PSYCHOLOGY AND THE HISTORY OF IMPRISONMENT
Foucault once termed prison “the intelligence of discipline in stone.”[1] He argued further that the shape of that “intelligence”—the pattern of domination that prevailed in any society—was determined by the conceptual systems with which that society had become enamored. What was experienced as the “given” in any society during a particular age or epoch—the unquestioned status quo—was what gave certain people the power to limit the lives of certain others. But the historical given also established the boundaries of that power—how far the apparatus of social control could go before it violated prevailing conceptions of humane treatment. The discipline of psychology has been implicated at all levels in the process by which the institution of prison became part of the natural order of things. Ideas from the emerging discipline of psychology were intertwined with the very conception of confinement as an appropriate mechanism of social control that, in turn, originated the prison form. In the century and a half that has passed since imprisonment became the predominate response to criminal deviance in the United States, psychology has played an important practical and functional role in determining the shape and manner of prison operations. More recently, questionable applications of psychological theory and data were used (and misused) to help justify and rationalize the more expansively punitive use of imprisonment contemporary corrections. Yet, modern psychological theory was excluded from recent criminal justice decisionmaking at precisely the point at which it could have served as the basis for basic and progressive change. As I will argue, the discipline of psychology must play a central role in future attempts to create meaningful limits to prison pain.[2]
As numerous historians have documented, imprisonment did not become the modal criminal sanction until the nineteenth century. Before then, prisons and jails served primarily as holding facilities for pretrial detention and also to coerce debtors into paying their creditors. Thus, Hirsch has observed that prisons were “at bottom instrument(s) of coercion rather than sanction, intended to pry open the purse rather than to deter or rehabilitate welchers.”[3] England used banishment or “transportation” of convicts, first to the United States, and then to Australia throughout most of the 17th, 18th, and part of the 19th centuries.[4] Of course, the utility—even the necessity—of prisons was linked to the popular conception of criminality. As long as criminals were viewed—as they were through most of the 17th century—as persons who had “wandered astray,” as Hirsch put it, there was an internal limit to what the community could do to them. However, once criminals were perceived as out-and-out adversaries, “physical enforcement became a crucial vehicle for the prevention of crime.”[5] The increased use of prison along with reliance on a professional police force were by-products of this changed perspective.
Compared to English and European urban centers, the American Colonies of the seventeenth and eighteenth century were sparsely populated places whose mechanisms of social control concentrated more on “biblical” offenses (like adultery and blasphemy) than property crime. They distributed punishment (primarily fines and whipping) more evenly throughout all segments of society.[6] Later in American history, Beaumont and De Tocqueville recognized both the potential severity of the American prison system, and the necessity to define prisoners as “other” before subjecting them to it: “While society in the United States gives the example of the most extended liberty, the prisons of the same country offer the spectacle of the most complete despotism. The citizens subject to the law are protected by it; they only cease to be free when they become wicked.”[7]
Social consensus concerning the dimensions of the alleged wickedness of criminals underwent several transformations in the course of the nineteenth century, all of which were the subject of popular discourse and debate over the causes of crime, and some of which had important implications for prison policy and operations. Psychological theories figured in each transformation. Nineteenth-century American society was devoted to the concept of psychological individualism, and this devotion facilitated the creation of a vast prison system that allowed penal confinement to become the criminal justice system's response of first rather than last resort. Psychological individualism implied—and the nation came to believe—that individuals were the causal locus of behavior, that social deviance arose from some defect inside the person, and that its cure was therefore to be found in some significant change or alteration in individual or personal characteristics.[8] The use of prison—as the arena in which such change was to be coercively produced—seemed a logical extension of these prevailing views. Indeed, the widespread use of imprisonment seems to have been linked to an emerging popular belief in the perfectibility of human nature. In a related vein, Bender connected the rise of the penitentiary to changes in cultural meanings. In his view, belief in the “power of confinement to reshape personality” led to a restructuring of the penitentiary.[9] And, as Hirsch noted, “[t]he signal feature of incarceration is that it offers an unparalleled measure of control over the deviant, and rehabilitation has been deemed a process which demands such physical control in order to succeed.”[10]
Legal science during these years was joined with the emerging science of human behavior. Psychological theories played an important role in helping to legitimate prevailing prison policies. Its putative ties to a science of human behavior helped convince the public that the field of “corrections” deserved to be regarded not as manifestation of political expediency (i.e., the mere application of state power to the task of social control) but rather as “prison science.” Whether they premised their approach loosely around a genetic or biological theory like Lombroso's “born criminal type,”[11] or on one of the numerous “crime-as-sickness” and “moral disease” metaphors that were popular during these years,[12] prison advocates brought their work closer to the image of objective science, often borrowing directly from the increasing status and respectability of disciplines like psychology to do so. Thus, Zebulon Brockway, one of the major figures in the development of early American penology, could write credibly at the end of the century that “[p]rison science is working out… a methodical system of penology which is in accord with the true science of our common human nature.”[13]
In the first half of the twentieth century, the individualistic focus of penology and prison policy continued, but became even more explicitly psychological in nature. “Indeterminate” prison sentences (which premised release entirely upon a demonstration of personal transformation), juvenile courts (which shifted attention from the nature of the offense to a focus on the character of the child),[14] and probation officers (whose job was to observe and intervene in the lives of individual prisoners once they have been released from prison)[15] were all creations of this individual-centered, psychologically-oriented system. Each of these three innovations was designed to make explicit use of psychological information in its decisionmaking process, often relying directly upon psychological experts to do so. Prisons also began to employ practices like “quarantines” and other forms of classification whereby prisoners could be isolated, evaluated, graded, and then assigned according to their personal characteristics.
