Dealing With Long-Term Confinement

Abstract

Early views of the impact of serving time in prison depict a process of systematic destruction of the person among offenders sentenced to long terms. Recent research, however, suggests that this deterministic view is simplistic—the impact of incarceration being highly variable. The prisoner's ability to invoke various adaptive strategies may serve to diminish the deleterious effects of incarceration. In this article, data collected through personal interviews with 59 long-term inmates are examined in order to specify the principal problems and needs of inmates serving long sentences, and to describe the various adaptive strategies employed by these offenders to deal with their confinement. The principal deprivations faced by long-term prisoners relate to time management, maintenance of family and other extraprison relationships, and preservation of self-identity and self-esteem. Although these concerns are similar to the pains of imprisonment felt by all inmates, the time factor amplifies these deprivations in the case of long-term prisoners.