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Ever since the 1960s and 70s the role of prisons within the social fabric has been questioned and deconstructed. Studies such as Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1991), G.M. Sykes’ Society of Captives: Study of a Maximum Security Prison (1992) and notions such as Irving Goffman’s ‘total institutions’ in his book Asylums (1971) have consistently asserted the importance of the prison in the psychosocial make-up of Western society.
For these authors, the prison represents more than merely a
place of incarceration or punishment, it goes to very heart of a
society’s relationship to the people that both transgress and uphold
the law; in Simulacra and Simulation (2004), for instance Jean
Baudrillard makes the observation that prison serves the function of a
mask to hide the real carceral nature of the socius (Baudrillard, 2004:
12) and, according to Foucault, prison is merely one of many
‘enunciative modalities’ (Foucault, 1989: 55) that shape the episteme
and create social Others.
Of course, what links many of these views is the connection between
the prison and the asylum, criminality and mental illness. Foucault’s
work on prisons came after his doctoral thesis Madness and Civilization
(2004) and Goffman’s study on institutions for the insane crosses over,
at various points to discuss prisons and their uses; in fact Goffman is
quite candid that, in his view at least, the prison and the insane
asylum share not only intrinsic qualities but intrinsic social
functions and his description of a total institution could easily be
used to describe the both:
“A total institution may be defined as a place of residence and work
where a large number of like-situated individuals, cut off from the
wider society, for an appreciable period of time, together lead an
enclosed, formally administered round of life.” (Goffman, 1971: 11)
It is little wonder, then, that more and more, as we shall see, the
prison psychologist is seen as an important practical and theoretical
quilting point between the two notions; criminality and the mind of the
criminal. This essay attempts to look at this dialogical topic
assessing the place of the prison psychologist today and what they can
tell us about, not only the offender and the whole notion of offending
but the prison and the practice of imprisonment itself.
In their 1963 work Pentonville: A Sociological Study of an English
Prison (1963), Barer, Morris and Morris describe the distinct lack of
any psychiatric or psychological professionals working within the
English penal system:
“The most striking feature of the medical services at Pentonville is
their concentration on physical illness and their almost total lack of
provision for mental illness. The prison has no psychiatrist, no
psychologist and makes no use of consultants in these disciplines.”
(Barer, Morris and Morris, 1963: 39)
This situation has changed tremendously since 1963. Today there are
twelve areas in England and Wales each with its own team of forensic
psychologists and assistants who are expected to provide services for
not only the prisoners in their area but for those on probation as well
. As Graham Towl and David Crighton suggest in their essay “Applied
Psychological Services in the National Probation Services for England
and Wales” (2005:1) this situation is not only likely to continue but
the amount of psychologists required will probably increase.
Due in part to the complex nature of the prison service, the role of
the prison psychologist extends far beyond the bounds of the mentally
ill. As we shall see, their role is as much concerned with the nature
of imprisonment and with its effect on those within it as with the
prisoners themselves.
One of the most famous examples of this, of course is the Stanford
Prison experiment carried out in 1973 by Haney, Banks and Zimbardo. In
this seminal piece of research a group of healthy, psychologically
sound male college students were observed, throughout the course of six
days, in a “prison-like environment” (Haney and Zimbardo, 1998). The
outcomes of the experiment, according to the experimenters themselves
were “shocking and unexpected” (Haney and Zimbardo, 1998: 1):
“Otherwise emotionally strong college students who were randomly
assigned to be mock-prisoners suffered acute psychological trauma and
breakdowns. Some of the students begged to be released from the intense
pains of less than a week of merely simulated imprisonment, whereas
others adapted by becoming blindly obedient to the unjust authority of
the guards.” (Haney and Zimbardo, 1998: 1)
Interestingly, the experiment was repeated almost thirty years later by
the BBC in a television program called The Experiment, that managed,
unlike Zimbardo’s original research to complete the projected course of
two weeks (BBC, 2002) .
The Stanford project was immediately seized on by the public, the media
and the Government and became, as George Miller asserted “an exemplar
of the way in which psychological research could and should be given
away to the public” (Haney and Zimbardo, 1998: 1) chiefly due to the
important lessons that it taught both society and the experimenters
about the institutions that from so much a part of our public fabric.
At its heart, the Zimbardo experiment dealt with the dynamics of prison
life, the ways in which prisoners act with each other and the guards.
It is not difficult to see how such research can aid us in our
knowledge of both the penal system and the wider society. A number of
psychological concepts arose from studies such as the Stanford
experiment that still shape the way prison psychologists view their
work today. Polarisation, for instance, referring to the internal
psychosocial dynamics of the prison has been used not only in the
carceral situation vis-à-vis the ways in which guards treat inmates but
also, as Claster (1992) points out in the wider society that polarizes
crime and criminals themselves, adding to the sense of division that
exists between the law and its transgressors .
Prisonisation, a term first used by Clemmer (1940) to describe the
psychological enculturation of prisoners, had a marked effect in the
Zimbardo project that noticed, among other things, the willingness of
the inmates to except their submissive roles in the experiment.
Prisonisation involves the induction of the individual into a world
that is governed by strange and unintelligible rules and regulations
and has been used ever since the 1950s as a method by which to
understand the differing reactions of prisoners to their environment
(Ohlin, 1956:38).
