Looking through the wrong side of prison bars: The psychology of injustice

The prison has emerged as a powerful and often invisible institution that drives and shapes social inequality.
Sara Wakefield and Christopher Uggen¹

I am discussing prisons and jails because lower-class people are enormously overrepresented there.² (Prisons are places where individuals convicted of a crime are held; jails hold individuals awaiting trial or convicted of minor crimes – see note on terminology.³) While ethnicity, gender, and social class clearly intersect in victimhood associated with incarceration,⁴ my main focus remains on giving priority to a contextual explanation to the plight of the poor.

As Bruce Western and Becky Pettit have explained, "Class inequalities in incarceration are reflected in the very low education level of those in prison and jail … prisoners … are drawn overwhelmingly from the least educated."⁵ There are certain characteristics of the (in)justice system, such as the role and nature of bail,⁶ that victimized poor people across ethnicities and genders and that enable superrich criminals such as the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to get luxury treatment while supposedly serving time in prison.⁷

But the causal-reductionist explanations of incarceration continue to have a lot of sway and fits with popular media depictions of prisons. Consider, for example, the riot that took place in the prison in Attica, New York, in 1971 and ended with ten correctional officers and thirty-three inmates being killed or the 2016 prison riot at Roraima, Brazil, that resulted in inmates being damaged so badly that they could only be identified by their body parts.⁸

How can we explain such violent prison riots?⁹ Mainstream psychology directs us to focus on the personality of inmates and prison guards. Surely prison guards and prisoners are 'special' and different from us; surely there are features of their personalities, such as high aggression, that cause violence in prisons? This causal-reductionist approach assumes that individual prison guards and prisoners are abnormal in terms of their personality traits, neurocognitive characteristics, or some other individual-level feature.

The assumption is that we, who are psychologically normal, would not behave with that kind of violence, irrespective of whether we are in the role of prisoner or prison guard. But research demonstrating the power of context forces us to reject this comfortable assumption, by suggesting that it is the context of the prison and not the personality characteristics of prison inmates and guards, that leads to dehumanizing behaviour in prisons.¹⁰

As Wakefield and Uggen (quoted above) argue, prisons reinforce and magnify inequalities in society: Prisons are filled with lower-class people, and their poverty is perpetuated by the experience of 'serving time' in prison. Those who serve time in prison become disadvantaged in finding employment and housing, as well as being civically engaged, among other ways.

The path to prison often begins with failing schools in poverty-stricken neighbourhoods, contributing to the school-to-prison pipeline.¹¹ From this perspective, the psychology of the criminal justice system is the psychology of how the poor of all ethnic groups and genders are victimized by the 'justice system' to serve time in prisons, and their time in prison serves to increase the probability that they continue being poor and politically disenfranchised after leaving prison.

The rate of incarceration in the United States is six times that of the typical Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries (these are the advanced Western countries, including Germany, France, and the United Kingdom).¹² In critically exploring the significance of this trend, I address four basic questions: (1) Who goes to prison? (2) What happens to them in prison? (3) What happens to the families of those who go to prison? (4) What is the wider psychological purpose of incarceration? My discussion focuses largely on the situation in the United States, but many of the trends identified are also relevant to other parts of the world. Prisons everywhere are predominantly occupied by the poor.

There are many important topics I will not have space to cover related to how the prison system ensnares the poor. For example, the bail system in the United States also 'punishes poverty'; the lower ability of the poor to pay bail results in more pretrial jail time for them.13 The poor do less well as crime victims: Juries give harsher punishments when the victim of a crime is middle class compared to the lower class.¹⁴

Accused individuals with higher educational attainments are seen as less dangerous and less blameworthy.¹⁵ Crimmigration, the merging of criminal law and immigration law,¹⁶ has victimized poorer immigrants in particular. In general, poorer people are more likely to be sentenced to prison for violating the law.¹⁷ These are all important topics, but in this chapter, I focus on a narrower set of issues within the broader topic of social class and prisons.

Who Goes to Prison?

