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Institutional Programs
CHAPTER OUTLINE
I. Managing Time
A. Prison Programs
1. Programs range from group therapy to chair making factories.
2. Some programs are designed to rehabilitate.
3. Other programs use inmate labor.
B. Types of programs
1. Rehabilitative programs attempt to improve skills or education.
2. Psychological behavioral programs try to alter the propensity for
criminal behavior.
3. Medical services provide medical treatment.
4. Industrial programs have inmates make various products.
5. Other programs involve the maintenance of the facility.
6. Recreational programs are designed to keep inmates physically fit.
C. Constraints of security
1. No matter how beneficial a program, it must not conflict with security.
2. Security requires tool counts, searches, and detailed accounting of
materials.
3. The heavy emphasis on security and the unceasing of surveillance
sharpens the inmates sense of captivity.
4. Security requirements make maintenance and industrial programs
inefficient.
D. The principle of least eligibility
1. Prisoners, having been convicted of wrongful behavior, should be the
least eligible of all citizens for social benefits beyond the bare minimum
required by law.
2. The elimination of Pell grants for education
3. Administrators find it difficult to justify the practice of offering services
to prisoners that may exceed in quality those available to law-abiding
citizens.
4. The principle of least eligibility reflects a strong public ambivalence
about correctional programming.
II. Classification
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A. The Classification Process: New prison bound offenders pass through a
reception and orientation center where, for a period that usually lasts 3-6
weeks, they are evaluated and classified.
1. At institutions where rehabilitation is taken seriously, batteries of tests,
psychiatric evaluations, and counseling sessions are administered so
that each prisoner can be assessed for treatment as well as custody.
2. In practice, classification decisions are often based on stereotypes
made on the basis of the institutions needs rather than those of the
inmate.
3. Inmates often contribute to stereotyping by behaving in certain ways
with staff.
B. Objective Classification Systems
1. As prison space becomes scarcer and more valuable, administrators
feel pressured to ensure it is used as efficiently as possible and that
levels of custody are appropriate.
2. New predictive and equity-based systems seek to classify inmates
more objective.
3. Predictive models are designed to distinguish inmates with respect to
risk of escape, potential misconduct in the institution, and future
criminal behavior.
4. Objective systems are more efficient and cheaper because line staff
can be trained to administer and score the instrument without help
from clinicians and senior administrators.
III. Rehabilitative Programs
A. Psychological Programs: In prison, psychotherapy treats underlying
emotional or psychological problems that led to criminality.
1. Psychotherapeutic Approach: psychotherapy is the generic term used
to refer to all forms of “treatment of the mind;” has narrow prospects of
success with motivated, voluntary, free patients.
2. Group Treatment Approaches: reality therapy; confrontation therapy;
transactional analysis; cognitive skill building.
B. Behavior Therapy postulates that the differences between persons labeled
deviant and nondeviant lie not in the individual but in that person’s
response to problems in the environment.
C. Social Therapy is a broad term used to denote programs that seek to
develop a prosocial environment within the prison to help the offender
develop noncriminal ways of coping outside.
D. Educational and Vocational Rehabilitation programs are one of the oldest
ideas in prison programming and is to teach prisoners a skill that can help
them get a job on release.
1. Educational Programs – academic courses are the most popular
programs in the correctional system, but inmate ability to learn is
hampered by a lack of basic reading and computational skills.
2. Vocational Programs – these attempt to teach offenders marketable
job skills, but these programs suffer from the principle of least eligibility
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E.
F.
G.
H.
and are often directed toward less desirable jobs in industries that
already have access to large labor pools: barbering, printing, welding,
and the like.
Substance Abuse Programs – the link between crime and substance
abuse is strong.
1. Studies of offenders at the time of arrest estimate that at least 50-80%
test positive for drugs.
2. It is estimated that of those who test positive for drugs 50-75% of
arrestees need some form of drug treatment.
Sex Offender Programs – Many officials believe that sex offenders
represent the most difficult group for correctional treatment.
1. Some sex offenders are far more committed, emotionally and
personally, to the kind of sexual deviance they practice.
2. Sex offenders are targets of harassment and so they are inclined to
maintain a low profile.
3. Attending treatment programs can call attention to the one’s status and
lead to trouble with other prisoners.
4. The incentives to deny problems with sexual deviance while
incarcerated are very high.
Religious Programs
1. Inmates become involved in religious programs to ease the burden of
prison time.
2. A key issue is whether religious participation helps offenders stay out
of trouble after release; evidence on this is spotty.
