Penology, an applied field of sociology, is the theoretical study of prison policy, prison management, and the resulting prison culture. The sociological contributions to prison issues are applicable worldwide and offer practical solutions to problems relating to overcrowding, prison violence, and prison culture. While there is a rich European and American history of prison (e.g., Howard 1777; Beccaria 1819; Bentham 1843; Foucault 1977; Hirsh 1992), the focus here is on American prisons from the 1940s to the commencement of the twenty-first century. The following discussion begins with major sociological analyses of prison and concludes with changes in American prison policy over the past fifty years.
With a few exceptions (e.g., Goffman 1966), prison sociology has traditionally followed some variety of structural analysis. This theoretical perspective is concerned with a societal member’s values, attitudes, roles, activities, and relationships that are assumed to be significantly influenced by the organization and structure of the member’s environment. There are two broad types of this perspective that have been utilized in prison analysis; both focus on the structural components of prison and the members of that system. The first type, structural functionalism, focuses on how these components affect order in prison. The second type, conflict theory, focuses on how the structural components of prison and the larger society create conflict in prison.
THEORETICAL ANALYSIS
Structural Functionalism. Clemmer’s The Prison Community (1940) is an early form of structural functional analysis. Based on interviews with staff and inmates, Clemmer’s exploratory study is an ethnography of prison. This pioneering work set forth the argument that administrative policy (i.e., authoritative control over inmates, or the lack of control over inmates) influenced inmate subculture. This subculture included behavior, rules, and attitudes. Inmates could be unruly, and could prey on each other and staff if control was lacking.
This behavior would disrupt prison order and inmate adjustment to prison life. The prison administration would attempt to reestablish order by increasing control efforts, and inmates would counter these efforts through a process of ”prisonization.” ”Prisonization” was a socialization process through which seasoned inmates inducted new inmates into the inmate subculture. The content of this socialization for new inmates included the learning of negative attitudes toward work, government, family, and inmate groups other than their own. Inmate behavior would become resistant, obstructive, and subterfugal. Clemmer saw this ”prisonization” and the resultant inmate subculture as unfortunate and unintended consequences of the administrative controls. He believed the negativism and hostility perpetuated by the inmate subculture was disruptive to the inmates’ reform and was ”a stronger force for evil than the programs are for good” (Clemmer 1940, p. xiii).
Sykes’s The Society of Captives (1958) was a qualitative, exploratory, and ex post facto study that also applied a structural functional analysis. Attempting to determine the cause of a series of prison riots, Sykes studied institutional records and interviewed correctional officers, civilian work supervisors, and inmates. Sykes found the cause of the prison disequilibrium to be rooted in the prison structure and values that followed from a policy of control. He argued that management’s major task was to control the inmates, but the prison’s system of power was flawed with structural weaknesses that left administrators serious difficulties in imposing their control regime on the inmates. These structural weaknesses involved the inmates’ lack of a sense of duty to obey correctional officers, and the correctional officers’ lack of legitimate rewards and punishments, with which they could encourage inmate submission.
Power based on authority, Sykes claimed, has two essential elements: the legitimacy of control efforts and a sense of duty to obey by those who are controlled (1958, pp. 46-47). He found the latter to be present down to the correctional officer level at the New Jersey State Prison, which operated under a traditional organizational hierarchy. The sense of duty to obey disappeared, however, when the control efforts were applied to inmates. The correctional officers had to make deals (i.e., giving correctional officer duties to trusted inmates in exchange for their help in preventing trouble) and compromises (i.e., overlooking rule violations) with inmates to achieve compliance and order. Sykes argues that correctional officer corruption (i.e., reciprocity) could not be eliminated by replacing the correctional officers. New correctional officers were aggressively pressured by the inmates (i.e., threats of riots, blackmailing staff) until they, too, compromised the rules and regulations.
The problem was a weakness of the prison system. ”The effort of the custodians to ‘tighten up’ the prison undermines the cohesive forces at work in the inmate population and it is these forces which play a critical part in keeping the society of the prison on an even keel” (Sykes 1958, p. 124). The cohesive forces are the less violent and more stable inmates who are given illicit privileges in exchange for their help in encouraging inmate cohesiveness and prison equilibrium. If the prison officials strip these inmates of their power (tighten up), the more violent and less stable inmates rise to power.
