Summary
Contents
With recent sentencing law changes at the state and national level, the United States will continue to use long-term confinement more than any other nation in the world. In this authoritative yet accessible volume, scholars, correctional authorities, researchers, and prisoners examine the use of long-term incarceration as a response to crime, the effects of long-term incarceration, and the strategies used by long-term inmates to adjust to confinement. Long-Term Imprisonment explores the prison experience of both male and female inmates and discusses the correctional management challenges posed by long-term incarceration. The core of this collection, edited by Timothy Flanagan, is a set of articles first published in The Prison Journal, the official journal of the Pennsylvania Prison Society and the oldest journal in the field of corrections. These articles are complemented with research reports on the effects of long-term confinement, a comprehensive analysis of long-term inmates currently confined in American and Canadian prisons, and essays written by long-term prisoners. If you are interested in the use and operation of prisons, and in the impact of these institutions on the people confined within them, this book is for you. In addition to students studying imprisonment, the book informs correctional administrators and policymakers about the nature of long-term inmate population and the impact of long-term imprisonment. “Timothy Flanagan began studying the effects of long-term incarceration over two decades ago when he conducted one of the first major studies of prisoners serving long sentences. Since then, many changes have occurred in corrections and sentences practices that have greatly increased sentence lengths and the number of prisoners serving long sentences. The collection of the essays contained in Long-Term Imprisonment represents the most comprehensive, up-to-date, and definitive review of literature regarding the effects of long-term incarceration on prisoners. Flanagan provides readers with a variety of perspectives of long-term imprisonment by including articles written by prison researchers, corrections officials, and long-term prisoners. This book is must reading for anyone interested in life in prisons and the unique world of the long-term prisoner.” --Kevin N. Wright, Binghamton University
Preface
This volume originated nearly two decades ago in a graduate seminar titled “Incarceration,” in the School of Criminal Justice at the State University of New York at Albany. The late Professor Donald J. Newman wanted students to examine real-world correctional issues of importance to prison administrators. He invited Arthur Leonardo, then director of special housing units in the New York State Department of Correctional Services, to discuss contemporary prison management issues. Leonardo observed that one of the most difficult challenges facing correctional administrators (in 1975) was designing correctional environments and programs for long-term prisoners. He argued that laws, rules, and historical correctional practices tie a long sentence to the need for high security, so options available to prison administrators in managing long-term prisoners were very limited. Moreover, he noted that American prisons don't have much to offer an inmate facing a long sentence anyway, except for a seemingly endless series of short-term training, therapy, and educational programs.
I wish I could report that the situation is different today, because Arthur Leonardo now runs a prison for long-term inmates, and state and federal institutions now house many times more long-termers than they did 20 years ago. But today, as then, when an inmate reaches the sally port with a sentence of 36 months, we prescribe a set of experiences with discrete learning objectives directed toward measurable improvement in skills and knowledge by the time of release. When an inmate arrives who is facing 36years, however, our muddled response reveals that, except for selected work assignments and a few educational programs, we have little insight into planning institutional careers for long-term prisoners.
Newman contended that the wave of interest in determinate sentencing during the mid to late-1970s would have predictable outcomes. The “sentencing reforms” of the period, he argued, would result in more offenders sentenced to prison, longer prison terms, and fewer options and relief valves for prison administrators to deal with the inmate population. The wholesale questioning of the effectiveness of correctional programs, exemplified by the catch phrase “nothing works,” together with the ascendancy of incapacitation as the primary goal of American corrections, put research and program development in institutional corrections on virtual hold for more than a decade. As a result, prison administrators today struggle with the fusion of several trends—they have many more prisoners to manage; many more prisoners will spend most of their adult lives in prison; and resources to investigate, design, and deliver meaningful, constructive prison regimes for long-termers are scarce.
For some, this is not an important issue, because many believe that “humane containment” is the best that corrections can offer. In today's political climate, talk of designing “meaningful, constructive” prison careers is unlikely to garner passionate support. Instead, the “principle of least eligibility” is invoked to justify the denial of virtually all positive experiences for the incarcerated. Education programs, television reception, physical fitness equipment, and even work opportunities in prisons are questioned. Withholding these elements of prison life is thought to “send a message” to lawbreakers that society will not coddle those who would victimize us. This cold-storage model ignores the facts that 95% of the incarcerated will eventually return to the community and that involving prisoners in constructive behavior while confined may increase opportunities to lead crime-free lives upon release. Responding to the criticism that such beliefs are soft on crime, Norval Morris wrote two decades ago,
If we select certain prisoners to bear the brunt of heavier sentences … surely we have a moral obligation at least to allow those serving extended terms an opportunity to make some constructive use of the time we have demanded of them. And unless we intend to lock them away forever, our reasons for attempting to rehabilitate these prisoners are not only moral but eminently practical. (1974, pp. 87–88)
The aims of this volume are to strip away some of the conventional wisdom and mythology surrounding long-term imprisonment and to present some of the best social science research on the topic in recent years. The essays included here share common purposes: to further understanding of the impact of long-term imprisonment on prisoners and prison systems and to offer insights and recommendations for better management of these inmates.
This book does not stake out an ideological position on long-term imprisonment. It does not ask whether it is “immoral” to impose long prison sentences on convicted offenders. Such questions are important, but they beg the question in America in the 1990s. The sentencing policy choices being constructed in Washington and state capitals in the mid-1990s are not “should we use long-term imprisonment, or should we rely on shorter sentences as a response to crime?” Instead, long-term imprisonment (especially life without parole) is being considered as a policy alternative to capital punishment. One can rail against the “tough on crime” ideology, but its pervasive influence in America today makes it very unlikely that the movement toward longer prison terms will soon reverse. Accordingly, it is incumbent on all concerned with administering (or paying for) humane and effective prisons to understand the phenomena of long-term confinement. Students who wish to understand the operation and impact of prisons can learn a great deal by focusing on long-term imprisonment. Indeed, if we discover ways to make prisons less destructive and more effective for those who spend decades within them, we will obtain invaluable wisdom about correctional practice and programs for all offenders.