The most direct and accurate answer to this question is that the poor go to prison.¹⁸ As Sara Heller, Brian Jacob, and Jens Ludwig state in their review of family income, neighbourhood poverty, and crime, "criminal offending and victimization rates tend to be disproportionally concentrated among low-income people living in high-poverty communities."¹⁹

The Columbia University researcher Amanda Geller and her colleagues have assessed the situation in this way: "The high level of parental incarceration is of particular concern for low-income children because incarceration rates are highest among the most disadvantaged."²⁰ In the years 1978–2009, there was a 430 percent increase in the number of prisoners held in state and federal prisons in the United States,²¹ and the most common characteristic of the inmates was being poor.

The relationship between poverty and prison became a research focus early in the twentieth century, with now classic studies exploring how life in poor neighbourhoods leads to major disadvantages and a higher likelihood of poor individuals both committing and being victims of crime.²² Economic recessions, such as the huge recession of 2008, provide researchers an opportunity to test the impact of economic hardship: Findings show that economic downturns not only lead to higher crime,²³ but they also increased suicides and worse health.²⁴ Thus, the housing crisis and widespread foreclosures around 2008 resulted in not only individual-level health decline but also community-level malaise in terms of rising family dysfunction and crime levels. The indications are that the COVID-19 pandemic will detrimentally impact the poor even more severely than the middle and upper classes.

In an extensive review of research on urban poverty and neighborhood effects on crime, Corina Graif, Andrew Gladfelter, and Stephen Mathews found that in 2012 alone there were more than 250 articles on this topic.²⁵ On the basis of this robust research literature, these authors report that poverty and related characteristics of neighborhoods "continue to predict multiple crime-related outcomes, including: individual's exposure to violence … risk of victimization … adolescent violent crime … aggression … arrests for violent behavior … domestic violence … incarceration … and recidivism."²⁶ But some studies suggest that family poverty is even more predictive of adult crime than is neighborhood poverty. For example, Valentina Kikulina, Cathy Widom, and Sally Czaja examined the experiences of children with a history of neglect, gathering detailed information on both their family and neighborhood poverty.²⁷ They discovered that family poverty, but not neighborhood poverty, played a distinct and significant role in predicting whether those children end up getting arrested as adults.

For the purposes of research, a 'stand in' for wealth differences is educational differences: The poor are characterized by low educational attainment. A strong negative correlation has been demonstrated between crime and education: The higher the years of schooling, the lower the different indices of crime.²⁸ This begins with the earliest years of education: Attending preschool programs is associated with lower crime.²⁹ A one- year increase in average education levels was found to reduce state-level arrests by 11 percent.³⁰ There is evidence that the impact of education on crime is consistent across cultures.³¹ For example, a study in Sweden concluded that "one additional year of schooling decreases the likelihood of conviction by 6.7% and incarceration by 15.5%." One interpretation of this research trend is that those families who have the monetary and other resources to invest in the education of their young, from preschool onward, are also ensuring a lower likelihood of their better educated young ending up in prison.

While I have highlighted the victimization of the poor in the (in)justice system, it is also important to acknowledge the role of other factors, as reflected by intersectionality research. First, the vast majority of prison inmates are male; for example, in 2016 males made up 93 percent of the total prison population in the United States; the imprisonment rate per 100,000 US residents for male adults was 1,109 and for female adults it was only 82.³² A variety of factors influence this difference, including higher aggressive behavior among males,³³ and biological and sociocultural differences.³⁴

A second huge disparity is based on ethnicity: A disproportionally high number of African Americans serve prison time in the United States.³⁵ In 2016 the imprisonment rate for Whites was relatively low (only 274 per 100,000 US residents) but for African Americans it was 1,609 – almost six times as high.³⁶ In a study of life after leaving school among American men, Joo Hee Han found that relative to Whites, Black men have an 84 percent higher risk of experiencing incarceration.³⁷ Although crime rates in the United States have been falling since the 1990s,³⁸ the incarceration rate of poor African American men has increased. In 2014 Ronnie Tucker predicted that "if these trends continue in America, one in three African American men born today can expect to spend time in prison during their lifetime."³⁹ The school-to-prison pipeline is particularly destructive for African American men.⁴⁰ But underlying these trends are harsh economic disparities, captured by a 2017 Washington Post headline "White families have nearly 10 times the net worth of black families and the gap is growing."⁴¹ The African Americans ensnared by the prison system are almost exclusively poor, as are the White Americans in prison.

