NCJ Number
89065
Editor(s)
R Johnson,
H Toch
Date Published
1982
Length
317 pages
Annotation
Criminologists and sociologists examine the effects of stress on prison inmates and staff, its relationship to overcrowding and victimization, the differential impact of stress on subpopulations, and coping strategies.
Abstract
Four essays apply stress management concepts to prison environments, describing alternative ways to handle overcrowding and techniques to decrease physical, psychological, and economic victimization. Another author comments that interactions among overcrowding, idleness, a heterogeneous prison population, and tight security restrictions produce stress and ultimately collective violence. Investigations of stress in terms of time served consider short-term jail prisoners, inmates serving long or life sentences, Death Row inmates, and parolees. Subsequent articles shift to stress as experienced by special populations -- adolescents in training schools, racial and ethnic minorities, women, and mentally ill offenders. Suggested measures to moderate prison racial hostility include classification schemes, increasing prisoner contacts under conditions of equality, and recruiting minority guards. An outpatient treatment program for mentally ill offenders in a Connecticut prison is described. The final essays focus on innovative ways to reduce prison stress, first assessing an experimental prison program that applied Norval Morris' collaborative model. Other authors propose a human relations approach to reducing sexual violence, with attention to democratic prisoners' organizations, and analyze inmates' niche-seeking patterns that ameliorate stress. All papers include references. For individual papers, see NCJ-89066-83.