Patterns of Prisoner Misconduct: Toward a Behavioral Test of Prisonization

Abstract

Theory and research in the sociology of prison life and prisonization, particularly Clemmer and Wheeler and their followers, focused mostly on the normative aspects of these processes and concepts, giving rise to two prominent conceptions: the functional and importation models of adaptation to prison life. Behavioral measures were relatively neglected. This paper reviews in detail these two paradigms and their basic premises, and proposes a new direction for prisonization study, namely the focus upon behavioral measures of the prisoners' acculturation to life within the prison community. Based upon data gathered on (N = 306) prisoners in a large northwestern state maximum security prison the author identifies intra-prison misconduct as a significant variable that sheds some light on the many aspects of prisonization. Four patterns of misconduct are highlighted (Incidental/Accidental, “Early Starter,” “Late Bloomer,” “Chronic”), and their respective linkages with prisonization are explored.     

Life in a Forgotten Scottish Gulag: Punishment and Social Regulation in HM Peterhead Convict Prison

This paper contributes to filling a lacuna in our knowledge of penal history in Scotland by examining the voices of convicts through records of prisoners experiencing Penal Servitude during the period 1897–1942. The sources utilized are the archived files of thirty‐two male convict prisoners in Scotland's Convict Prison at Peterhead. These files give insights about life in this remote prison as conveyed through records of punishment, prisoners' requests, and prisoners' letters. Prison Rules about convict correspondence highlight penal letters as a distinctive genre of communication: political and personal boundaries were enforced on all exchanges. The convict prison, like nineteenth‐century British labour colonies, imposed workhouse conditions at the extreme; it was a place of exclusion, dominated by religious and social sentiment and suppositions about criminal psychology and containment. The extent of the curtailment of convicts' liberty and the aim of re‐socialization is refracted in penal practices fostering convict dependency. The ethos of Scotland's convict colony was immersed in military traditions of training, subservience to authority and generalized gloom.     

Elderly Prisoners: A Growing and Forgotten Group Within Correctional Systems Vulnerable to Elder Abuse

ABSTRACT

There are over 2.1 million people incarcerated in the nation's jails and prisons. Additionally, close to 600,000 prisoners are released annually into communities across the country. Many prisoners and those released from prisons are elderly. The purpose of this article is to examine the systemic abuse and neglect experienced by elderly prisoners while they are incarcerated and when they are released from prison. Most correctional systems have inadequate resources, processes, and personnel to manage the elderly population inside and outside of prisons. In addition to providing a definition of “elderly prisoner,” two specific problems–prison health care and prisoner re-entry–are examined in the article. The article concludes with recommendations for both policy and research on how best we can further understand and address the multiple needs and concerns faced by elderly prisoners.     

Micropolitics of race and ethnicity in women's prisons in two political contexts

Research over the past two decades has focused on the topic of race as important for understanding order and compliance in men's prisons. However, relatively little research considers how subjective understandings of imprisonment are influenced by race, particularly in the case of women prisoners. The current study analyses 139 interviews conducted with women prisoners in California and England in order to determine how race and ethnicity shape prisoners' experiences and abilities to cope with institutional confinement. Findings suggest that women's understandings of their racial identities differ substantially in these two contexts. In California, where the conditions of confinement are more extreme and white women assume a minority status, racial identity emerges as a salient factor in coping with the adversities of prison life. By contrast, in England, it is the women of colour, and particularly foreign nationals, who have a greater appreciation of the role of race and ethnicity in their daily lives. These findings have implications for our understanding of how prisoners draw on their lived experiences to make sense of their carceral worlds.     

Typology of Slovenian Drama in the Period Between the Two World Wars

From the 1970s, the term metafiction has been mostly confined to studies of American and Western European literatures; I propose using metafiction as a means of approaching Sergei Dovlatov’s Zona [The Zone], a novel which blurs the line between fiction and memoir. In one sense a prison text, in that it concerns the lives of guards and prisoners in a camp, it is, however, divorced from survivor narratives in that the camp does not contain political prisoners, so the “heroes” are the thieves and criminals so universally reviled in other memoirs of the Soviet gulag. It is also a record of its author’s developing need to write as it tracks the transformation of the guard Boris Alikhanov, Dovlatov’s alter-ego. Dovlatov’s authorial persona serves not to elucidate the text, but to construct a hybrid prison memoir which supports his views on the prison experience; views which are in opposition to the pre-existing tradition, and this leads me to describe The Zone as a metatextual camp narrative, containing many of the attributes of the metafictional novel, though originating from the memoiristic impulse and still straddling the line between fiction and nonfiction in a way that true metafictions do not.     

