Boats against the current: A note on the effects of imprisonment.

Abstract

In their review of research on the of imprisonment, Bonta and Gendreau (1990) draw the rather startling conclusions that imprisonment and specific conditions of confinement such as solitary, under limiting and humane conditions, fail to show any sort of profound detrimental effects (p. 364) and many prisons may actually be conducive to good health (p. 357). In light of our experience, both direct and indirect (through research as well as the sworn testimony of witnesses), we have difficulty sharing this upbeat assessment of the of incarceration. We feel imprisonment should be used with far more restraint than at the present, and before rejecting the view that imprisonment is intrinsically destructive, we would require evidence more compelling than that generated by contemporary social science research. The authors assume that a sentence of custody is more punitive than, but in other ways no different from, other sanctions. In our opinion, this view fails to take into account the phenomenology of the prison as it has evolved in western society. Incarceration has acquired a significance that exceeds description as mere punishment. This is not to say that the of imprisonment are impervious to scientific investigation, but simply that the experience of incarceration might not be adequately captured by the usual social science dependent variables. Can the of an experience such as living on death row really be captured by psychiatric interviews or the MMPI? Bonta and Gendreau state: From the available evidence and on the dimensions measured there is little to support the conclusion that long-term imprisonment necessarily has detrimental effects (p. 359,