The Importation Model.

The Importation Model - Irwin and Cressey.

An explanation for institutional aggression comes from Irwin and Cressey's Importation Model. This model focuses on prisons, and believes that aggression is caused by the personal and psychological characteristics that the prisoners bring into the institute with them. Irwin and Cressey suggests that people bring with them there social histories, which influence the way they adapt into the institute. These characteristics (values, experiences and attitudes) may make some prisoners more prone to violence. Irwin and Cressey argued that prisoners are not blank slates, and many of the normative systems (the way they act) that were developed in the outside world were brought along with them. This suggests that aggression is not caused by the institution, but instead by the characteristics of the criminals being brought in - in short, aggression has been imported in.

Research Support: Black prisoners often enter prisons from impoverished areas, where there are higher rates of violent crime. Thus, the importation model would argue that these people bring with them established cultural norms and experiences that condone aggressive behaviour. This is supported be Harer and Steffensmeier, who collected data from 58 American prisons,and found that there were much higher rates of inter-personal violence amongst black inmates. Therefore…