Ramen Politics: Informal Money and Logics of Resistance in the Contemporary American Prison

This article explores an unexpected yet pervasive arena in which changes to security may alter lived experiences of and responses to punishment. Namely, amidst changes in the quality of care behind U.S. prison walls and resultant prisoner insecurities in the face of neoliberal penology, the nation’s prisoners have adapted informal prison markets to address unmet needs and pursue autonomy. Where cigarettes once reigned as the de facto token of exchange in the underground economy, the contemporary American prison is now home to a new form of informal money: cheap, reliable food items like ramen noodles. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork within a U.S. men’s state prison and 82 in-depth interviews with prisoners and institutional staff, this paper explores this change in the form of informal prison money and what it reveals about the nation’s prisons and prisoners. It contends that prison money reflects changing logics of prisoner resistance in particular political-economic and penal contexts. As prison administrative practices, institutional conditions, and legal environments change with time, prisoners adapt expressions of autonomy accordingly. While cigarettes symbolized withdrawal from the rigors of prison life and individualized treatment—the dominant logic of resistance of the prior era—the new ramen currency reflects a growing emphasis on prison “foodways” in opposition to cost-shifting and deteriorating services behind bars.     

Love,Stigma, and Resistance: “Therapeutic Microaggressions” in a Prisoners' Wives' Support Group

This article derives from ethnographies of therapeutic interventions in a support group for prisoners' wives in Israel. The study's main inductive findings reveal that love and the emotion work of prisoners' wives are constructed as the primary site for achieving the clinical objective: modifying the prisoners' wives' spoiled self and encouraging their adoption of a psychological self. The findings reveal a dramatic clash between the therapeutic emotion work of love that the group facilitators proposed and the collectivist emotion work to which the prisoners' wives subscribed. These forms of emotion work are associated with ethnic hierarchies and experiences of stigmatization by the prisoners' wives during the therapeutic sessions. In this context, the article suggests the concept of “therapeutic microaggressions” to describe how interactions in clinical sessions can reinforce inequality.     

Former welfare clients in prison: education and self-reported learning problems

The aim of this study is to investigate educational background, educational wishes, actual participation in prison education, and self-reported learning problems among former child welfare clients in prison. A significant concern is that prisoners' educational level is far lower than for the general population. The same concern has also been expressed regarding former child welfare clients. The question is whether prisoners with a background from the child welfare system are especially vulnerable. The survey reported in this paper addressed the entire Norwegian prison population. We distributed a questionnaire containing questions about whether the prisoner or their family had been in contact with the welfare system, educational issues such as educational background, whether they wanted to participate in prison education and actually participated, and to what extent the participants had self-reported learning problems. We also investigated whether such learning problems affected participation in prison education. The results showed that around one-third of the 2065 respondents were former child welfare clients. The mean age of the respondents in the child welfare group was 31 years and 7.9% were women. The results further revealed that those who had been child welfare clients had a lower educational level and more self-reported learning problems than the general prison population, but most of them still wished to start an education while incarcerated.     

“The Last Refuge of the Scoundrel”: Debating between History and Theory

When “History” is called to represent silence, its metaphysical position is symptomatically felt. Tracing what Fasolt calls “the historian's revolt”, this paper identifies the political impetus behind it as the symptom dictating Foucault's own silences/silencings (regarding Derrida's intervention in his History of Madness). In naming such a symptom/silence – in taking “Derrida's position” – this paper performs its own violence/decision by, both “justifying,” and betraying, this position; by installing itself in, instead of “above,” this curious “debate”. “The last refuge of the scoundrel” appears then as the reflective exteriority of a political antagonism that's based on a metaphysical difference with regards to the legitimate “seat” of authority (in Fasolt, an antagonism between the historian and the Catholic Church). Finally, this trajectory is installed within a wider – metaphysical and historical – context, where Hegel's famous saying, that the University is the Protestant's Church, might yet echo that distant metaphysical decision – still looming, like a “genealogical specter,” over Academia and its Social Sciences.     

