How the prison changes the personality of the detainees | Science and Health

To deal with this type of social environment, inmates need to adapt. Especially those sentenced to long sentences.

In a report to the US government on the psychological impact of the arrest, social psychologist Craig Haney went straight to the point: "Few people leave unchanged or unscathed prison experience.

Taking into account interviews with hundreds of prisoners, researchers from the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge in the UK went even further by saying that imprisonment at long term "changes the essence of people".

Or, as an inmate questioned for research published in the 1980s summarizes, after a few years in prison, "you are not the same thing".

In the field of personality psychology, it was believed that our personality remained unchanged in adulthood.

But recent studies have shown that in fact, despite relative stability, our thinking, behavior, and emotional habits change significantly – especially in response to different roles throughout life .

It is therefore almost inevitable that the time spent in prison – in a highly structured but threatening environment – causes changes in personality.

Especially for people who are concerned about how to rehabilitate the prisoner, the problem is that these personality changes, while helping the individual to survive the prison, are counterproductive to his life after his release.

The common characteristics of the prison environment that can change one's personality include the chronic loss of free will and privacy, daily stigma, constant fear, the need to constantly wear an invulnerability mask, and Emotional apathy (to avoid exploitation by others) and the need, day after day, to follow strict rules or imposed routines.

There is little research on how the chronic characteristics of the environment can change the convict's personality in terms of the Big Five model.

39 is a model widely used in psychology to badess the personality of the general population (non-prisoner) based on traits of: neuroticism (measure of emotional instability), extraversion, pleasure (or sympathy) , openness to experiences and awareness (related to the discipline).

However, psychologists and criminologists recognize the that the detainees adapt to the environment, which they call "prison". This contributes to some kind of "post-incarceration syndrome" when they are released.

For example, there are the results of in-depth interviews with 25 ex-life inmates (including two women) in Boston, United States, who spent an average of 19 years in prison.

In badyzing her stories, psychologist Marieke Liema and criminologist Maarten Kunst discovered that the group was developing "institutionalized personality traits" such as "mistrust of others, difficulty in building relationships and making decisions."

A 42-year-old prisoner said, "I'm still acting as if I were in jail, and so you're not like a switch or a faucet. a long time … it becomes a part of you. "

The change in the predominant personality was the inability to trust others – a kind of constant paranoia." You can not trust anyone in jail, "said another interviewee, a man of Age 52. "I have trust issues, I do not trust anyone."

Interviews with hundreds of British inmates by Susie Hulley and colleagues at the Institute of Criminology showed a similar image. "Many […] told us that they experienced great personal transformations, sometimes complete," wrote the researchers in 2015.

Prisoners described a process of "emotional anesthesia "It makes you harder, it makes you a little more distant," said one of them, explaining how people in the penitentiary deliberately hide and choke their emotions. do you become, and if you're hard at first, then you get even harder, you get even colder, even more selfless. "

Another said," That's … I did not have any more feelings for people. "

In terms of the five major personality factor model, it can be characterized as an extremely low form of" neuroticism "(or high emotional apathy), badociated with low extraversion and a lack of approval. In other words, this is not an ideal personality change for the return to the outside world.

This is undoubtedly a concern of Hulley and his colleagues. "A long-term inmate becomes" adapted "to the imperatives of a long period of confinement, he becomes more emotionally apathetic, more isolated and socially withdrawn, and perhaps less adapted to life after his release," have- they warned.

These interviews with interviewees involving inmates have long been incarcerated. But an exploratory article, made in February 2018, applied neuropsychological tests to show that even short-term spending in prison has an impact on the personality.

Researchers led by Jesse Meijers of the University of Vrije in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, conducted two tests – three months apart – with 37 prisoners. In the second test, there was an increase in impulsivity and a reduction in the control of attention. These cognitive changes may indicate that your consciousness has been altered.

The researchers believe that the changes are probably due to the poor prison environment, with a lack of cognitive challenges and a loss of autonomy. "This is a significant and socially relevant finding," they concluded, "since released prisoners may have a lower capacity to live in law than before the sentence of imprisonment".

However, other discoveries offer a bit of hope. In another recent study – one of the first to apply the model of the five major factors to the personality changes of prisoners – the researchers compared the personality profiles of maximum security inmates in Switzerland with different control groups such as students and guardians.

And they found that even though the prisoners were getting a score lower than extroversion, openness to experience and pleasure, as expected, they were more aware of consciousness, in particular "subtractions" of the order and self – discipline.

The researchers, led by Johanna Masche-No of the University of Kristianstad in Switzerland, believe that the results may reflect a positive personality adapted to the prison situation: "The prison environment is very rigid with regard to regulations and standards and the private space is limited, "they concluded. "Such an environment creates requirements to order prisoners to avoid the formal punishments and negative acts of their co-presidents."

In other words, consciousness can help you avoid problems. If the results of Swiss research seem to contradict the Dutch, it is interesting to note that Dutch prisoners have become more impulsive and less attentive, but they have also improved their spatial planning, which can be seen as an order (Meijers and his colleagues did not go into this further because they thought they could have scored better the second time for a matter of practice).

Another possibility is that the high degree of awareness of Swiss prisoners is due to the country's prison system, where the emphasis is more on treatment and rehabilitation than in other countries.

Two recent investigations of prisoners involved in financial games used to study cooperation, risk-taking and punishment (one of the games is by chance The prisoner's dilemma) are also promising. . They showed that prisoners participated in normal or even high levels of cooperation.

The findings have implications for discussions about the reintegration of criminals into society, says Sigbjørn Birkeland of the Norwegian School of Economics NHH who conducted one of these studies with colleagues.

"A common perception … is that criminals are wicked men without pro-social motivation (the desire to benefit other people or groups), and this perception can be used to justify higher sentences. rigid to criminals, "they write. But studies show that criminals can be "pro-socially motivated like the general population".

As awareness grows that personality is malleable, it is hoped that this will increase efforts to badess how the prison environment can shape the character of the convict, which could certainly affect his return to society.

At the present time, there is little research with this specific goal. The latest evidence suggests that life in prison causes personality changes that can hinder rehabilitation and reintegration. To a certain extent, this is inevitable because of the loss of privacy and freedom.

But with that said, discoveries about the prisoner's awareness and cooperation show that all hopes are not lost, and they point to potential targets for rehabilitation programs.

These are not just abstract questions for researchers: they have profound implications for how we, as a society, want to deal with people who disobey laws.

Current evidence suggests that the longer and harsher the sentence of imprisonment – in terms of freedom, choice, and opportunity to have safe and meaningful relationships – the greater the personality of the prisoners will likely change to make reintegration difficult and increase the risk of re-offending.

In the end, society has to face a choice. We can punish offenders more severely and risk changing them for the worse, or we can develop sentencing rules and prisons to help offenders rehabilitate and change for the better.