One of the most important concepts to arise out of the Stanford project
was that of deindividuation. Deindividuation refers to the lack of
self-awareness that arises out of being part of a group situation
(Wortley, 2002: 26). In the prison environment, deindividuation
manifests itself in the types of cruelty displayed by the guards in the
experiment but could equally be applied to the ways in which prisoners
form groups and gangs in order to obviate their individual
responsibility that is masked by the crowd as Wortely (2002) suggests:
“As a member of a crowd, an individual is afforded a degree of
anonymity and becomes less concerned with the opinions and possible
censure of others. At this level of deindividuation, people may be
aware of what they are doing but have a reduced expectation of
suffering any negative consequences.” (Wortley, 2002: 26)
The role of the prison psychologist then extends far beyond the bounds
of the mentally ill and can, in certain circumstances effect all manner
of different aspects of the penal system, from the architecture to the
everyday running. Concepts such as those that we have been looking
constitute not only a body of theoretical knowledge but tools with
which governments and other agencies can measure the efficacy of their
penal programs .
However we must ask how successful are prison psychologists, such
Zimbardo and Clemmer in applying psychological concepts and frameworks
to actual penal environments? The answer to this, I think lies in the
complexity of the prison experience. For example Lloyd E. Ohlin in his
study Sociology and the Field of Corrections (1956) gives an
enlightening critique of the early notions of prisonisation asserting
that any conclusions concerning the nature and extent of psychological
enculturation of a prisoner is, by its very nature open to all manner
of differing influences:
“Prisonization (sic) was…found to be related in some degree to the
length of the incarceration. The process proceeded very rapidly in some
cases and slowly or not at all in others (and) was intimately related
to the degree of participation in the informal social life of the
prison community” (Ohlin, 1956: 38)
This process is likely to be affected by not only the length of stay of
the prisoner but their background, the environment of the prison, their
relationship to the guards and an almost inexhaustible series of
variables that would render any empirical outcome difficult if not
impossible to assess.
We see this also with a notion such as deindividuation, especially as
it was observed by the psychologists in the Stanford project that
sought, after all, to recreate an environment that resembled, rather
than actually was, a prison. Sociological studies such as Sykes (1992)
and Barer, Morris and Morris (1963) have highlighted the extent that a
prison consists of a complex series of social and psychological layers,
each with its own members, traits and sense of community. By simply
recreating the simplistic binary of guard/prisoner could not prison
psychologists such as Zimbardo be seen as disregarding some of the
complex nature of prison society?
The notion that the power afforded prison guards engenders abuse was
one of the major conclusions of the Stanford project, however, as
Joycelyn Pollock suggests, again the reality seems to be much more
complex. Kercher and Martin (cited Pollock 1986: 4), for instance,
found that the attitudes prison guards had towards their prisoners
varied enormously from prison to prison and from guard to guard, being
more a reflection of where individual guards were in their career cycle
than any deeper psychological tendencies. This suggests again that
psychological research carried out on small subject groups do not
translate particularly well to the larger real institution.
I said in my introduction that it has become de rigueur for penal
theorists to view the prison as reflective of the wider society and,
perhaps, prison psychology is no exception. Commensurate with notions
of the postmodern dissolution of discipline boundaries, the
contemporary prison psychologist must, I think, be acutely aware of the
full influence of a huge range of factors on the lives of the people
they see everyday; from the architecture, to the subtle changes in
group dynamics, from alterations in theory to the changes in
socio-political ethos of the governing bodies. This is, perhaps, a
theoretical standpoint that is missing from canonical studies like
Zimbardo or Clemmer and that we only begin to see as theorists like
Foucault began to exert influence.
References
Barer, Barbara, Morris, Pauline and Morris, Terance (1963), Pentonville: A Sociological Study, (London: Routledge)
Baudrillard, Jean (2004), Simulacra and Simulation, (Ann Arbour: The University of Michigan)
BBC (2002), “Shocking Experiment Recreated for TV” published online at
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/tv_and_radio/1986889.stm
Blass, Thomas (2000), Obedience to Authority: Current Perspectives on the Milgram Program, (London: Lawrence Erlbaum)
Clemmer, Donald (1940), The Prison Community, (Boston: The Christopher Publishing House)
Crace, John (2002), “The Prison of TV”, published in The Guardian, May 14th 2002
Foucault, Michel (1991), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, (London: Penguin)
Foucault, Michel (2004), Madness and Civilization, (London: Routledge)
Foucault, Michel (1989), The Archaeology of Knowledge, (London: Routledge)
Goffman, Erving (1971), Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates, (London: Pelican)
Gross, Richard (2003), Themes, Issues and Debates in Psychology, (London: Hodder and Stoughton)
Haney, Craig and Zimbardo, Philip (1998), “The Past and Future of U.S.
Prison Policy: Twenty Five Years After the Stanford Prison Experiment,
published in American Psychologist, Vol. 53
Harre, R and Secord, P.F. (1976), The Explanation of Social Behaviour, (London: Blackwell)
Malim, Tony (1997), Social Psychology, (London: Macmillan)
Ohlin, Lloyd (1956), Sociology and the Field of Corrections, (London: Russell Sage Foundation)
Pollock, Joycelyn M. (1986), Sex and Supervision: Guarding Male and Female Inmates, (London: Greenwood Press)
Sykes, G. (1992), Society of Captives: Study of a Maximum Security Prison, (New Jersey: Princeton University)
Towl, Graham and Crighton, David (2005), “Applied Psychological
Services in the National Probation Service for England and Wales”,
published in Crighton, David and Towl, Graham (eds), Psychology in
Probation Services, (London: Blackwell)
Wettstein, Robert (1998), Treatment of Offenders with Mental Disorders, (London: The Guildford Press)
Wortley, Richard (2002), Situational Prison Control: Crime Prevention
in Correctional Institutions, (Cambridge: Cambridge University)
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