America moved abruptly in the 1970s from a society that justified incarceration in the belief that it would facilitate productive re-entry into the free-world to one that used imprisonment to inflict pain (“just deserts”), disable criminal offenders (“incapacitation”), or to keep them away from society (“containment”).
Adaptation to modern prison life exacts psychological costs to most prisoners. Adaptation to imprisonment is usually difficult and, at times, creates habits of thinking and acting that can be dysfunctional in periods of post-prison adjustment.
Subtle psychological changes occur in the course of adapting to prison life. The term “institutionalization” is used to describe the process by which inmates are shaped and transformed by the institutional environments in which they live.
In the first decade of the 21st century, more and more people have been subjected to the pains of imprisonment for longer periods. Their conditions threaten greater psychological distress and long-term dysfunction before they return to communities that have already been disadvantaged by lack of social services and resources.
Prisoners typically are denied basic privacy rights and lose control over mundane aspects of their existence that most citizens take for granted.
They live in small, sometimes extremely cramped and deteriorating spaces (a 60 square foot cell is roughly the size of a king-sized bed), have little or no control over the identity of the person with whom they must share that space (and the intimate contact it requires), often have no choice over when they must get up or go to bed or when or what they may eat. Prisoners may come to think of themselves as “the kind of person” who deserves only the degradation and stigma to which they have been subjected while incarcerated.
Prisoners develop a “prison mask” that is unrevealing and impenetrable. This causes a type of alienation from themselves and others. They may develop emotional flatness that becomes chronic and debilitating in social interaction and relationships. They find that they have created a permanent and unbridgeable distance between themselves and the rest of society.
It is important to emphasize that these are the natural and normal adaptations made by prisoners in response to the unnatural and abnormal conditions of prison life.
Some prisoners learn to find safety in social invisibility, by becoming as inconspicuous and unobtrusively disconnected from others as possible. In extreme cases, especially when combined with prisoner apathy and loss of the capacity to initiate behavior on one’s own, the pattern closely resembles that of clinical depression. Long-term prisoners are particularly vulnerable to this form of psychological adaptation.
In many institutions, the lack of meaningful programming has deprived them of pro-social or positive activities in which to engage while incarcerated. For some prisoners, incarceration is so stark and psychologically painful that it represents a form of traumatic stress severe enough to produce post-traumatic stress reactions once released.
Mental illness and developmental disability represent the largest number of disabilities among prisoners. According to a study by Craig Haney of UC Santa Cruz, as many of 20 percent of the current prisoner population nationally suffers from either a significant mental or psychological disorder or developmental disability. Yet both groups are too often left to their own devices to survive in prison and then to be discharged without having had any of their needs addressed.
Supermax facilities are institutions where prisoners are kept under conditions of unprecedented social deprivation for unprecedented lengths of time. This kind of confinement creates its own set of psychological pressures that, in some instances, uniquely disable prisoners for free-world reintegration.
Human Rights Watch has suggested that there are approximately 20,000 prisoners confined to supermax units in the United States. Most experts agree that the number of such units is increasing. Many prisoners who have been confined in these supermax units for considerable periods are released directly into the community.
Over the next decade, the impact of unprecedented levels of incarceration will be felt in communities that will be expected to receive massive numbers of ex-prisoners. They will complete their sentences and return to communities ill prepared to absorb the high level of psychological trauma and disorder that many will bring with them.
