The Effects of Imprisonment

Alison Liebling, Shadd Maruna, Alison Liebling, Shadd Maruna

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134012466
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

As the number of prisoners in the UK, USA and elsewhere continues to rise, so have concerns risen about the damaging short term and long term effects this has on prisoners. This book brings together a group of leading authorities in this field, both academics and practitioners, to address the complex issues this has raised, to assess the implications and results of research in this field, and to suggest ways of mitigating the often devastating personal and psychological consequences of imprisonment.

Chapter 1

Introduction: The effects of imprisonment revisited¹

Alison Liebling and Shadd Maruna

Offenders emerge from prison afraid to trust, fearful of the unknown, and with a vision of the world shaped by the meaning that behaviours had in the prison context. For a recently released prisoner, experiences like being jostled on the subway, having someone reach across him in the bathroom to take a paper towel, or making eye contact can be taken as a precursor to a physical attack. In relationships with loved ones, this warped kind of socialization means that problems will not easily be talked through. In a sense, the system we have designed to deal with offenders is among the most iatrogenic in history, nurturing those very qualities it claims to deter.

(Miller 2001: 3)

Florence Nightingale (1859) famously argued that the first principle of the hospital should be to do the sick no harm. A recent history of prison standards (Keve 1996: 1) begins by arguing that Nightingale ‘undoubtedly would have expressed a similar principle for prisons’. It seems that she actually did–or at least argued that we should do more research into whether or not prisons caused harm. In a letter to the Manchester Guardian in 1890, Nightingale laments the fact that ‘criminology is much less studied than insectology’ and argues that: ‘It would be of immense importance if the public had kept before them the statistics, well worked out, of the influence of punishment on crime or of reformatories and industrial schools on juvenile offenders.’ Armed with such knowledge, she believed, no rational society would support a system of ‘reformation’ that made its subjects more likely to offend upon their release than they were prior to admittance.

Since Nightingale’s time, the discipline of criminology has grown immensely (surely by now eclipsing entomology at least in terms of undergraduate interest levels) and recidivism statistics of the type she described have become one of the discipline’s most essential products (see Baumer et al 2002; Beck 2000; Kershaw 1997). However, the prison has remained and indeed reliance on imprisonment as a means of social control has increased substantially over the last 20 years in the United Kingdom and especially in the United States. We rely on imprisonment by remaining blind to the falseness of our assumptions about its role and effectiveness. As Garland (1990) has argued, restricted to its technical functions, imprisonment does not work, and there are other institutions far better placed to deliver goods such as ‘repair’, ‘inclusion’ or ‘correction’. Yet, presumably, the public consent to the increasing use of imprisonment based at least in large part on these narrow, technicist and unproven grounds (Useem et al 2003).

Where did Nightingale’s remarkable prognostic abilities go wrong? Perhaps we human beings are not as rational as she gave us credit for being. Or else, more optimistically, perhaps criminology has simply failed to make the case that prisons do not ‘work’. The study of the effects of prison has a distinguished history within criminology, yet the debate has gone stale in recent decades (partially indicated by how few investigations of this nature have been supported by criminal justice research councils in recent years). Haney and Zimbardo (1998: 721) have argued that although social scientists contributed significantly to the intellectual foundations on which the modern prison was developed, over the last 25 years, we have ‘relinquished voice and authority in the debates that surround prison policy’. This absence has created ‘an ethical and intellectual void that has undermined both the quality and the legitimacy of correctional practices’, they argue.

In recent years, the reigning paradigm in the prison effects literature, voiced by Zamble and Porporino (1988) and others, is that incarceration is akin to a ‘behavioral deep freeze’ (see Oleson 2002 for an ingenious parody of this finding). In other words, the adaptational styles and capacities of offenders are basically invariant and largely impervious to effects of imprisonment. In this framework, incarceration simply acts to put a person’s pre-existing propensities on hold until renewed opportunities are presented for these propensities to be freely exercised in the future. Essentially, Dostoevsky’s tragic optimism that humans must be creatures who can ‘withstand anything’–earned the hard way after he spent four years in a Siberian prison camp–has become the dangerously taken-for-granted assumption in contemporary thinking about prison effects.

The logical conclusion of this ‘deep freeze’ argument is not so much that ‘nothing works’, but essentially ‘nothing much matters’. Prisons can become as harsh and inhumane as desired–and imprisonment does not get much more inhumane than the conditions in so-called ‘supermax’ confinement widespread in the United States (see Haney, this volume)–and no real damage will be done to their unfortunate inhabitants. Among the shortcomings of this argument is the narrowness by which it defines ‘harm’. The contemporary effects literature lacks a sufficient affective dimension. Fear, anxiety, loneliness, trauma, depression, injustice, powerlessness, violence and uncertainty are all part of the experience of prison life. These ‘hidden’, but everywhere apparent, features of prison life have not been measured or taken seriously enough by those interested in the question of prison effects. Sociologists of prison life knew these things were significant, but have largely failed to convince others in a methodologically convincing way that such ‘pain’ constitutes a measurable ‘harm’ (see Liebling 1999). Yet, ‘pains’ have consequences, however indirect. The petty humiliations and daily injustices experienced in prison (as in our communities) may be suffered in silence, but as they accumulate and fester these hurts can return as hatred and ‘inexplicable’ violence (see Gilligan, 1999). After all, if the consequence of injustice and rejection is hatred (Storr 1991: 49; Parker 1970: 84–6) or resentment (Barbalet 1998) and the product of this pain is violence (de Zulueta 1993), we are surely obliged to avoid these unwanted and unintended effects.

