Prisonization and its Consequences: An Examination of Socialization in a Coercive Setting

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to outline and assess the utility of a model capable of accounting for several consequences of confinement. Toward that end an attempt is made to integrate several variables emphasized by the two basic paradigms which have been advanced to account for patterns of assimilation into the inmate society, the “deprivation model” and the “importation model,” into a model that draws heavily on the logic of Etzioni's compliance theory.

The findings, which are based on an analysis of data obtained from a sample of 276 inmates confined in a maximum security penitentiary, provide substantial support for the theoretical expectations. Specifically, two measures of assimilation into the inmate society, degree of prisonization and type of social role adaptation, are shown to be related to several indicators of preprison experience, prison-specific influences, and the quality of post-release expectations. These two assimilation variables, in turn, are shown to be strongly associated with variables which imply that coercive organizations of the type represented by prisons are most unlikely to attain any rehabilitative goals. To the contrary, they seem far more likely to stimulate changes that are predictive of postrelease reinvolvement in criminality.