Organization of the Book
Part One, Perspectives on Long-Term Imprisonment, sets the stage for the rest of the book. In the first two chapters, I attempt to outline the primary issues and questions surrounding long-term imprisonment, and I present statistical portraits of the long-term offender population in the United States. The issues to be examined in later chapters include the definition of long-term confinement, the characteristics of long-termers, and modes of adaptation and adjustment to long-term confinement. Finally, the primary correctional policy, practice, and programmatic issues in management of long-term inmates are introduced. The characteristics of long-term inmates in U.S. state correctional facilities from 1974 to 1994 are examined in Chapter 2. Weekes's essay provides a similar overview for the Canadian correctional system.
In Part Two, Long-Term Prisoners on Long-Term Imprisonment, three essays by long-term prisoners frame the issue in highly personal terms. Wikberg and Foster discuss long-term inmates in the Louisiana prison system and ask why some offenders are held so much longer than others. Santos, a federal prisoner serving a long sentence for drug law violations, explores the early phase of long-term confinement in his essay, “Facing Long-Term Imprisonment.” Kummerlowe's essay on adaptation strategies is reprinted from a report commissioned by the National Institute of Corrections.
In Part Three, researchers tackle the important controversy surrounding the effects of long-term confinement. As these chapters show, the time-worn notion depicted in movies and fiction of the zombie-like “old con” masks tremendous variation in response to long-term imprisonment. The challenges to physical and mental health that imprisonment imposes are real, but these essays show that their effects are neither ubiquitous nor easily predicted.
Part Four, Adaptation and Survival Among Long-Term Inmates, explores the coping and time management strategies used by long-term prisoners to adjust and cope with the prison experience. Much of this research indicates that the coping problems faced by long-term inmates are perceived to be different from those faced by short-term inmates. The attitu-dinal and behavioral adaptations utilized by long-term prisoners serve important functions of time bounding, maintenance of relationships, and development of a form of detente with correctional staff members. Zamble examines these strategies in a longitudinal study among Canadian prisoners. Genders and Player, and MacKenzie, Robinson, and Campbell show that coping and adjustment are particularly challenging for women long-term inmates. Fishman's study of wives of prisoners illustrates that inmates do not do time alone; instead, spouses and other family members also face problems of role definition, loneliness, poverty, and stigmatization.
The chapters in Part Five, Correctional Responses and the Management of Long-Term Prisoners, argue that correctional personnel must be aware of and responsive to the stresses and coping problems of long-term prisoners and should be active in developing appropriate responses. Toch's extensive research into person-environment matches in prisons leads him to conclude that contemporary prisons can be very difficult settings in which to serve a long prison term. He suggests that effective classification systems can help to diminish mismatches between personal needs and environmental characteristics. In Chapter 18, leading correctional practitioners describe the management dilemmas posed by long-term inmates and discuss the health care, labor, education, and other institutional systems needed to manage long-termer populations. Mitchell's chapter, “Management of Life Sentence Prisoners in England and Wales,” describes a comprehensive systemwide strategy to develop and implement career plans for inmates serving long terms. Mitchell's study shows that prison staff play a crucial role in carrying out the sentence planning model.
Bottoms, Hay, and Sparks consider the issue of prevention of violence and disorder in long-term prisons. They argue that importation of well-developed community crime prevention techniques into the prison can help to minimize disorder. More important, they argue that treating prisoners as autonomous persons, with fairness and predictability in interactions with staff, also contributes to order maintenance. The pair of chapters by Cowles and Sabath tells the story of a grounded effort to identify the program needs of long-term inmates and to develop and implement programs within the Missouri Department of Corrections that were responsive to long-termers' needs. Their work shows that imaginative thinking and inmate participation can be part of effective correctional program development.
Palmer's description of the LifeServers program within a Canadian prison provides a comprehensive overview of a successful, mul-tifaceted program for lifers and long-term prisoners. In the final chapter of this section, I describe the components of comprehensive sentence planning for long-term prisoners. This perspective forces correctional officials to recognize that planning a career in confinement for an inmate who will spend many years inside is very different from program assignments for short-term “tourists.”
The final section of the volume, Afterwords, includes two essays on correctional policy and long-term imprisonment. Toch's essay, “The Long-Term Inmate as a Long-Term Problem,” discusses the role of staff, environmental attributes, programming, and career planning in developing meaningful institutional careers for long-term prisoners. He reminds us that long-termers are seldom the “squeaky wheels” of the prison, so it is possible to run prisons in which inmates “gradually waste away.” In the final chapter, I discuss the components of a correctional policy model for long-term imprisonment. The policy assumes that imprisonment per se is the primary punishment for lawbreakers, so the cardinal objective of correctional practice with long-termers should be to minimize the deleterious “secondary” punishments of prisons. Again, the objective of these chapters is to provoke critical thinking on the part of correctional professionals, students, and interested citizens about ways to organize prisons for long-termers that (a) provide opportunities for growth, maturity, and constructive involvement during confinement and (b) maximize the odds of successful reintegration into society upon release. The alternative “cold-storage” model may seem less expensive, and it may satisfy our desire to use prisons as punishment as well as for punishment, but it ignores the reality that nearly all long-term prisoners will eventually be released. It is in our interest to reduce offenders' social toxicity during confinement.
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