Our dissatisfactions with the state of the existing literature, and our recognition that important work challenging the ‘deep freeze’ paradigm was beginning to emerge, provided the rationale for the conference out of which the following chapters emerged.² Our admittedly ambitious aim in assembling this collection of chapters from leading international scholars is to redirect the conversation among academics, policy-makers and professionals regarding the effects of imprisonment. We define this topic broadly to include the social, psychological, behavioural and emotional impacts of the incarceration experience on prisoners (during and after their captivity); as well as the impact of imprisonment on prisoners’ families (see Murray, this volume); and on those working in the institutions themselves (see e.g. Arnold, this volume; Carlen, this volume); and, indeed, the impact that the institution of the prison has on a society (especially in the present times of mass incarceration in the US and elsewhere).

These are far from mere academic issues. For instance, there may be justice implications if apparently objective measures of punishment, calibrated in chunks of time, have radically different subjective effects on recipients (von Hirsch 1993; Liebling 2004). Understanding the true effects of imprisonment is necessary if we are to appreciate what goes on in prisons as well. As Sykes argued, the deprivations of prison life provide the energy for the system of action that characterises the prison (Sykes 1958). There is even a relationship between the effects debate and prison design: reflecting on assumptions about the impact of prison over time helps us to make sense of the varied and apparently contradictory penal estate in England and Wales, for example.³ Finally, of course, an understanding of the intended and unintended effects of imprisonment has serious implications for the treatment of offenders and the reduction of recidivism. One reason for the null findings of so many of the best designed interventions may be that the positive impact of interventions such as education or job training may be systematically undermined by the negative effects of the incarceration process itself.

The account below presents a selective review of the debate over the effects of imprisonment over the last 50 years or so, and shows some of the limitations of the argument to date. We begin with the post-war consensus regarding the dangers of total institutions like prisons on the mental health and personality of the individuals they hold captive. Then, we review the shift in the 1980s to seeing imprisonment as a largely neutral experience with little lasting impact, good or bad. We conclude with some of the new issues that have emerged in recent years and which inform this collection.

The post-war consensus on prison effects

The first major critiques of imprisonment and its effects came from sociologists critical of institutions per se (e.g. Goffman’s 1961 classic Asylums). In the UK, Barton (1966) brought together several studies showing detrimental effects of institutionalisation under the heading ‘institutional neurosis’. This was:

… a disease characterised by apathy, lack of initiative, loss of interest more marked in things and events not immediately personal or present, submissiveness, and sometimes no expression of feelings of resentment at harsh or unfair orders. There is also a lack of interest in the future and an apparent inability to make practical plans for it, a deterioration in personal habits, toilet and standards generally, a loss of individuality, and a resigned acceptance that things will go on as they are – unchangingly, inevitably, and indefinitely.

(Barton 1966: 14)

There were several overlapping factors associated with its aetiology: loss of contact with the outside world; enforced idleness and loss of responsibility; the authoritarian attitudes of medical and nursing staff; the loss of personal possessions and friends; prescribed drugs; and loss of prospects outside the institution (p. 63).⁴

Around the same time, other, more specific reservations about the effects of imprisonment were being expressed from various sources in the UK, including a report of the Advisory Council on the Treatment of Offenders on Preventive Detention (Home Office 1963). It was clear from research (e.g. West 1963) that very long sentences were being inappropriately given to socially ‘inadequate’, repeat offenders and that such prison terms only reinforced the cycle of dependency, institutionalisation and crime (West 1963: 106–7; Home Office 1963). Tony Parker’s The Unknown Citizen powerfully illustrated this critique:

Imprisonment neither reforms nor deters me. It confirms and completes the destruction of my personality, and has now so conditioned me that I am almost totally incapable of living outside. A prison has become the only place in which I can exist satisfactorily, and it has become a kindness on your part to return me to it since the strain of living outside is so painful and intense.

(Parker 1963: 156)

In a landmark study of prison environments,⁵ Gresham Sykes (1958) used the language of the ‘pains of imprisonment’. In his sociological study of a maximum security prison in Trenton, Sykes identified five main pains of imprisonment. They were:

• the loss of liberty (confinement, removal from family and friends, rejection by the community, and loss of citizenship: a civil death, resulting in lost emotional relationships, loneliness and boredom)

• the deprivation of goods and services (choice, amenities and material possessions)

• the frustration of sexual desire (prisoners wer...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Cambridge Criminal Justice Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• List of tables and figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction The effects of imprisonment revisited1
• Part 1 The Harms of Imprisonment Thawing Out the ‘Deep Freeze' Paradigm
• Part 2 Revisiting the Society of Captives
• Part 3 Coping Among Ageing Prisoners
• Part 4 Expanding the Prison Effects Debate Beyond the Prisoner
• Afterword
• Appendix Conference participants
• Index