SELF‐INJURY IN CORRECTIONAL SETTINGS: “PATHOLOGY” OF PRISONS OR OF PRISONERS?*

Abstract

Although self-injury is not a new behavior, public awareness of it has increased dramatically since the mid-1990s (Adler and Adler, 2005). Selfinjury is generally defined as the deliberate act of physically hurting oneself, usually without conscious suicidal intent, in a manner that results in superficial, rather than traumatic, damage to body tissue. Despite typically being perceived as psychological in nature (Favazza, 1998; Muehlenkamp, 2005), the etiology is not often clear. The bulk of selfinjury behavior (SIB) research comes from a mental health perspective, rather than from sociology or related disciplines; yet the DSM IV (1994) says little about SIB, other than listing it as a symptom for other “disorders.” Clinically, self-injury consistently has been linked to a broad range of individual-level problems, ranging from intellectual and developmental difficulties to emotional dysfunctions, and to physical and behavioral maladaptation. Such typologies reduce the act to individual pathology rather than, as Kilty (2006) notes, a possible coping mechanism in a debilitating environment. Estimates of the prevalence of self-injury in the non-prisoner population are inconsistent, varying from 1% to 4% and between 12% to over 40% among adolescents and college-aged samples (Muehlenkamp, 2005; White Kress, 2003). One of the few common claims across studies is that selfinjury typically begins during early adolescence and tends to persist for an average of 10 to 15 years, although it may continue for decades (Favazza, 1998; Muehlenkamp, 2005).