What Happens to Them in Prison?

There was a quadrupling of expenditures on corrections between 1980 and 2010.⁴² Given this increase in costs, we would expect prisons to have become much better at educating and reforming prisoners – particularly given the positive impact of education on crime, as we reviewed early in this chapter.

The most obvious group to focus on to assess the impact of incarceration is young people: They can be more readily influenced by educational programs and have more time to reap the benefits of educational and reform opportunities over the course of their lives. Anna Aizer and Joseph Doyle conducted a very well designed study that examined outcomes for two groups of youths charged with a similar crime, those who were and those who were not sent to a juvenile detention center.⁴³ The results clearly demonstrate the detrimental impact of incarceration in the United States, which imprisons young people at a rate seven to eight times higher than other comparable countries.⁴⁴ Those who were sent to a detention center were 22 percent more likely to be incarcerated as an adult and 13 percent less likely to graduate from high school. Rather than 'reforming' juveniles, incarceration negatively impacted their lives and lowered their beneficial contributions to society.

The reasons why incarceration has a detrimental impact on youth are not difficult to discover. Detailed documentation of violence and other abuses against incarcerated youth reveals a sustained pattern of mistreatment in juvenile detentioncenters.⁴⁵ Major national reports of the experiences of incarcerated youth reveal at least half of the youth suffered solitary confinement of more than twenty-four hours,⁴⁶ solitary confinement being a practice with well-documented detrimental outcomes.⁴⁷ At least one in ten incarcerated youth suffer sexual abuse at the hands of a staff member,⁴⁸ but some studies report higher levels of abuse. For example, one study of incarcerated youth reported that almost all of them experience some type of abuse.⁴⁹ Both for incarcerated youth and adults, the reported levels of abuse in prison probably underestimate the problem, because in many detention centers, there are inadequate systems for incarcerated individuals to report abuse.⁵⁰

Research studies focused on both incarcerated juveniles and adults in different juvenile detention centers and prisons show that incarceration is a time of continued criminal behavior,⁵¹ in part because the environment of detention centers and prisonsare conducive to criminality. In their current form detention centers and prisons fail to educate and reform incarcerated juveniles and adults.

What Happens to the Families of Those Who Go to Prison?

Broadly conceptualized, the prospective link between early life exposure to violence and victimization and subsequent antisocial behaviors is known as the cycle of violence.
Matt DeLisi et al. (2010)

In considering the question of what happens to the families of the incarcerated, it is useful to adopt a 'cycle of violence' perspective. This is because in many cases the individuals who are incarcerated have experienced personal abuse, belong to families with a history of abuse, and help to shape a next generation that suffers abuse. The juvenile detention center and/or prison is just another component of the 'cycle of violence,' which could only be broken by an intervention that involves serious educational and reform alternatives and opportunities. As they exist today, juvenile detention centers and prisons are not intended to, nor do, provide these. They simply perpetuate cycles of violence.

Collateral Consequences of Incarceration

An extensive research literature demonstrates that incarceration detrimentally impacts the families of incarcerated individuals.⁵² Researchers have described this impact as "collateral consequences,"⁵³ involving a wide range of processes, from perceptions of greater injustice and unfairness at the individual level to damaged ability to participate in civic and community life. The key factor causing damage to family life is the removal of a central member, typically the father, rather than the type of institution (e.g., federal, state, or local facility) in which the individual is incarcerated.⁵⁴ A direct and perhaps the most important consequence of a father's removal is the increased likelihood of the union dissolving and the mother moving on to a new partner.⁵⁵ Of course, this does not mean that the dissolutions of unions is always bad. But the emotional impact on children is often detrimental.⁵⁶

What Is the Wider Psychological Purpose of Incarceration?   

