Crime psych-6- effects of imprisonment

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  • Created by: livvvx
  • Created on: 10-04-19 17:33

Effects of imprisonment (social)

The dispositional hypothesis (DH) proposes both prisoners and guards have certain personalities making conflict inevitable. It assumes prisoners lack respect for law and order and guards are domineering personalities who use physical force to control agg inmates.

Those who become guards are people attracted to the job because of a desire for power. DH therefore assumes both prisoners and guards are inevitably 'evil' and it is this innate disposition which causes the violence and dehumanisation which exists in prisons. However, this is a simplistic view that fails to take into account the impact of social, economic and political factors (sit e.g. over-crowding or env conditions )

Whilst prisons have imporved over the years, the social institution of prison has continued to fail. Prisons neither 'rehabilitate' nor actb as a deterrent to future crime. The 1994 recidivism study estimated that within three years 51.8% of prisoners released during the year were back in prison either because of a new crime for which they received another prison sentence or because of technical violation of their parole. Prisons also fail on humanitarian grounds. The media frequently reports accounts of atrocities committed in them often with an expl based on the DH. 

In order to test the DH Haney, Banks and Zimbardo serparated the effects of the prison evn itself from the natural dispositions of its inhabitants and created a 'simulated' prison, comparable to existing prison systems but populated by ordinary individuals. If the guards and prisoners in a simulated prison behaved in an non-agg manner, this would support the DH. But if these 'ordinary' people came to behave in the same inhumane ways that we see in real prisons, then it can be concluded that the env plays a major role in influencing behaviour.

A person can be punished for a committing a crime by; fines, community serive, imprisonment, probation, captial punishment. 

Responses to criminal behaviour

1. Reform= changing or improving the behaviour of offenders; there are many techniques for changing those factors that contribute to reoffending i.e. anger-management programmes. 

2. Imprisonment is punitive as prisoners are locked up in an institution, sometimes hundreds of miles away from home with the prospect of not seeing family regualrly, and then only for short visits. Their lives are tightly controlled. Other unintended features of prisoners are boredom, overcrowding and threat of violence from other prisoners. 

3. The main findings of the longitudinal study ''Surveying Prisoner Crime Reduction'' were that probation supervision was more effective than a custodial sentence of less than a year in reducing one-year reoffending rates.

Imprisonment may increase likelihood of reoffending as it involves isolation from family, friends and the community so relationships have to be re-built when the person leaves prison (research suggests 40% of prisoners lose touch with family whilst in prison). Having a criminal record and large gaps in work history can aslo make finding a job or housing especially difficlut (research suggests 2/3rds lose their jobs and 1/3rd lose their house whilst in prison…

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