In addition to providing the structural functional analysis described above, Sykes argued that the result of imprisonment on inmate values, attitudes, and behaviors is a product of the patterns of interaction the inmate experiences on a daily basis (1958, p. 134). For example, inmates feel helpless and frustrated when staff refuse to explain bureaucratic decisions. Sykes described the hardships of imprisonment (i.e., rejection, degradation, deprivation, alienation, and lack of safety) felt by the inmates, and he acknowledged that ”Somehow the imprisoned criminal must find a device for rejecting his rejectors, if he is to endure psychologically” (1958, p. 67). Sykes also depicted the correctional officers’ work environment as dangerous and tense. He reported that the correctional officers were heavily outnumbered in a potentially violent setting, and were often frustrated by the administrative pressure to maintain order while they lacked unconditional compliance from the inmates.
The Prison: Studies in Institutional Organization and Change by Cressey (1961) and Theoretical Studies in Social Organization of the Prison, by Cloward and colleagues (1960) were also structural functional analyses. Both studies depicted prisons as authoritarian systems governed by bureaucratic hierarchy and empowered to control inmates. They described how the control policy in prison affects the power structure which, in turn, influences communication and values (i.e., staff pursuit of power over inmates, inmate restraint from talking to staff). Cressey (1961) found that two different prison policies, one emphasizing custody and the other treatment, had different hierarchies with contradictory purposes. The two hierarchies, with different models of decision making, one authoritative and the other participatory, had to increase their efforts to communicate with each other to facilitate the security desired by the custody branch and the programming desired by the treatment branch. It was also reported in the Cressey study (1961) that inmates and staff can work together effectively when the role expectations of their respective groups are not involved. Effective communication deteriorates when inmates and staff allow their respective group pressures to interfere with their relationships (1961, pp. 229-259).
Webb and Morris’s Prison Guards (1978) focused on the organization of prison structure, which Clemmer (1940) had felt contributed to the maintenance of prison order (or disorder) and determined the inmates’ prison experience. They focused on the correctional officers’ subculture, and concluded that the officers saw maintaining security as their main function. While discipline was expressed as the means for carrying out the policy, poor prison facilities and inexperienced administrators were seen as barriers to prison order and safety.
Webb and Morris (1978) reported that the officers’ major complaints about administrators were lack of communication and failure to consult the officers when decisions had to be made. This suggests that those making the decisions were distrustful of the officers’ ability to participate in decision making, and preferred to monopolize power at the top. It also means that information that the officers would know best (i.e., security issues relating to certain inmates) was not being considered by those making the decisions. The correctional officers saw their safety compromised. The frustration caused by this poor communication process led to correctional officers being openly critical of the administration, and to their finding ways of undermining the administration’s authority (i.e., doing no more than they were told).
Webb and Morris (1978) described how the officers developed their own protective society. The veteran correctional officers pressured the new to become ”hardened” and ”con-wise,” and if, after six months to a year, the officers were not seen as ”con-wise,” then they were given the derogatory label ”pro inmate.” This pressure to be estranged and nonsympathetic in their attitudes toward inmates was the correctional officers’ way of protecting themselves from ”getting conned” or ”being burned” by the inmates.
Kauffman’s Prison Officers and Their World (1988) was another structural functional analysis of the correctional officer subculture. Correctional officers had been blamed by the central administration for the riots and inmate violence that had plagued the Massachusetts prison system in the 1970s. Based on interviews with sixty correctional officers, Kauffman describes the rite of passage that many new correctional officers went through: how the recruits were assigned the high-inmate-contact positions in cellblocks, abandoned by the administration and veteran officers, and aggressively tested by the inmates. The general result of this treatment was an emotional hardening toward the inmates, and the acceptance of violence by staff as a means of controlling inmates. Kauffman concludes that the power veteran officers had over staff recruits was an unintended consequence of the lack of a clear administrative policy for bringing order to the prison system. She found that the administration was determined to find someone to blame for the rite of passage many recruits went through, rather than adopting a policy ”to counter the continuing legacy of chaos and violence” (1988, p. 199).