Following Sara Wakefield and her colleagues,⁵⁷ it is useful to conceptualize the 'collateral consequences' of incarceration as consisting of two categories: informal and formal. In addition to breaking up romantic partnerships and marriages, "For the children of incarcerated parents, parental incarceration increases mental health and behavioral problems, infant mortality, homelessness, grade retention, body mass index, harsh parenting, and material hardship, among many other social problems."⁵⁸ But incarceration also has wide formal consequences for the families of prisoners. Formerly incarcerated persons are not able to hold certain jobs and are in highly important ways excluded from participating in civic life, such as voting in elections and serving on juries. These exclusions have important wider political and social consequences, because convicted formerly incarcerated persons are disproportionally poor, male, and African American and their disenfranchisement results in further weakening of political influence among African Americans.

Moreover, research has demonstrated that the boys of incarcerated fathers are significantly lower on measures of noncognitive school readiness (i.e., aggression, anxiety, concentration, depression, disobedience, hyperactivity, social withdrawal),⁵⁹ and they also have more behavioral problems.⁶⁰ The children of incarcerated, paroled, and recently released parents are estimated to number about 3.2 million in the United States.⁶¹ Consequently, incarceration is having a detrimental impact on the educational performance and overall behavior of large numbers of children, particularly lower-class males.

Despite progress in some areas of civil rights since the 1960s, the incarcerated population in the United States is pushed to the side and given less importance in politics and policy decision-making. For example, conventional data on educational attainment excludes the incarcerated population, and it consequently seriously underestimates the level of inequality in educational attainment across social classes and ethnic groups. Stephanie Ewert and her colleagues estimate that by excluding the incarcerated population, high school dropout rates are underestimated by about 40 percent for young African Americans.⁶²

What Is the Wider Psychological Purpose of Incarceration?

What are we to make of the so-called 'prison boom' in the United States and the widespread use of prisons in many different countries around the world? By the second decade of the twenty-first century there were about 1,700 correction facilities in the United States, housing a population of about 2.3 million prisoners.⁶³ From our discussion of the research literature so far in this chapter, it is clear that the incarcerated are predominantly lower class and the families of the incarcerated suffer severe consequences – particularly when the prisoner has a child who is a minor, which is in about half the cases. As part of a 'cycle of violence and deprivation,' the children of incarcerated parents are transformed into victims, becoming less likely to succeed in education and more likely to commit crimes.

Increased presence of police at schools is worsening the situation for students with behavioral problems. Police presence has been increasing because of school shootings, such as the tragic events that took place at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012, when twenty-six people were shot and killed. However, empirical evidence suggests that increased police presence at schools also increases the probability that a child will be referred to a police officer even for a minor offense, which previously would have been dealt with by teachers and other school staff.⁶⁴ Consequently, the effort to place police officers in schools as a way to make students and school staff safer has had the unintended consequence of making schools an even less supportive place for students who have more behavioral problems – the children of incarcerated parents tending to disproportionally be among these.

The evidence clearly shows that education serves as insurance against a person going to prison, but as things stand, incarceration does not serve to reform or educate the majority of the incarcerated. Studies of recidivism in the United States,⁶⁵as well as the available international evidence,⁶⁶ show a pattern of repeat offenders, studies showing between 50 percent and 80 percent of offenders being rearrested within five years of their release and nearly 50 percent returning to prison within three years of their release.⁶⁷ The empirical facts clearly demonstrate that prisons as they function today do not reduce recidivism; as Francis Cullen and colleagues demonstrate, it is factually incorrect to argue that prisons teach criminals that crime does not pay.⁶⁸ Given the enormous investment authorities in the United States and other nations have made in the so-called prison industrial complex, and given that clearly education and reform are not the prime effects of incarceration, prisons must be serving a different purpose.

The Wider Function of Prisons

It is probably more accurate to claim that twenty-first-century prisons have taken shape through multiple factors and motivations, rather than one or a few. At the broadest level, as argued by Michel Foucault (1926–1984), the prison serves a wider function of discipline, similar to schools and other institutions, that help shape the cognitions and actions of modern citizens, particularly the lower class.⁶⁹ The discipline and control function of the prison is closely tied to its punishment function: Prisons not only consist of extremely difficult conditions for inmates during the period of incarceration but also lead to intense stress and hardship after release. Studies of the experiences of prisoners after their release demonstrate that reintegration into society is extremely difficult, often involving long periods of unemployment, financial stress, reliance on others for food and shelter, poor housing or homelessness, and psychological isolation.⁷⁰ Bruce Western and his colleagues have noted in their study of life after release from prison that "In the larger context of the poor neighborhoods and poor families to which former prisoners return, leaving prison is a challenging transition that strains surrounding sources of assistance."⁷¹ Of course, most prisoners are unable to reintegrate successfully and return to prison.