The Rediscovery of Correctional Rehabilitation
1. After Robert Martinson’s 1975 study showed that prison rehabilitation
programs were ineffective, prison treatment programs began to
decline.
2. Scholars argue that the time has come for a reformulation of the ethics
of correctional rehabilitation: from “nothing works” to “what works, for
whom, and why.”
3. It is important to address inmates’ criminogenic needs.
4. To bolster this view, several researchers have undertaken systematic
reviews of correctional rehabilitation studies to express their
effectiveness in cost-benefit ratios.
5. Recent systematic cost-benefit studies have been encouraging to
those who advocate for more rehabilitation programs in corrections
and have sparked new interest in rehabilitation among influential
penologists.
IV. Prison Medical Services
A. Inmates have a well-established right to medical treatment while
incarcerated (Estelle v. Gamble 1976).
B. This is potentially a very expensive right because inmates bring significant
health problems to the prison; from the high-risk behavior many engaged
in prior to incarceration.
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1. Needle use from drug abuse is the frequent cause of HIV transmission
and the leading cause of hepatitis C.
2. Unprotected sex and so-called “life-style” diseases can be complicated
and expensive.
3. Two ways that prisoners pose special needs: poverty and aging.
4. One in five inmates report suffering a new medical problem
subsequent to arriving at the prison.
5. Most prisons offer medical services through a full-time staff of nurses,
augmented by part-time physicians under contract to the correctional
system.
V. Prison Industry
A. The Contract Labor, Piece-Price, and Lease Systems: led to corruption
and exploitation.
1. A Contract Labor system existed in the first days; an inmate’s labor
was sold to private employers who provided the machinery and raw
materials for the work they would do.
2. In the Piece Price system, the contractor established a purchase price
for goods that inmates produced with raw materials provided by the
contractor.
3. In the Lease system, the contractor maintained the prisoners, working
them for 12-16 hours at a stretch; enabled many prisons in later 1800s
to operate in the black.
B. The Public Account System
1. When contract labor was outlawed, Oklahoma led the way in instituting
this system.
2. Instead of selling inmate labor to private entrepreneurs, the prison
began to make twine, buying raw materials and using inmate labor.
C. The State Use System: prisoners were employed to produce goods and
services used only in state institutions and agencies.
D. The Public Works and Ways System: inmates work on public construction
and maintenance projects filling potholes, constructing or repairing
buildings and bridges, and so on.
E. Prison Industry Today
1. Until very recently the trend has been away from free-market use of
prison labor and toward state monopolies.
2. The past decade has seen a renewed interest in channeling prison
labor into revived industrial programs that would relieve idleness, allow
inmates to earn wages that they could save until release and reduce
the costs of incarceration to the state.
3. With the rise of the labor movement, state legislatures passed laws
restricting the sale of prisoner-made goods so as not to compete with
free workers.
4. Figures 14.1 and 14.2 show some of the employment and payment
practices for prison industry.
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VI. Prison Maintenance Programs
A. The typical prison must provide every major service that is available in a
community and more.
B. In most prisons, maintenance jobs constitute an elaborate pecking order
and tell something about prestige and influence within the prison.
C. Jobs that provide access to contraband goods are quite desirable.
D. The choice jobs have access to power; the least desirable jobs are the
most plentiful—janitorial services.
E. Prison maintenance jobs are essential because they lower the cost of
operations and provides rewards and punishments to enforce prison
discipline.
VII. Prison Recreation Programs
A. When prisoners are not working, in treatment, or in their cells, they are
probably engaging in some form of recreation.
1. They are integral to prison social life; prisoners vary physically and
intellectually and variety in programs enables them to form positive
social contacts who share their interests and abilities.
2. Prison recreation and leisure pursuits can be rehabilitative in teaching
social skills such as cooperation and teamwork; provide a means for
prisoners to grow in experience and enhance self-image; serve as a
productive counterpoint to the general alienation of prison.
B. Recreation programs also present security risks.
C. Politicians have pressed to shut down recreational programs, especially
weight lifting, but administrators point out that inmates in these programs
are often the best behaved and argue that trying to run a prison without
such activities will cause prisoner unrest.
VIII. Prison Programming Reconsidered
A. Nonrehabilitative programs—prison industry and maintenance—pose their
own problems for administrators; yet a programless prison is unthinkable.
B. Some experts have said that prison programs ought to be voluntary.
C. But in the fact of the realities of prison life—the need to run the prison, the
need to occupy time, and the need to give both staff and prisoners hope
that life will be better for the inmates after they leave—it is unlikely that
prison programs will change in any dramatic way.
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