Punishment and pleasure: women, food and the imprisoned body1

Food assumes enormous importance in prison: for many prisoners it conditions their life in custody and, in many respects, is symbolic of the prison experience. This article explores the complex relationship between gender, food and imprisonment through an analysis of data obtained from in‐depth interviews and group discussions conducted in three women's prisons in England. The findings indicate that, in prison, where control is taken away as the prisoner and her body become the objects of external forces, food is experienced not only as part of the disciplinary machinery, but also as a powerful source of pleasure, resistance and rebellion. The implications of such findings for health promotion in the prison context are discussed. Here, the pleasures and consolations of food may well constitute a redefinition of what it is to be healthy in this context, one that challenges the dominant meaning constructed in current health promotional discourse.     

CAN SUBGAME PERFECT EQUILIBRIUM THREATS FOSTER COOPERATION? AN EXPERIMENTAL TEST OF FINITE‐HORIZON FOLK THEOREMS

This paper considers extended prisoners' dilemma games in which a second pure strategy equilibrium in the stage game allows for mutual cooperation in all but the last round of the finitely repeated game as an equilibrium outcome. We distinguish a strict and a weak extension of the prisoners' dilemma game in a long and a short horizon treatment. A comparison with the corresponding finitely repeated prisoners' dilemma games shows that the strict additional equilibrium increases cooperation rates while the weak does not. This result is robust to the variation of the time horizon. (JEL C73, C91)     

CARBON GEOGRAPHY: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF CONGRESSIONAL SUPPORT FOR LEGISLATION INTENDED TO MITIGATE GREENHOUSE GAS PRODUCTION

Over the last 5 years, the U.S. Congress has voted on several pieces of legislation intended to sharply reduce the nation's greenhouse gas emissions. Given that climate change is a world public bad, standard economic logic would predict that the United States would “free ride” and wait for other nations to reduce their emissions. Within the Congress, there are clear patterns to who votes in favor of mitigating greenhouse gas emissions. This paper presents a political economy analysis of the determinants of “pro‐green” votes on such legislation. Conservatives consistently vote against such legislation. Controlling for a representative's ideology, representatives from richer districts and districts with a lower per‐capita carbon dioxide footprint are more likely to vote in favor of climate change mitigation legislation. Representatives from districts where industrial emissions represent a larger share of greenhouse gas emissions are more likely to vote no. (JEL Q54, Q58, R50)     

Committing Canadian Sociology: Developing a Canadian Sociology and a Sociology of Canada