The influence of prison policy on the structure, process, behavior, and attitudes in the prison (a focus typical of both structural perspectives) is also represented in Dilulio’s Governing Prisons (1987). He shows how prison management problems have been addressed in Texas, California, and Michigan through the development and use of different management policies. He refers to the Texas policy as one of ”control,” where authority is centralized and where the use of administratively controlled inmates to control other inmates (”building tendering”) prevailed until the decision in Ruiz v. Estelle (1980) ruled the system illegal. DiIulio claims that California has a ”consensus” policy, in which each warden works to get inmate ”consensus” on classification systems, there are elaborate in-service training programs for correctional officers, and there are community-related educational/vocational programs for inmates. Dilulio (1987) found that Michigan has a third alternative, which emphasizes a bureaucratic system of measuring and dispensing different levels of inmate ”responsibility” and accountability. DiIulio found the quality of life for inmates inside the Michigan prisons better than what he had found in other state prisons. Staff had a difficult time accepting the responsibility model, however.
Conflict Theory. The second theoretical strand of prison sociology, conflict theory, saw tight controls on inmates as unjust and called for the sharing of power with them. Wright’s The Politics of Punishment (1973) is the first of three works representing this second branch of structural analysis that will be reviewed here. Wright is more critical of prison operations than the structural functionalists. He thought rehabilitation was manipulative in the way that it attempted ”to coerce the prisoner to conform to established authority” (1973, p. 325), and then use this conformity as the basic criterion for parole. Wright believed inmates were almost totally helpless to protect themselves against the dehumanization of ”liberal” totalitarian rule he found in most prisons.
The prison administration’s focus on rehabilitation was an individualistic solution that avoided and disguised the real causes of criminality. Wright claimed that it was the structural flaws in the capitalist system (i.e., unemployment and the lack of opportunities outside the prison), not individual failings, that were the problem. Wright believed that crime could be reduced, and prisons reformed, by moving the American capitalist society toward socialism. Within this context, prisons could be decentralized and not controlled by a ”self-perpetuating, unrestrained bureaucracy” (1973, p. 342). The administration of punishment could be placed under public surveillance. The prison under this system would ”serve the interests of the people rather than of the elite” (1973, p. 337). Wright suggests that prison management has typically held to the position that prison order can be obtained only with traditional control strategies (i.e., correctional officer power over inmates), and that the effect of these strategies has been oppressive and inhumane prison conditions.
Hawkins’s The Prison: Policy and Practice (1976) is another critical analysis of prisons and prison management. Although Hawkins’s prison experience was gained in the United Kingdom, his message was relevant to American prison practitioners and researchers. Among his claims was that correctional officers had only been superficially studied by the functional branch of sociologists, who presented them as stereotypes acting out assigned roles (1976, p. 81). Hawkins saw the correctional officers in a situation of role conflict (security versus treatment) that was due to the absence of clearjob descriptions and training. The results of this conflict for the correctional officers were negative attitudes toward the administration and obstructive behavior. These results, along with the conflicting goals of imprisonment (punishment versus rehabilitation), were seen by Hawkins as impediments to prison reform. Hawkins also urged that prison evaluations should be more than just ”eulogistic and imprecise descriptions of success stories” (1976, p. 178).
In his assessment of the Attica prison in New York, Hawkins also found that the relationship between correctional officers and inmates was a crucial factor in the 1971 riot. The problem was mostly structural. The officers were assigned to large blocks of inmates, rather than to small units where they could have established rapport with the inmates. In the large units the officers worked with different inmates each day, thus reducing the opportunities and motivations for staff and inmates to development mutual respect and understanding. The structural problem went further, however. Hawkins, citing a New York State Special Commission’s report on Attica, reported that there were unnecessary priorities in the correctional officer recruitment policies (i.e., age, physical size, and strength were more important than skills in persuasion, leadership, and interpersonal relations).
