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
The Long-Term Inmate as a Long-Term Problem
The Long-Term Inmate as a Long-Term Problem
Prisons are comparable to other large, complex institutional environments in that they contain stressful features, which affect some people (inmates, students, patients, or workers) more or less than they do others. In fact, just as patients have to be thrown out of hospitals and some of us never leave school, so some inmates are comfortably prisonized. And whereas institutional assimilation may leave an inmate a healthy person, it may also make him or her less competent in the short run. At minimum, prison adaptation makes the average prisonized inmate somewhat different from the way he acts on the street- meaning he looks more socialized or healthy in some ways and less so ...