Overview

""Living in Prison"" offers an inmates' view of prison life, set against a backdrop of ""objective"" information, to understand how individual prisoners relate to and cope with their environment. Several salient inmate concerns emerged: privacy, safety, structure (stability of the environment), support (prison programmes), feedback (outside ties), activity and freedom. A ""prison preference inventory"" is presented to measure the relative importance of environmental concerns for individual prisoners. The conclusion drawn from this study is that organisations are more likely to achieve their objective if an attempt is made to match persons with relevant characteristics of particular surroundings. ""Living in Prison"" aims to make a major contribution to the fields of criminal justice and human ecology. It captures the flavour of inmate life and presents fully documented evidence that stress can be ameliorated through direct and practical intervention.

Full Product Details

9781557981769

Table of Contents

Reviews

Toch's sophisticated research design attempts to gauge the impact of prison environments on an inmate population randomly selected from five New York State penal institutions: Attica, Auburn, Coxsackie, Elmira, and Green Haven. Though prison is necessarily an unpleasant place, Toch (Psychology, School of Criminal Justice, SUNY, Albany) believes that conditions of incarceration may be less or more noxious and stressful depending on the degree of privacy, structure, safety, activity, freedom, and emotional feedback available to the men. The catch is that needs vary, so that a good place to do time for inmate A may be a hellhole for inmate B. Administering a questionnaire called the Prison Preference Inventory (which deliberately compares apples and pears: I'd prefer: guards who are consistent or housing that keeps out noise ), Toch finds that older inmates value structure, predictability, and privacy more highly than younger offenders whose paramount concerns are freedom and safety. (The young are most susceptible to prison violence and victimization.) Black inmates show a very high concern with freedom and care less about keeping occupied. Other subgroups - the married, those with a history of drug use, former mental patients - all have special criteria to make life bearable. Toch's object is achieving a fit or match between a man and his particular prison environment, thereby minimizing gratuitous suffering and, not infrequently, misguided reforms. Prisoners do this informally by creating niches wherein they feel comfortable; Toch would have it done explicitly and systematically. It's a modest proposal, one which in practice might not go much beyond administrative reshuffling, but to the extent that it proposes meeting individual needs, a progressive one. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available