Psychology
The Importation Model
The Importation Model is a theoretical framework that explains how individuals bring their pre-existing cultural values and beliefs into new environments. It suggests that cultural differences can lead to misunderstandings and conflicts, and that individuals may experience stress and adjustment difficulties when their cultural values clash with those of the new environment.
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3 Key excerpts on "The Importation Model"
eBook - PDFLiving Inside Prison Walls
Adjustment Behavior
- Victoria R. DeRosia(Author)
- 1998(Publication Date)
- Praeger(Publisher)
His findings in this and other studies (Thomas, 1977; Thomas, Peterson, and Zingraff, 1978) led to the certainty that a more inclusive model of inmate adjustment was required. "In brief, each inmate has a past, a present, and a future. His adaptation to the prison can be nothing other than the interactive product of all these influences" (Thomas, 1973:16). Although the prisonization concept and the models of inmate adjustment that followed have become less useful in explaining inmate behavior, this literature still serves as important heuristic work and as a historical forerunner to the modern study of inmate adaptation to confinement. Even modern critics of early adjustment literature concur that the intellectual merits of this sociological view have influenced how Americans think about prisons and have helped shape the course of correctional policy for the last five decades (Dilulio, 1987:13). Today, attention has shifted away from the collective response perspective towards a body of literature focused on individual attempts at dealing with confinement. The integrative model of adjustment has contributed greatly to that line of research by illustrating that inmate behavior is no less complicated nor any different than human behavior generally. While the models of inmate adjustment are no longer in vogue, there are still important clues about how an inmate's background characteristics, his/her response to the problems created by imprisonment itself, and the interaction of the individual with his/her environment mix together to influence inmate adjustment to prison. DIMENSIONS OF INMATE ADJUSTMENT There can be no question that prison is a particularly stressful and challenging situation. The abrupt disconnection from the outside world of family, friends, and ordinary life alone requires some level of adjustment by even the most hardy individual. Inmates have been found to respond to confinement in a number of ways.
eBook - PDFDoing Time
An Introduction to the Sociology of Imprisonment
- R. Matthews(Author)
- 1999(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
The process of ‘prisonisa- tion’, as Clemmer called it, involves the adaption by different social groups to imprisonment. This ‘importation’ model challenged the ‘deprivation’ model, which claimed that it was the restrictive nature of imprisonment that was the dominant factor in inmate adjustment. Within the sociological literature on imprisonment these two models have been cast as competing alternative explanations, but, as Thomas (1977) has demonstrated, they are not theoretically incompatible, since it is likely that the prisoner’s social and cultural background will provide the conceptual framework through which the deprivations of imprisonment will be perceived and experienced. However, there still remains some disagreement over the explanatory power of both these models, and the priority which should be accorded to each in account- ing for the processes of adjustment. 54 Doing Time Within the various contributions to the literature on the sociology of imprisonment different forms of individual and collective adap- tion have been identified. Although various authors place a different emphasis on different types of adaptation, most agree that modes of adaption are not static and that different individuals and groups may move between them during their period of confinement. There are considerable variations in the modes of adaptation which sociolo- gists have identified, but they tend to boil down to three essential types. 1. Co-operation or colonisation In this mode of adaptation prisoners will aim to keep out of trouble and do their time with the minimum degree of conflict and stress, and with the intention of working towards their earliest release date. 2. Withdrawal This can take a number of different forms, including physical separation from other inmates, engaging in minimum degrees of communication, depression, or self-mutilation and suicide.
- Marcus Harmes, Meredith Harmes, Barbara Harmes, Marcus Harmes, Meredith Harmes, Barbara Harmes(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
1997 ) asserted that under importation theory, the same individual factors used to predict criminal behavior in general can be used to predict inmate misconduct.Importation theory provides a salient explanation for the homicide itself. While the idea of having the inmates fight a second time is consistent with early sociological observations that the inmate culture places a premium on interpersonal violence (Ohlin 1956 ), importation theory helps explain the over-development of those values by showing that the hyper-masculinity present in prison (where aggression, violence, and respect are intertwined) is the product of the interaction between pre-prison experiences and the inmate subculture. This is apparent in the inmate who committed the murder, a 23-year-old black offender from the DC serving a long sentence for a violent crime. The murderer had no direct connection to the victim other than the fact that he lived in the same housing unit, was from the same geographic location as the older black inmate involved in the original fight, and was chosen to guard the door during the second fight. It is possible he was driven by impulsivity and low self-control (Gottfredson and Hirschi 1990 ), but it can also be argued that his actions were due to being part of a pre-prison culture that (1) permitted the use of violence to gain respect (which is prized as a form of social capital; see Anderson 1999 ), and (2) has politicized criminal behavior as being the result of “political and economic deprivation of Black America by the Anglo-American State” (Chrisman 1971
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