Prison

About: Prison is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 25120 publications have been published within this topic receiving 470474 citations. The topic is also known as: jail & gaol.

Doing Prison Research: Views From Inside:

Abstract: This article is coauthored by four prisoners and a prison-researcher. In it, the authors discuss the differing aims and aspirations of research participants and scholars and their implications for doing prison research. Unlike most other accounts of prison research, the authors stress the experience of those being interviewed rather than that of the interviewer. The authors pay particular attention to the emotional nature of being part of a study and how a researcher gains participants’ trust. The authors also consider the utility of academic research and how inmate voices might be effectively harnessed to build a sustained critique of the U.S. prison system.

Nowhere to go: How stigma limits the options of female drug users after release from jail

Abstract: Drug and alcohol using women leaving prison or jail face many challenges to successful re-integration in the community and are severely hampered in their efforts by the stigma of drug or alcohol use compounded by the stigma of incarceration. This qualitative study is based on individual semi-structured interviews and focus groups with 17 women who had recently left jail about the challenges they faced on reentry. Our analysis identified three major themes, which are related by the overarching influence of stigma: survival (jobs and housing), access to treatment services, and family and community reintegration. Stigma based on drug use and incarceration works to increase the needs of women for health and social services and at the same time, restricts their access to these services. These specific forms of stigma may amplify gender and race-based stigma. Punitive drug and social policies related to employment, housing, education, welfare, and mental health and substance abuse treatment make it extremely difficult for women to succeed.

A General Strain Theory of Prison Violence and Misconduct: An Integrated Model of Inmate Behavior

Abstract: Explanations of prison violence and other forms of misconduct have been dominated by three competing models: (a) the deprivation model, (b) the importation model, and (c) the coping model. We propose that these three seemingly competing models can be integrated within Agnew’s general strain theory (GST). GST enriches the deprivation model by revealing three distinctive categories of strain. GST encompasses the importation model in hypothesizing that criminal cultural values and affiliations will structure the response to the strains of imprisonment. And GST incorporates the coping model in its emphasis on how social support, social capital, and human capital can blunt the effects of potentially criminogenic strains. Finally, GST is sufficiently broad to include factors (e.g., emotions, self-control) in the explanation of prison maladjustment not covered by the three main models of prison inmate behavior. In short, GST offers a general integrated framework for reconceptualizing our understanding of prison violence and misconduct.

Prison Violence: The Contribution of Crowding Versus Other Determinants of Prison Assault Rates

Abstract: The relationship between prison assault rates and aggregate measures of crowding, age, and prisonization is examined using data collected from 19 Federal prisons over a 33-month period, resulting in 627 observations for each independent and dependent variable. In the context of a multivariate specification (estimated using the TOBIT procedure), crowding was by far the most influential variable in the predictor stock. Of the four assault types examined, three are positively related to a crowding index, and all crowding-assault relations are nonlinear. When controlling empirically for crowding level, institutional size, staff-inmate ratio, percentage of staff who are correctional officers, rehabilitative program participation rates and program type, inmate turnover rates, inmate demographics, criminal histories, and unique institutional influences, age was implicated in only one of the four types of assault rates. Measures assumed to be indicators of the deprivation and importation models of prisonization i...

No Bond but the Law: Punishment, Race, and Gender in Jamaican State Formation, 1780–1870

Abstract: Investigating the cultural, social, and political histories of punishment during ninety years surrounding the 1838 abolition of slavery in Jamaica, Diana Paton challenges standard historiographies of slavery and discipline. The abolition of slavery in Jamaica, as elsewhere, entailed the termination of slaveholders’ legal right to use violence—which they defined as “punishment”—against those they had held as slaves. Paton argues that, while slave emancipation involved major changes in the organization and representation of punishment, there was no straightforward transition from corporal punishment to the prison or from privately inflicted to state-controlled punishment. Contesting the dichotomous understanding of pre-modern and modern modes of power that currently dominates the historiography of punishment, she offers critical readings of influential theories of power and resistance, including those of Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and Ranajit Guha. No Bond but the Law reveals the longstanding and intimate relationship between state formation and private punishment. The construction of a dense, state-organized system of prisons began not with emancipation but at the peak of slave-based wealth in Jamaica, in the 1780s. Jamaica provided the paradigmatic case for British observers imagining and evaluating the emancipation process. Paton’s analysis moves between imperial processes on the one hand and Jamaican specificities on the other, within a framework comparing developments regarding punishment in Jamaica with those in the U.S. South and elsewhere. Emphasizing the gendered nature of penal policy and practice throughout the emancipation period, Paton is attentive to the ways in which the actions of ordinary Jamaicans and, in particular, of women prisoners, shaped state decisions.