Financial motives also directly and indirectly influence the growth and shaping of modern prisons. Private companies have far more extensive influence in the lives of the incarcerated population than is suggested by the percentage of the prison population that is managed by private companies (private companies manage 8.4 percent of the US prison population and 5.4 percent of the jail population⁷²). At the organizational level, the hierarchical and disciplinary organization of prisons and factories are similar.⁷³ In this sense, it is a 'natural' move for private corporations to play an increasingly important role in government operated prisons and jails, such as by 'providing employment opportunities' for prisoners, for which prisoners receive very little or no pay. There is some variation across states in how much money prisoners receive for their work, with some extremes where they receive almost nothing. For example, "Although ninety percent of prisoners in Florida work, most of the prisoners are unpaid. One study estimates the average hourly wage at $.02 an hour."⁷⁴ On average across states in the United States, prisoners who are 'employed' retain only about 20 percent of their wages,⁷⁵ although international surveys show a lot of variation across nations.⁷⁶

Private corporations also treat prisons and jails, as well as the entire incarcerated population and the prison guards and other staff, as a huge opportunity for profit making. Prisoners do not profit from prison, but the American private sector does. The market for a wide range of goods and services to the incarcerated population of over two million provides enormous business opportunities and profits. These goods and services include food, clothing, medication, and health services, as well as specialized equipment and technologies for prison guards. The profit motive explains why the prison population remains stubbornly high, despite the decline in crime rates since the 1990s. A number of popular books have examined the role of the profit motive in shaping the prison system,⁷⁷ but unfortunately the political clout of the incarcerated population and their families remains too insignificant to reform the prison system.

Concluding Comment

[N]othing could be made of it by anybody.
Charles Dickens, Bleak House⁷⁸

Although the prison features prominently in Great Expectations and a number of his other novels,⁷⁹ it is in Bleak House and the infamous case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce that Dickens attacks the justice system most comprehensively and directly. People are pulled into the 'justice system' as if they have entered a thick fog, quickly losing their way, unable to make any sense of what is happening to them. The twenty-first-century reader might imagine that the justice system of the nineteenth century as explored by Dickens is far removed from our twenty-first-century justice system – and this is true for middle- and upper-class people. But for the lower class, things have really not changed much since Dickens wrote about prisons, the justice system, and unfairness in society.

When looked at from the perspective of the lower class, there is little that is fair about the justice system in the United States and most other major societies – it is designed to ensnare the poor of all ethnic groups and genders. Psychologists are giving more attention to the plight of the poor, entrapped by a prison system that punishes them for profits. As Chris Surprenant points out, "Incarceration is big business in the U.S.A."⁸⁰ Businesses that provide food, clothing, and services to the approximately 2.3 million prisoners in the US prison system make large, sometimes gigantic, profits. In exchange, these prisoners often provide labor either without pay or for a pittance and receive no education or training of value. Prisons and the injustice systemas experienced by the lower class need to become a more important focus in psychological science. The psychological research that does examine social class differences in ethical behavior suggests that higher-class individuals are more likely to behave unethically when such behavior benefits themselves.⁸¹ What keeps the rich from ending up in prison is their greater wealth, not their more ethical behavior.

- This is Chapter 9 from Fathali M. Moghaddam's How Psychologists Failed: We Neglected the Poor and Minorities, Favored the Rich and Privileged, and Got Science Wrong, published with kind permission from Cambridge University Press.

Notes

1 Wakefield and Uggen (2010, p. 401).

2 Reiman and Leighton (2016).

3 The terminology used to discuss incarcerated persons has been changing; see Shalby (2019). I have tried to use terminology that is more neutral.

4 Foster and Hagan (2015).

5 Western and Pettit (2010, p. 9). Mears and Cochran (2018) make the same point: "Individuals in prison have substantially worse educational … histories as compared to the general population" (p. 30).

