The impact of congested prisons is not primarily a problem of population density, but of corollaries of crowding such as social instability, lack of programming, and the ascendance of custody goals. Congestion affects staff as well as inmates, and different inmates are differently affected. Some have antisocial tendencies exacerbated; others suffer from mental health problems. Staff subserve custody goals, but subserve them less effectively because social control mechanisms—such as programming and classification—are impaired by crowding. A recent prison riot points to transience and idleness as key preconditions and shows the results of congestion in escalating sequences that prominently include crisis management. The most serious consequence of crowding is warehousing, which creates a prison climate that prevents inmates from serving time in customary ways. It remains to be determined whether this result constitutes disproportionate—hence unlawful—punishment.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
1. Most research studies fall in the positivistic tradition that was adopted by the social sciences from the physical sciences. This tradition places a premium on correlations between neatly specified independent and dependent variables. Unfortunately, simple designs do not permit fleshing out the effects of complex sets of conditions—such as those of overcrowded prisons—on persons subjected to them. See fn. 32.
2.
and Gavin McCain, Verne C. Cox, and Paul B. Paulus, The Effect of Prison Crowding on Inmate Behavior (Washington, DC: Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice, 1980).
3.
these authors conclude that “courts have gradually recognized that there is some relationship between prison conditions, emotional and mental states and destructive behavior” but that “courts still fail to grasp how prison conditions can and do cause certain inmates to behave violently.” DeWolfe and DeWolfe point out that the thoughts of judges “might be reconciled by interpreting the court's position to mean that some inmates are inherently violent regardless of external circumstances of incarceration while the otherwise latent violence of others is triggered by the prison conditions themselves.” DeWolfe and DeWolfe add that “such a reconciliation would probably be accurate.” Ibid., p. 501. Though DeWolfe and DeWolfe are among the few experts who recognize that extreme prison conditions can produce stress-induced violent behavior and that more punitiveness is no solution, they also conclude that “inmates who are violent or exploitive, or both, must be excluded from rehabilitation programs,” so as to protect the other program participants. Ibid., p. 529.
4.
4. Desmond Ellis, Harold Grasmick, and Bernice Gilman, “Violence in Prisons: A Sociological Analysis,”American Journal of Sociology, 80:16-34 (1974).
5.
5. Nacci, Teitelbaum, and Prather, “Population Density and Inmate Misconduct Rates in the Federal Prison System.”
6.
6. McCain, Cox, and Paulus, Effect of Prison Crowding.
7.
McCain, Cox , and Paulus, Effect of Prison Crowding.
8.
8. Andrew Baum and Stuart Valins, Architecture and Social Behavior: Psychological Studies in Social Density (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1977).
9.
9. Megargee, “Association of Population Density”; D'Atri, “Psychophysiological Responses to Crowding”; Frank J. Porporino and Kimberly Dudley, “An Analysis of the Effects of Over-crowding in Canadian Penitentiaries,”Program Branch User Report (Ottawa: Ministry of the Solicitor General of Canada, 1984).
10.
10. Desmond Ellis, Crowding and Prison Violence: An Integration of Research and Theory (Downsview, Ontario: York University, 1982); Jonathan L. Freedman, Crowding and Behavior (San Francisco: Freeman, 1975).
11.
11. Ellis, Crowding and Prison Violence, p. 2.
12.
12. Lucien X. Lombardo, Guards Imprisoned: Correctional Officers at Work (New York: Elsevier, 1981); Robert R. Ross, ed., Prison Guard/Correctional Officer: The Use and Abuse of the Human Resources of Prisons (Toronto: Butterworth, 1981).
13.
13. Ellis, Crowding and Prison Violence, p. 15.
14.
14. Gresham M. Sykes, The Society of Captives: A Study of a Maximum Security Prison (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958).
15.
for more data related to the first point, see Daniel Glaser, The Effectiveness of a Prison and Parole System (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964).
16.
16. Ellis, Crowding and Prison Violence, p. 8.
17.
17. Glaser, Effectiveness of a Prison and Parole System, p. 142.
18.
18. John Hagel-Seymour, “Environmental Sanctuaries for Susceptible Prisoners,” in The Pains of Imprisonment, ed. Robert Johnson and Hans Toch (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1982), pp. 267-284.
19.
19. Hans Toch, Men in Crisis: Human Breakdowns in Prison (Chicago: Aldine, 1975).
20.
20. Richard Shaw, “An Explosive Situation,”Albany Times Union, 18 Sept. 1983.
21.
Robert Levinson, former deputy assistant director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, points out that “individuals with `mixed' diagnoses are persona non grata in all settings.” He comments that “it is, indeed, unfortunate that patients do not read the appropriate textbooks so that they might better conform their mental health problems to a single category.... No one wants to deal with the difficult patients, and everyone defines difficult idiosyncratically. As long as treatment resources are scarce (and patients plentiful), individuals who do not fit the available regimen will be extruded. It is as if the patients are selected to fit the treatment rather than the other way around.”Robert Levinson, “The System That Cannot Say No,”American Psychologist, 39:811-812 (1984).
22.
22. Lawrence T. Kurlander, Report to Mario M. Cuomo: The Disturbance at Ossining Correctional Facility, January 8-11, 1983 (Albany, NY: Executive Chamber, 1983), p. 242.
23.
23. Ibid., p. 88.
24.
24. Ibid., p. 78.
25.
25. Ibid., p. 79.
26.
26. Ibid., p. 81.
27.
27. Ibid., p. 82.
28.
28. Ibid., p. 75.
29.
29. Ibid., pp. 225-26.
30.
30. Kurlander asserts that “nowhere is [the] need for better planning more evident than in our swelling and overcrowded prison system”; he describes typical management reactions as “schizophrenic, haphazard, and wrecked by an endless train of `unforeseen contingencies,' many of which might have been anticipated if there had not been such confusion.” Kurlander adds that “the Ossining disturbance was simply the most immediate and most dramatic consequence of a crisis management response to complex problems.” Ibid., p. 235.
31.
31. Prison researchers support such strategies by defining problems as events that one can count rather than as the motives of inmates who are involved in these events.
32.
32. Toch, Men in Crisis, p. 304.
33.
33. Kurlander, Report to Mario M. Cuomo, p. 232.
34.
34. Such documentation is called for in a recent court decision—Rhodes v. Chapman—that limits the application of the Eighth Amendment to crowded prison conditions. The implications of this Supreme Court decision for prison research are dealt with in Hans Toch, “The Role of the Expert on Prison Conditions,”Criminal Law Bulletin, 18:38-49 (1982).
