Institutional aggression in the context of prisons Flashcards
dispositional and situational explanations
Acts of aggression are more common in prisons than in the outside world, so the question is whether this is down to disposition (personality) or situational (environmental) explanations.
Dispositional explanations of aggression
Irwin and Cressey’s (1962) Importation Model suggests that prisoner’s social pasts and personal traits (i.e: alcohol or drug addiction and gang membership, low education levels) affect the way they behave in prison. They import their behaviour from the outside world into the prison.
When they arrive in prison the prisoners apply their old ways of behaving onto the new environment, therefore the same influences drive aggression both on the street and in prison.
Many of the prisoners are in prison for committing acts of violence on the street, showing that they are the kind of people capable of extreme violence
Gang membership can result in instrumental violence, that is premeditated violence for the purpose of settling scores, to achieve status, or to deter attacks via fear.
This aggressive behaviour due to dispositional factors may be reduced by effective drug rehabilitation, counselling, or educational programs.
Situational explanations of Aggression
Sykes (1958) which proposes that aggression results from a number of environmental deprivations.
1.Deprivation of liberty: Prisoners are deprived of their freedom; this is the main form of punishment when an individual is sent to prison. They have to remain in the prison environment with no freedom at all. Prisoners often have to obtain permission to eat/sleep, shower, etc. (Blomberg & Lucken, 2000).
2.Deprivation of autonomy: Prisoners have no power and very few choices; this leads to a feeling of helplessness among inmates. This can lead to frustration and aggression.
3.Deprivation of goods: In prison access to things that we take for granted such as smartphones are restricted or denied entirely. This brings about a frustrated sense of failure to most prisoners, leading to aggression (Sykes, 1958).
4.Deprivation of heterosexual relationships: Men may feel emasculated from the loss of heterosexual relationships; they feel less than a man. In addition, the greater opportunity for homosexual behaviour in prison may lead to anxieties for prisoners.
5.Deprivation of security: Prisoners may live in fear of aggression from other inmates, which leads to a heightened sense of physical threat. This feeling of perceived continual threat can result in an aggressive response as a form of defence.
• This deprivation causes stress and frustration which leads to an aggressive subculture. But this only applies to places with harsh conditions: E.g. in prison, army, refugee camp etc. Less likely to be a problem if the deprivation is for a good reason; Eg. fitness & diet camp.
Evaluation of both
There are practical applications in our understanding that the prison environment can lead to aggression. In 2005, Wilson set up two units in HMP Woodhill where the overcrowding was reduced, music was introduced to reduce noisy conditions and the temperature was carefully controlled. He found that initiating these conditions was a successful way to lower levels of aggression.
Camp & Gaes (2005) undertook a field experiment where they randomly allocated 561 male inmates to two different categories of prisons, low security and high security. The inmates had been matched on criminal history and predisposition to aggression. Camp and Gaes (2005) found that the individuals were just as likely to behave aggressively in the low security prison (33%) as in the high security prison (36%). This demonstrates that aggression in prisons is more likely to be a result of the individuals rather than the situation. Low security prisons should have afforded less stress to the inmates and there should have been a lower level of violence, implying that individual factors were affecting the inmate behaviour more than the environment.
Fischer (2001) Segregating gang members inside prison, so that they did not come into conflicts with other gangs, led to a 50% reduction in assaults.