Irwin’s Prisons in Turmoil (1980) also represents this ”conflict” branch of sociological theorizing. Irwin, an ex-felon and past leader in the prison reform movement of the 1970s, shows how American penal policy has followed changes in the economic and political conditions in the United States.
His thinking ran against the usual functionalist sociology, which explained prison policy and activity largely in terms of internal events. Irwin believed that sociologists (e.g., Clemmer 1940; Sykes 1958) who studied prison cultures were blinded by their focus on prison structure, and therefore failed to recognize the fact that when inmates enter prison, they bring their outside values with them. He also believed that if prisons are to be safe and free from malicious authoritarianism, staff and inmates should have more formal input into policy and grievance decisions.
These sociological analyses of prison were written in different phases of the development of penal policy. It is very difficult to determine whether the literature influenced the policy, or vice versa. Most likely, they shaped each other. The point of the following brief history of the development of American penal policy over the past fifty years is not to make the causal argument, but to help the reader get a sense of the changing ideologies leading to the current management model.
CHANGES IN AMERICAN PENAL POLICY
Retribution to Rehabilitation. Prisons in the United States have traditionally been centralized hierarchical organizations with authoritarian and coercive management. Policies and procedures have been formulated at the central administrative offices and passed down in military fashion to prison administrations for implementation. This is assuredly true of the management style that administered the penal philosophies of the 1950s. The decade began with a ”Big House” warehousing of inmates that implemented a classical penal philosophy embracing retribution, ”care,” and the notion that punishment should fit the crime. The decade ended with a changed perspective on crime and punishment, emphasizing that punishment should fit the individual and the inmate should be rehabilitated. By 1958, a noncustodial treatment branch of prison management shared an uneasy coexistence with the custody branch. Three types of treatment programs (psychological, educational, and economic) were centrally administered under the rubric of the rehabilitative ideal (Irwin 1980). The idea was to treat the individual problem that ”caused” the individual to commit the crime. By the end of this decade, most prison administrators had implemented this rehabilitative model without any interference from federal and state governments.
Rehabilitation to Reintegration. The early 1960s saw variations of the rehabilitative or treatment model of the late 1950s sharing an uneasy coexistence with an authoritative management style that had traditionally maintained order and control in large prison bureaucracies. Public and prison administrative acceptance of the ”rehabilitative ideal” as a penal policy was partly rooted in its advocates’ view that the new scientifically based treatment model could provide a remedy for crime.
By the middle 1960s, the call for community involvement in rehabilitation was signaled in a report by the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice. Advocating a shift to a policy of reintegration, the report advised that rehabilitation might be best done outside prison, and that community programs should be designed that could change both the inmate and society (U.S. President’s Commission 1967, pp. 27-37). It took a few years to catch on, but in the late 1960s a number of community alternatives to prison were developed and heavily underwritten by federal revenues.
Reintegration to Retribution. This reintegration policy continued into the 1970s. Prison administrators were pressed to design reentry programs such as work and educational release, and home furloughs. But public support waned in the mid-1970s, when the ”get-tough-with-criminals” and antirehabilitative mood became dominant. The second theoretical strand of prison sociology, conflict structuralism, began around this time. This orientation was influenced by the 1960s societal reaction and critical theories that denounced the 1950s conservative structural functionalism. Riots and litigation forced federal courts to scrutinize the repressive management of correctional facilities and community-based treatment programs to ensure compliance with the Eighth Amendment right to protection from cruel and unusual punishment.
If prisons were being unfair in their partiality toward manipulative rehabilitation (e.g., Wright 1973; Hawkins 1976: the liberal critique), then retribution ought to replace it as a penal goal. The mid- to late 1970s saw a readoption of the early classical policy—”let the punishment fit the crime”— rather than the rehabilitative or positivist policy of ”letting the punishment fit the criminal.” A different argument was that rehabilitation rarely worked (e.g., Martinson 1974: the conservative critique). Prison technologies had not successfully rehabilitated inmates despite prison administrators’ repeated claims of success. The Martinson survey (1974) of 231 treatment reports in New York concluded that treatment had not worked. The publication of this survey ended any lingering hope for serious rehabilitative programming.
