Coping Strategies of Prisoners in a Maximum Security Prison. Minimals, Optirnals and Utilitarians

Abstract

Adaptation, or coping, has historically been an important aspect of prison life for students of penal policy. Sociologists in particular, following Donald Clemmer, have focused much of their attention on the processes of assimilation into the prison culture. Data gathered in a maximum security population of a large midwestern prison calls into question the salience of the prisonization concept in contemporary prisons. In particular. the solidary model, at the heart of the prisonization concept is absent and findings suggest that contemporary prisoners, far from joining their peers in soliclarity and opposition to the administration, are overtly self-serving in dealing with prison life.