NCJ Number
89067
Date Published
1982
Length
18 pages
Annotation
The demands imposed by prison overcrowding may be alleviated by a policy of resource enrichment coupled with increased opportunities for personal control, rather than by enlarging institutional capacities alone.
Abstract
Reformers and prison administrators have linked psychological deterioration not to crowding per se, but to the destructiveness of prison conditions as a whole. Research on prison density has documented correlations between density and misconduct, increased mortality rates for older inmates, psychiatric commitments, and recidivism. Inmates housed in dormitories versus one or two-person cells have shown higher blood pressures and more illness complaints. These studies, however, exhibit many inconsistencies reflecting methodological weaknesses arising from a failure to control for other factors which could affect their findings. Therefore, a more elaborate model of crowding is needed, such as that proposed by Epstein which accounts for the mediating effects of the group's orientation and an individual's sense of personal control. Theorists now see the deprivations of prison life as serving to intensify and heighten existing social structures among those confined. Crowding disrupts an individual's pattern of attaining needs. The primary consequence of prison crowding is the intensification of behavior patterns of dominance and submission that characterize inmate society. Crowding cannot be managed solely by building more prisons, but its consequences can also be ameliorated by increasing goods and services as well as meaningful employment and recreational activities and then allowing inmates to choose among these resources. The paper includes approximately 50 references.