to kill himself. Combined/ Integrated Model It combines both models in trying to decipher what determines prison adaptation. According to DeLisi and Conis (2013, p. 279), “although the deprivation and importation models were developed as rival explanations, it has long been recognized that prisoner behaviour is a reflection of both institutional and individual characteristics-known as the integrated/multilevel model”. The combination of both models puts the importation approach on the upper hand in things like gender, race age, and marital status that are more likely to determine the level of adaptability compared to the deprivation model, which demonstrates minimally violent behaviour against staff and other inmates compared to the importation model. Both models have interactive features that can make them useful in understanding prisoner adaptation to prison life. They are both compatible because an individuals pre-prison life can define how an inmate adapts to deprivations and confinement determines other things. DeLisi and Conis (2013, p. 279) add that “penologists generally agree that individuals import characteristics from the street that make them more or less likely to engage in violence and misconduct in prison, but, the form of institutional life and how the individual chooses to do time also contribute to their behaviour behind bars”. Studies show that disciplinary infractions are not determined by a person’s interaction with the environment, but more complex issues like stress that explain the external behaviour to cope with. The deprivation model however, does not explain why prisoners do not commit suicide even when in institutions of high deprivations. The model fails to explain why imprisonment leads to suicide in some prisoners and not others. On the side of importation, various explanations have been advanced to explain the prevalence of risk factors that result in suicide among prisoners, deducing that individual characteristics rather than prison conditions lead to suicide (Tocci 2007). The model though does not adequately address the issue of the prison context and its role in suicides. It also does not explain why most inmates who possess many risk factors do not commit suicide in prison, but do so once they are out. Both models do not give satisfactory explanations as to why inmates commit suicide, but then a combination of inmates’ characteristics and the prison environment interact to explain the fact. According to the combination model, prisons are painful and certain conditions in other prisons may increase the likelihood of adjusting to be difficult. Stevens (2013) explains that the important aspect of the combination model is that inmates will react differently to various conditions depending on the level of vulnerability. Unlike the importation model, the combined model considers the role of the environment in promoting how inmates cope with prison life. High vulnerable inmates are likely to adapt successfully to prison life when conditions are less depriving. However, where conditions are most depriving, the vulnerabilities of inmates become exposed making the ability to cope less likely. Therefore, the combined model fits to explain how prisoners adjust to life in confinement in that it combines the environmental conditions and a persons attributes to determine the level of adaptability. It is thus important to note that deprivation and importation variables are both behind individuals adjustment to the prison confines. Conclusion Life in prison is very different from life as a free civilian. For those that get imprisoned for one reason or the other, they have to learn to cope with a different kind of life and this is not easy. To better understand how prisoners adapt to imprisonment, a number of theoretical models have been devised by different scholars. This paper has discussed the deprivation, importation and combined models of adaptation to imprisonment. References Cullen, F. T. and Wilcox, P., 2010. Encyclopaedia of Criminological Theory-Volume 1. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc. DeLisi, M. and Conis, P. J., 2013. American Corrections: Theory, Research, Policy, and Practice. Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning, LLC. Dhami, M. K., Ayton, P. and Loewenstein, G., 2007. Adaptation to Imprisonment: Indigenous or imported? [pdf] Available at: < http://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/sds/docs/loewenstein/adaptPrisonment.pdf> [Accessed 17 March 2015]. Hensley, C., 2002. Prison Sex: Practice and Policy. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. Hochstetler, A. and DeLisi, M., 2005. Importation, Deprivation, and Varieties of Serving Time: An Integrated-Lifestyle-Exposure Model of Prison Offending. [pdf] Available at: < http://www.soc.iastate.edu/staff/delisi/Hoch-DeLisi%20JCJ.pdf> [Accessed 17 March 2015]. Huey, M. P., 2008. Deprivation, Importation, and Prison Suicide: The Combined Effects of Institutional Conditions and Inmate Composition. [pdf] Available at: < https://getd.libs.uga.edu/pdfs/huey_meredith_200808_phd.pdf> [Accessed 17 March 2015]. Jewkes, Y. and Bennett, J., 2008. Dictionary of Prisons and Punishment. Portland, OR: Willan Publishing. Reid, S. T., 2011. Criminal Justice Essentials. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons. Stevens, A., 2013. Offender Rehabilitation and Therapeutic Communities: Enabling Change the TC Way. New York, NY: Routledge. Tocci, L., 2007. The Proscenium Cage: Critical Case Studies in U.S. Prison Theatre Programs. Youngstown, NY: Cambria Press. Read More