Prison isolation of convicts with extremely long imprisonment terms and the chance of successful reintegration after release

Abstract

Long-term prisoners, i.e., prisoners with imprisonment terms of five years or longer - according to the definition provided by the European Committee on Crime Problems - are more at risk of being affected by the destructive impact of prison isolation. This is what Donald Clemmer claims, who is the author of the idea of prisonization, according to which the longer a convict stays in prison, the more engaged in the prison subculture he or she will become, will adopt language specific to inmates, their style of dress, and also - which is important - will adapt to life in prison to such an extent that his or her reintegration will be very difficult or even impossible. Research by many authors does not support such a strongly phrased thesis; however, nobody contradicts the evident cases of prisonization. Out of the many available concepts of adaptation to prison conditions, the author of this article chose to focus on the one proposed by Erving Goffman. Using qualitative methods such as analysis of prisoners’ penitentiary records and interviews, he studied 15 Polish convicts with extremely long imprisonment terms (at least 20 years). He analyzed the data collected and then assigned each prisoner to an appropriate adaptation type according to this classification. Then, based on his own and other researchers’ studies, the author investigated which type of adaptation acquired during long prison isolation was more likely to contribute to successful reintegration after release and which type foreshadowed an almost certain failure.