As Rothman noted, “t was within the framework of these procedures that psychiatrists and psychologists took up posts inside the prisons for the first time.”[16] Prison historian Elmer Barnes included the “extremely significant step” of creating a “psychological clinic” inside Sing Sing prison in the early 1900s as one of four “notable advances in penology” made by the New York prison system over the preceding century.[17] Even during this initial period, however, the real impact of psychologists upon prison treatment and institutional routines was limited both by their narrow role and by their relatively small numbers. In Rothman's words: “The presence of psychiatrists and psychologists on the prison payrolls was of more symbolic than real importance, their credentials lending a legitimacy to incarceration without their services altering routines.”[18]
At the same time, however, although “historically the prison doctor's concern with mental health was for the purpose of diagnosis rather than treatment,” it was also the case that “n both the physical and mental sphere” the prison doctor was “charged with the task of refereeing the punitive excesses of those who administered the penal system.”[19] Again, Rothman is instructive about what he termed “the rub” concerning the limited impact of psychological services:
It was not only that one psychiatrist or psychologist could accomplish very little with three hundred or five hundred inmates. Even had the staff been larger, the contributions would have remained minimal. Psychiatrists might provide an elaborate case history and, perhaps, a recommendation for treatment. The institution, however, had no way to respond.[20]
Yet, this underscored the limited but not unimportant role that psychologists continued to play in the prison system. On the one hand, their presence helped to legitimize prison practices as science or therapy (despite their relatively modest impact on actual programs and policies), while on the other hand they acted as a modest restraining force against the harshest aspects of the penal system.
From time to time in the course of the twentieth century, prison therapy programs would attain some real prominence inside specific institutions or even entire prison systems. For the most part, however, an uneasy truce persisted in which—in the name of rehabilitation—prison psychologists were granted some autonomy over very limited therapy or treatment programs. The therapeutic or treatment function of the institution was virtually always subjugated to the mandates of the prison’s perceived security or custody needs. The presence of psychologists served to certify the scientifically legitimate nature of the enterprise, to underscore the individual-centered nature of the problem of crime (conveying the clear message that crime was a product of the pathology of criminals), but also to place limits on how far the security function of the institution could be taken in the name of managing and controlling prisoners. To be sure, the noble goal of rehabilitation was always balanced against—some said, compromised by—the need to maintain order, even to punish, but there was a balance. Rehabilitation also justified the presence of psychologists at high levels of prison administration and national committees on prison policy, where they could exercise at least some influence over penal practices and voice humanitarian concerns.
However, in the beginning of the 1970s all this began to change. Psychological theory was displaced from any position of real influence inside prisons and hopes of using psychology to establish and shape more humane penal policies were at least temporarily dashed. This displacement occurred at a time when the discipline of psychology could have provided a more theoretically-grounded and effective restraining edge to harsh prison policies and a more sophisticated intellectual critique of the effects of deteriorated prison conditions. Indeed, psychology was ushered out of the intellectual analyses, policy debates, and out of the institutions themselves just as theories were emerging in the discipline that would have posed fundamental challenges to the prison status quo. Shifts in the way in which the discipline of psychology conceptualized social behavior—ones emphasizing the importance of social history, context, and situation—promised a profound reorientation in the way in which the legal and penal systems understood the role of prison in an overall strategy of crime control, and the importance of prison conditions and post-release environments to subsequent reoffending. But the reorientation never materialized.
Never wrote it myself GOT but thought it may be of interest
