Prisons are usually horrible places to be, much more violent than normal society,
that may not come as much of a surprise to you. But why? Well your likely to think its one of
two explanations, one is well they are designed to be unpleasant, and anyone in that situation
is going to be aggressive. Or you may think, well we do go through all the effort of caching
the criminal members of society and putting them into one place. And many of those criminals have
commited violent crimes, so of course they will just continue thier violent acts in prision.
Well thats a basic outline of two psychological theories, situational and dispositional. So let's
dig a little deeper into these theories and see what evidence there is for them.
So this is about institutional aggression. The word institutional is pretty wide,
is basically any human organization. Within any organisation people are likely to share
some behaviour and ideals. Your school is an institution and so is your family.
Now when we think of institutions that are associated with aggressive behaviour you may think
of the army, or police force. But in this video we want to try to explain aggression within prisons.
So lets get the definitions of our two explanations clear first.
When we suggest aggression in prisons is due to dispositional factors
we are saying that aggression is primarily because of the personal characteristics of the prisoners.
Importantly not the physical environment of the prison.
And we can flip that around in our definition of situational factors.
The aggression is primarily due to the environment of the prison,
not the personal characteristics of the prisoners. Ok simple enough. Let's dive a little deeper.
Dispositional factors
If we are making an argument for dispositional factors being the reason for prison aggression,
we are saying its factors are internal to each prisoner. There are lots of examples,
but perhaps they biologically feel high levels of anger, maybe they don't fully
think through the consequences of their actions and are impulsive. Or maybe they do but they
have learnt that aggression is a way to solve problems, And maybe they have been socialised
into expecting and accepting aggression. So no surprise if we gather all these people
off the streets and put them into one place we will concentrate all of the aggression
into the prison. Now another name for this theory we should know is the importation model. These
problems have been moved from the streets and imported into the environment of the prison.
One potential characteristic we can say a little more on is gang membership. Gang members will
bring their baggage from outside the prison inside. So the same alliances and rivalries
and a gang understanding of how conflicts are resolved. Often their aggression serves a purpose,
maybe they need to show dominance, or they have been asked by their gang to settle a score.
We would call this type of violence instrumental, violence used as a tool.
We can also consider other wider issues, many prisoners are suffering from alcohol
and drug addiction, and many of the people are from disadvantaged educational backgrounds
and may have few prospects outside. And there are biological factors, young males are
by far the most likely to be imprisoned, and it's likely the high testosterone levels in this group
has a link to the aggression they display. Situational factors
So in this explanation we are suggesting that the reason for prison aggression
is largely external from the personal characteristics of the prisoners.
Prisons are unpleasant and stressful pretty much by design, the idea being if its unpleasant people
don't want to return, reducing recidivism. This combined with poor prison management can
put people into a situation in which the only possible behavioral response is aggression.
Now researchers call this criminogenic, the criminally aggressive behaviour is caused,
generated by the environmental conditions. Some of the physical characteristics I’m
thinking of are a poor layout, so one that puts lots of prisoners close together so they have no
privacy and are constantly exposed to loud noises. Also places to gain and hide weaponry, combined
with places not covered by guards or CCTV meaning prisoners constantly fear they will be attacked.
And many prisons have poor quality or completely lack facilities, like libraries and gyms.
This can lead to boredom and frustration. That's just the building. Aggression can
result from inexperienced prison staff who don't know how to handle and diffuse prison conflicts.
There are also issues around the racial and gender background of the prison staff and how that is
related to the experience of the prisoners. Of course prisons are places where people are
deprived of their freedom, but that's not all people are deprived of. The deprivation model
suggests that depriving people of autonomy, but also access to hetrosexual relationships and
a sense of safety leads to stress, frustration and fear resulting in aggression.
This type of aggression, in response to stress isn't pre-planned and we would call it
expressive violence. Dispositional and
Situational factors research evaluations I’m going to mention two research evaluations,
now as these are opposite explanations, the presence of support for one explanation
can be used as a potential limitation of the other evaluations, keep this in mind as I discuss them,
and think about how you would reword it if you had to write an essay on just one of the explanations.
Bierie investigated if the quality of actual prison conditions are associated with real
examples of aggression in prison. So two sets of data was combined, first data from
a questionnaire that was sent to prison staff from all the 117 prisons ran by the US bureau of
prisons. This included a set of questions about what the conditions were like at their prisons.
This data was then matched to the data every prison has to record when a serious example
of violence happens in prison, so a serious assualt or murder. The results did show that
violence was significantly higher in prisons with poor conditions including noise levels,
poor hygiene that was judged by the presence of rodents and cockroaches. And how little
privacy was available to the prisoners. Interestingly the study also found that
prisons with the most white staff and fewest female staff had significantly more violence.
All of these issues are situational factors under the control of prison management.
A counter study is by DeLisi. This used a review of over two thousand five hundred young male
offenders, this included their personal characteristics and criminal history.
This was then used to see if it could predict how they would behave while imprisoned.
Certain disposition factors did make aggression towards other prisoners and prison staff more
likely. If they had spent time living in the care system, if they had experienced poverty growing up
and if they had a history of being violent to their family members.
So this does suggest that dispositional factors developed early in life can result in prison
violence. In the paper DeLisi suggests this is evidence of a life course importation model,
with negative early experiences before and during prison cascading into more and more violence both
inside and outside the prison. General Evaluations
So I think one of the most interesting aspects of this research is in its application.
And that makes the research socially sensitive. Conducting this kind of research can have real
world implications on the experiences of the group you're studying, in this case prisoners.
Let's say research finds that violence in prisons is due to the conditions,
well not many people want prisons to be nice, but most people would agree that
the state has a duty to at least make sure people are safe while imprisoned so they can
be rehabilitated and eventually rejoin society. This type of research would support arguments
to improve prison facilities and the lives of the prisoners. However research
that shows that prison aggression is due to the personal characteristics of the prisoners cant be
changed with better conditions and management, and could be used by politicians to argue that
budgets could be cut making conditions even worse. Now you may have expected me to use zimbardo as
one of the research evaluations, but I’m not going to lie if I spotted that in an essay as
the main evaluation, well it's not wrong exactly but its not showing an ability to go beyond what
you have learnt in the first year, so try not to. But I know many students would want to use it,
so if it's going to be one of your supporting evaluations make sure it's
explained properly, fully linked to the topic. Zimbardo's stanford prison study is a support
of situational aggression, Participants in the study were students at a top university
and screened before entry making them unlikely to have dispositional characteristics
predisposing them to aggression. But the stanford prison experiment quickly resulted
in both verbal and physical aggression from guards and prisoners. Its argued this is
because of the situational pressure of the prison environment that Zimbardo simulated.
Notice i'm really linking zimbardos study here with the language of institutional aggression.
And finally a good way to finish on pretty much any essay in this area is by talking about the
interactionalist approach. It’s likely more valid not to say its either dispositional or situational
but that its a combination of the two processes. There likely are some prisoners who are more
predisposed to aggression than other prisoners. But that aggression is more likely to be expressed
if they are put into situations that they feel the need to be aggressive in, so if they feel the
need to show dominance if threatened, or they lack resources that aggression will get them access to,
or if they feel its the only way to show they are unhappy with their conditions.