This paper is a slightly revised version of the author's “Outstanding Career Award Lecture” presented at the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Sociological Association in Victoria, British Columbia on June 6, 2013. The paper distinguishes between Canadian Sociology and the Sociology of Canada. The former involves the explanatory stance that one takes to understanding Canada. The latter addresses the significant social dimensions that underlie Canadian social organization, culture, and behavior. I make a case for a Canadian Sociology that focuses on the unique features of Canadian society rather than adopting a comparative perspective. I also argue that there is a continuing need within the Sociology of Canada to address the issues of staples development. However, I argue that “new” staples analysis must have a directional change from that of the past, in that social processes now largely determine the pattern of staples development. Moreover, new staples analysis must include issues that were never part of earlier staples analysis, such as issues of environmental impacts and of staples depletion under conditions, such as climate change. The paper concludes by analyzing four factors that provide the dominant social contexts for analyzing modern staples development: (1) the rise of neoliberal government, (2) the implementation of globalization and its social consequences, (3) the assumption of aboriginal rights and entitlement, and (4) the rise of environmentalism. These factors were generally not considered in earlier staples approaches. They are critical to understanding the role of staples development and its impact on Canada in the present time. Cet article est une version quelque peu révisé du cours pour le “prix pour contributions exceptionnelles” de l'auteur, présenté à la réunion annuelle de la Société Canadienne de Sociologie à Victoria, Colombie‐Britannique le 6 juin 2013. Cet article ce distingue entre la sociologie canadienne et la sociologie du Canada. Le premier ce concerne la position explicative que l'on prend pour comprendre le Canada. Le dernier adresse les importantes dimensions sociales qui sous‐tendent l'organisation sociale, culturelle et comportementale. Je soutiendrai une sociologie canadienne qui se concentre sur les aspects uniques de la société canadienne au lieu d'adopter une perspective comparative. Je soutiendrai aussi qu'il existe un besoin continu au sein de la sociologie du Canada pour adresser les questions de la théorie des principales ressources. Cependant, je soutiens que l'analyse des principales ressources “nouvelle” nécessite un changement de direction que celles du passé, en ce que les processus sociaux déterminent principalement le système de développement des principales ressources. De plus, l'analyse des principales ressources “nouveau” doit inclure les problèmes qui n’étaient jamais partis des analyses précédentes, comme les problèmes d'impacts environnementaux et de la diminution des principales ressources dans les conditions comme celui des changements climatiques. Cet article ce termine par scruter quatre facteurs qui produisent le contexte social dominant dans les analyses du développement des principales ressources moderne: (1) la croissance du gouvernement néolibéral; (2) l'implémentation de la globalisation et ses conséquences sociales ; (3) l'assomption des droits autochtones, et (4) l'ascension d'environnementalisme. Ces facteurs n'ont été généralement pas considérés dans les méthodes d'analyse des principales ressources antérieures. Ils sont cruciaux pour comprendre le rôle du développement des principales ressources et leurs impacts contemporains sur le Canada.     

Character Contests and Violent Criminal Conduct: A Critique*

Goffman's theory of violent criminal behavior, which is based upon the complementary notions of “character contest” and “stake in conventional institutions,” is relatively unique in that it makes problematic both the violent criminal act and actor. However, the explanation Goffman's work provides is inadequate for three major reasons. First, mutual consent among the conflicting parties to use violence to settle their dispute rarely occurs in violent criminal acts. Secondly, the meanings with which most violent criminal acts are imbued are different from that of a character contest. Finally, violent people cannot be distinguished from non-violent ones merely on the basis of whether or not they have a stake in conformity. Thus, a more accurate and adequate theory of violent criminal behavior which takes into account both the nature of the violent criminal act and actor is needed. The outlines of such a theory are briefly described.     

Racializing Redemption,Reproducing Racism: The Odyssey of Magical Negroes and White Saviors

Recent research on the intersection of race and media describes a trend of progressive, even antiracist, narratives that showcase close inter‐racial friendships and camaraderie on the silver screen. Films in which one character saves or helps another from some unholy or disastrous plight are common in films like The Green Mile (1999), Bruce Almighty (2003), Amistad (1997) and The Blind Side (2009). While these films present a stark change from the patently racist and on‐screen segregationist history of Hollywood cinema, these films often trade on racist meanings and expectations. Many of these films are what critics call “Magical Negro” or “White Savior” films – cinema in which implicit and explicit racial stereotypes are employed to structure the inter‐racial interactions where one character labors to redeem another. In comparing these two genres, this article provides an overview for how both cinematic forms reproduce racist messages by naturalizing the supposed cerebral rationality, work ethic, and paternalistic morality of select White characters while normalizing Black characters as primordially connected with nature, spiritually connected to the carnal, and possessive of exotic and magical powers. Together, these films subversively reaffirm the social order and relations of racial domination by reproducing centuries’ old understandings of racial difference.     

