The purpose of this research is to more fully understand the relative impacts of two different styles of correctional management - indirect and direct supervision - on incarcerated populations. Indirect supervision is characterized by minimal face-to-face contact between officers and inmates and is often practiced in prisons with traditional, linear-style housing designs. In contrast, direct supervision entails more frequent interaction between officers and inmates in podular housing units with large common areas. Direct supervision is a relatively new inmate management strategy that has been lauded as a "best practice" by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the American Correctional Association, and the National Institute of Corrections. This research uses a comparative, qualitative design to understand the nuances and workings of both direct and indirect supervision. It does so by using data from in-depth interviews with prisoners to establish a framework for the new concept of penal consciousness - defined as the ways in which prisoners understand and orient to their incarceration as punishment - and then exploring penal consciousness among different populations of prisoners in different settings.
By utilizing a penal consciousness framework to better understand direct supervision, this research improves upon the largely atheoretical work on direct supervision that has approached inmate management in a vacuum, divorced from current theoretical understandings of carceral environments. Further, its qualitative design expands the scope of inquiry to encompass a fuller, more contextualized view of how prisoners experience and orient to incarceration as punishment. Through its comparative, qualitative design, this research informs the theoretical, empirical, and policy literatures on incarceration by bringing to the fore the interpretations of those who are punished in order to develop a more complete understanding of the contours of punishment as both a lived experience and a state project.
At a moment in which mass incarceration has potentially reached its zenith and prisons across the country struggle to provide constitutionally defensible housing for prisoners, research on incarcerated populations is arguably more important than ever. This one-year study looks inside prison walls to examine how prisoners experience punishment while they are incarcerated. Most individuals involved in the process of incarceration—whether prisoners or criminal justice practitioners—would agree that incarceration is punishment. Indeed, prison is punitive by design. To more fully understand the nature of punishment, however, it is crucial to avoid simply equating prison with punishment. In the interest of providing a nuanced look at the types of punishment experienced in prison, this study asks the following questions: What do prisoners experience as punishment while in prison? How do they describe their punishment? What meaning does their punishment have for them? What affects the perceived harshness of their punishment? To answer these questions, I interviewed 80 Ohio State prisoners about their experiences with punishment. I gained access to three Ohio State Prisons, where I randomly selected 40 male and 40 female prisoners from a subset of housing areas within each prison. After being selected for inclusion in the study, I interviewed each prisoner about topics related to prison life in general and experiences with punishment in particular. The average interview lasted just over an hour and utilized a flexible set of questions that allowed prisoners to define and discuss punishment in their own terms and at their own pace. Findings reveal that prisoners consider a wide range of phenomena to be part of their punishment while in prison. Concrete punishments cited by prisoners included medical neglect or mistreatment, inadequate or unhealthy food, and the inability to pay for necessities that were not provided by the prison. These punishments were described as relatively circumscribed, hinging on the presence or absence of concrete, material things. Other punishments, in contrast, were experienced as symbolic of larger losses or injustices, and were wide-reaching in both their scope and impact. Among the numerous symbolic punishments experienced as integral to prison life, four types of loss loomed largest: the related losses of autonomy, self, and personhood, and the loss of family. In order to investigate the patterned nature of punishment, data on this diverse array of punishments were examined along two discrete dimensions: severity and salience. Severity refers to the intensity or magnitude of punishment as it is experienced by the prisoner. The severity of punishment, experienced by prisoners on a spectrum from barely noticeable to practically unbearable, depends in large part on whether punishment is experienced as concrete or symbolic. Concrete punishment is generally experienced as low in severity, while symbolic punishment is experienced as higher in severity. The second dimension, salience, refers to the prominence of punishment in the prisoner’s life. Like severity, salience of punishment can vary from almost imperceptibly low to strikingly high. The salience of punishment is determined by the gap between a prisoner’s expectation of punishment and her actual experience of punishment. The interplay between severity and salience results in an individualized experience of punishment that forms the substance of what I call penal consciousness—an orientation to and understanding of punishment from the point of view of those who experience it. Through an attentiveness to penal consciousness, we—as non-incarcerated people—can more fully understand the composition of punishment as it takes shape inside prison. This study informs the theoretical, empirical, and policy literatures on punishment by bringing to the fore the interpretations of those who are punished in order to develop a more complete understanding of the contours of punishment as both a lived experience and a state project. The implications of this study are not limited to incarcerated populations, however. There is a long tradition in the social sciences of exploring populations and circumstances at the margins in order to understand not only the marginal, but also the typical. This study achieves both of these goals by examining what has become a typical form of state control—incarceration—but is by no means typical for the average American.