The ”new” word in penal policy was ”retribution.” Though it had been criticized by many social scientists and judges since the early 1900s, in 1972 the U.S. Supreme Court offered retribution as an appropriate reason for capital punishment (Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238, 1972). The neoclassical doctrine generally implies deterrence as a function of punishment. Wilson and Herrstein (1985) are among those who take this position. There are others, however, who argue that retribution is the main function, and that there does not have to be any further utilitarian purpose such as deterrence. The argument these penologists make for retribution is that inmates are incarcerated because they deserve to be, not because they should be treated and not because their punishment should serve as a deterrent. Many penologists credit the retributive model with encouraging prison management to create an environment where inmates can serve their time safely and productively, rather than a harsh environment designed to deter crime. The deprivation of freedom was a harsh enough punishment: Prisons did not have to be punishing beyond that.
As the 1980s commenced, national policy emphasized broad reductions in domestic welfare programs. The criminal justice system warmed to the reacceptance of the classical notion that punishment should fit the crime rather than the criminal. The widespread adoption of determinate sentencing continued throughout the 1980s and 1990s, as it became increasingly difficult for social theorists to agree on definitive causes of crime. By 1999, most states had determinate sentencing, action supportive of the classical model. This, along with the conservative ”get even tougher” response to violent crimes and drug offenses, was why the U.S. prison population more than tripled from 1980 to 1998. With 1,277,866 inmates in state and federal prisons (U.S. Department of Justice 1999), the United States ranks with Russia as having the highest-known incarceration rates of any industrialized nation in the world.
The Penal Debate. One contemporary justification for prison is its crime deterrence function, for which there is considerable public support. Many sociologists take the neoclassical position that an appropriate and updated crime control policy should include an increase in the swiftness and certainty of punishment for street offenders, and that control efforts should focus on both the before-sentencing work of police and prosecution, and the after-sentencing work of corrections. The deterrence advocates’ penal policy is based on the theory of criminality that proposes that the frequency of an individual’s criminal behavior is a matter of the individual’s choice, and a consequence of that behavior’s reinforcement or punishment in the past. The individual’s choice is based on the expectation of subsequent reward or punishment.
Despite the general public’s belief that prison is a deterrent to crime, there is considerable research evidence to the contrary, leaning some sociologists against deterrence. They argue that crimes of passion are less apt to be deterred by prison sentences than crimes committed for monetary gain. The threat of prison is less likely to deter someone of lower socioeconomic status, who has less ”good life” and status to lose, than someone of wealth and higher status. Additionally, the courts are so overcrowded that the possibility of swift and certain punishment is diminished.
Entering the twenty-first century, the prevailing model of sentencing is still grounded in the neoclassical deterrence ideology. When it comes to the serving of the sentence, however, the neoclassical retributive, nondeterrence doctrine prevails. This retribution policy requires a correctional system that does not abuse individual treatment, but instead makes rehabilitation programs voluntary, restricts autonomy of movement, specifies the length of sentence in advance (determinate), and implements it in a fair and safe environment. Since about 1973, prison administrators have addressed these fairness and safety issues, specified in the retribution policy, by attempting to minimize the potential violence associated with overcrowding, gang membership, and racism. They have tried to do this by separating the inmate populations into small functional housing units (Levinson and Gerard 1973) that are supervised by a decentralized ”unit management” team. Current research (i.e., Farmer 1994) has shown that, if implemented properly, this method of managing inmates can facilitate increased communication, safer conditions, a more satisfying work environment for staff, and more personal programming for inmates.
Sociologists and penologists generally expect the twenty-first-century prison situation to continue its current trends. Incarceration rates will continue to climb as sentences become longer, and as good-time awards and parole options decrease. Acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) and racism in prison will be more closely watched and more rigorously dealt with. Inmates will become more violent as confinement, with less programming, becomes more Spartan and harsher. Gang membership in prison will increase, along with management efforts to combat the membership. Prison ”privatization” in areas of prison construction and management, inmate work, and services (i.e., food, health, counseling, education) will become a more widely accepted solution to increasing prison costs and decreasing prison budgets.