Deprivation of Furusato: The damage faced by evacuees after the Fukushima nuclear power plant accident

This paper considers the damage caused by the Great East Japan Earthquake and the meaning of the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant accident, and reflects on the evacuees' experiences over past 12 years. During this time, several lawsuits demanding the clarification of responsibility for the accident and compensation for damages have been filed against TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company) and the Japanese Government. The “loss and transformation of hometowns (furusato in Japanese)” has become one of the key issues in these lawsuits. While the casees were being litigated, the mandated “evacuation designated zones” were gradually lifted. Even in the “Difficult-to-Return Areas” where annual integrated doses of radioactive substances are over 50 mSv and evacuation orders are still in effect, efforts are being made to lift the evacuation orders. Because they were forced to leave their places of residence, evacuees have claimed, “we lost oue furusato [hometown].” However, because they are able to return after evacuation orders are lifted, both TEPCO and the Japanese Government have insisted that “their furusato has not been lost” and “they cannot claim compensation for furusato damages.” In this paper, I call the irreversible and absolute damage caused by the nuclear power plant accident “the deprivation of furusato.” I look at furusato from three aspects: the relationship between people and nature, the connection between people, and notions of persistence and sustainability. Then, I discuss what kind of reconstruction is being promoted to respond to the deprivation of furusato and for whom.     

Truth-in-sentencing,law enforcement,and inmate population growth☆

This paper presents the empirical estimation of an econometric model of the flow of prisoners into a state correctional system. Specifically, an econometric model was built to control for the number of parolees, the probability of admission to the state system, the size of the state population, the unemployment and poverty rates, the number of law enforcement officers within the state, and the state-wide “truth-in-sentencing” law, which requires convicts to serve at least 85% of their sentences. One primary result was that increases in the number of law enforcement officers has generated a decline in the growth rate of the prison population. This suggests that a “deterrent effect” is created when more police are placed on the beat. Furthermore, the results indicate that the truth-in-sentencing law has also slowed the rate of inmate population growth. This finding may reflect the growing trend for courts to hand down nontraditional sentences and to adjust prison sentences to reflect a constant “real time” of incarceration by crime.     

Children of prisoners: exploring the impact of families' reappraisal of the role and status of the imprisoned parent on children's coping strategies

Qualitative data from a larger study on the impact of parental imprisonment in four countries found that children of prisoners face fundamentally similar psychological and social challenges. The ways that children cope, however, are influenced by the interpretative frame adopted by the adults around them, and by how issues of parental imprisonment are talked about in their families. This article argues that families have to reappraise their view of the imprisoned parent and then decide on their policy for how to deal with this publicly. Their approach may be based on openness and honesty or may emphasise privacy and secrecy, or a combination of these. Children are likely to be influenced by their parents'/carers' views, although these may cause conflict for them. Where parents/carers retain a positive view of the imprisoned parent, children are likely to benefit; where parents/carers feel issues of shame and stigma acutely, this is likely to be transmitted to their children. This is important for social workers and practitioners involved in supporting prisoners' families and for parenting programmes.     

Gender,Sex, and the Sexual

Laplanche distinguishes the sexual [le sexuel] and the sexuated [le sexué]. He goes on to ask whether the current tendency to speak of gender identity merely a lexical change or something more profound. If it is a change, is it positive or the sign of a repression? If the latter, where is the repression to be found? There follows an outline of how the triad, gender/sex/sexual, functions in the human being's early history. Four hypotheses serve as conclusion: (1) The precedence of gender over sex, which overturns the habits of thought that place the “biological” before the “social.” (2) The precedence of assignment over symbolization. (3) Primary identification, which, far from being a primary identification “with” (the adult) is a primary identification “by” (the adult). (4) The contingent, perceptual, illusory nature of the anatomical difference of sex, the true destiny of modern civilization.     

BAD REPUTATION UNDER BOUNDED AND FADING MEMORY

I relax the full memory assumption in Ely and Välimäki's (2003) mechanic game, where reputation is bad. Under bounded memory (only recent periods are observed), long memory still yields bad reputation due to an “echo” where bad signals cause future motorists to not hire, causing further lack of hiring, and so on. Short memory avoids bad reputation by making it “useless,” because consumers never learn enough information to change their decisions. No “happy middle” exists under bounded memory where consumers learn valuable information without tempting the mechanic into harmful signaling and thereby unraveling the market. By contrast, “fading memory” (past periods are randomly sampled with “fading” probabilities) achieves this happy middle by offering valuable information in a way that bounds the probabilities of these reputational echoes. Possible fading memory implementations (e.g., for review websites) are described and generalized to a broader class of games. (JEL C73, D8)