6 Page, Piehowski, and Soss (2019).

7 Epstein finally met a kind of justice in prison when he (apparently) took his own life, but as chronicled so diligently by Julie Brown (2021) his wealth and influence kept him out of the reaches of the law for decades.

8 De Carvalho and Bantim (2019).

9 For a broader discussion of prison riots, see chapter 12 in Wooldredge and Smith (2018) and Wooldredge (2020).

10 Kulig, Pratt, and Cullen (2017) provide a reasonably balanced discussion, arguing that psychologists should be more demanding regarding replication of results, particularly in the case of studies such as the Stanford prison experiment. Le Texier (2019) provides a more damning discussion of Zimbardo's prison study.

11 Kim, Losen, and Hewitt (2010).

12 Kearney et al. (2014).

13 Scott-Hayward and Fradella (2019).

14 Schweitzer and Nuñez (2017).

15 Franklin (2017).

16 Woolard (in press).

17 Reiman and Leighton (2016).

18 Wheelock and Uggen (2008).

19 Heller, Jacob, and Ludwig (2011).

20 Geller et al. (2009).

21 Carson and Golinelli (2013).

22 Zorbaugh (1929) and Shaw and McKay (1942).

23 Ellen, Lacoe. and Sharygin (2013).

24 Stuckler et al. (2011).

25 Graif, Gladfelter, and Mathews (2014).

26 Graif, Gladfelter, and Mathews (2014, p. 1141).

27 Nikulina, Widom, and Czaja (2011).

28 Freeman (1996) and Lochner (2004).

29 Lally, Mangione, and Honig (1988) and Schweinhart, Montie, and Xiang (2005).

30 Lochner and Moretti (2004).

31 Hjalmarsson, Holmlund, and Lindquist (2014) and Hjalmarsson and Lochner (2012).

32 Carson (2018).

33 Archer (2004).

34 See Choy et al. (2017) and Schwartz, Steffenmeier, and Ackerman (2009).

35 Campbell, Vogel, and Williams (2015, p. 199).

36 Carson (2018, Table 6).

37 Han (2018).

38 Tonry (2014); see also Kearney et al. (2014).

39 Tucker (2014, p. 135)

40 Barnes and Motz (2018).

41 Jan (2017).

42 Kearney et al. 2014).

43 Aizer and Doyle (2015).

44 Aizer and Doyle (2013).

45 Mendel (2011).

46 Sedlak and McPherson (2010).

47 Human Rights Watch (2012).

48 Beck, Harrison, and Guerino (2010).

49 Dierkhising, Lane, and Natsuaki (2014).

50 Dumond (2000).

51 For example, see Trulson et al. (2010) for juveniles and Steiner and Wooldredge (2008) for adults.

52 For a review of this literature, see Foster and Hagan (2015).

53 Lee, Porter, and Comfort (2014).

54 Wildeman, Turney, and Yi (2016).

55 Turney (2015).

56 Amato (2000).

57 Wakefield, Lee, and Wildeman (2016).

58 Wakefield, Lee, and Wildeman (2016, pp. 11–12).

59 Haskins (2014).

60 Geller et al. (2009).

61 Haskins (2014).

62 Ewert, Sykes, and Pettit (2014).

63 Eason (2010).

64 Nance (2016).

65 Katsiyannis et al. (2018).

66 There is a lack of systematic and comparable statistics on recidivism across nations, but Fazel and Wolf (2015) provide a tentative picture.

67 Durose, Cooper, and Snyder (2014).

68 Cullen, Jonson, and Nagin (2011).

69 Foucault (1995).

70 For examples, see Western et al. (2015) and Western (2018).

71 Western et al. (2015, p. 1541).

72 See Gaes (2019) for a discussion of research on prison privatization.

73 See Melossi and Massimo (1981).

74 Katzenstein and Waller (2015, p. 639).

75 Katzenstein and Waller (2015).

76 Van Zyl Smit and Dunkel (2018).

77 For example, see Dyer (2000) and Eiser (2017).

78 Dickens (1970, p. 324).

79 See Alber (2007) for a more comprehensive discussion of how Dickens incorporate the prison in his novels.

80 Surprenant (2019, p. 124).

81 Piff et al. (2012).