Module 01: Reflection Assignment 1: Interview with Dr. Gendreau about Prison System
Shelley Brown: Hello, everyone in criminal behavior world. Thank you, Dr. Gendreau, for being here today. It’s my pleasure to have you here to share some insights about prisons. So apparently, you’ve been doing lots of publishing recently on prisons specifically. Do you want to tell us about that?
Paul Gendreau: I’d love to. Do we have two or three hours? I can give a Fidel Castro like speech on this stuff.
Shelley Brown: I know you can.
Paul Gendreau: OK.
Shelley Brown: Five minutes.
Paul Gendreau: Here we go. Well, I started out as a prison psychologist. And it’s where my heart has always been. And at the end of my career here, I seem to be more deeply involved in it than ever. I just find prisons fascinating environments. And maybe I’m living in the old days.
When I worked at Kingston Penitentiary it was a, what an intriguing place it was. You had your psychiatric unit classification department. The physical structure of the institution was interesting in terms of its architecture. It was almost like out of an old movie set.
We had a big musicians dorm. And being interested in music, we’d have quite a few guys there that were good jazz players and stuff. And we had very good baseball teams and outsiders would come in. In one way I was just there during the good years but, I guess, because there was a riot shortly after I left. But the whole mix was fascinating, the way it was run, and the inmates’ committees, and how decisions were made, working in the psychiatric unit.
Shelley Brown: What’s an inmate committee? I don’t think many students would know what an inmate committee is.
Paul Gendreau: These would be senior inmates, mainly by reputation and status, who would be consulted by the warden in regard to various sorts of issues. I’m not too sure if they exist anymore.
Shelley Brown: They do. Yeah, they do.
Paul Gendreau: But the nature of the men on the committee was interesting and how they would try to present their issues and finesse things, and how the administration would try to deal with them to keep the institution functioning in a relatively safe way. It was politics, of course, but it was fascinating.
And there was a lot of movement in those institutions too, whereas now we have many institutions where they’re just locked down and they have sort of Soviet Treblinka kind of designs, which are totally uninteresting, whereas these old institutions had an incredible amount of character. Having said that, I was recently in another country where they had these old classic institutions. And they were just terrible in terms of their hygiene, and so on, and so forth. But any case, the dynamics of an institution.
And for the students, there are three major theories of how an institution functions. One is a deterrence perspective that comes from an economic view that if you go to an institution, it can be punishing, it can make you straighten up and fly right. It’s a humiliating experience, and the last thing you want to do is ever go to that institution again or get involved in crime because you don’t want to go back to a prison. This view has been modified a little bit by economists who would argue that, well, if you’re in a prison, there is an optimal period of time where you should be in a prison that would have a deterrent effect. And by a deterrent effect, you would be, so-called, rehabilitated.
Shelley Brown: Reformed.
Paul Gendreau: And it’s again based on that simple-minded economic view that if the cost is severe enough, you will behave. As a matter of fact, the deterrence view has no empirical credibility whatsoever, despite sometimes various governments espousing the fact that it is a deterrent. There have been a number of meta analysis, and I think one of the first was ours, Paula Smith and Claire Goggin in 2002, that it showed that, in fact, whether you spent more or less time in a prison, or you were put in the community or went into a prison, there was no deterrent effect. In fact, there was a slight increase in crime of several percentage points.
Shelley Brown: So, deterrence is a form of punishment, right?
Paul Gendreau: Yes, it is. And it’s based on the simple-minded notion that prison sounds like an unpleasant place, and so you should not want to be there. Some economists have argued that, well, prison is such a common experience that so many individuals, and particularly within the African-american context in the US, that it’s no longer much of a punishment if many people have had experience with it.
But it should be a punishment for low-risk offenders who have the most to lose. These are individuals with families and a job to go back to, and it should be punishing to them. So for example, Conrad Black kind of example. But meta analysis indicate that no matter how you look at, and much more research has to be done, clearly a policy of incarcerating people for longer periods of time slightly increases recidivism.
Shelley Brown: It has no impact at all on reducing crime.
Paul Gendreau: No impact.
Shelley Brown: It makes things worse.
Paul Gendreau: And there’s a number of reasons for that, but
Shelley Brown: For another day.
Paul Gendreau: For another day. But clearly the policies that we embarked upon in Canada, the ones they’ve had in the US, have made the situation less safe for the community, yet it’s been very saleable because fear of crime is such a powerful motivator in public policy.
The other approach is the schools of crime. Now that make sense. Yeah, you go to prison and you’re going to, who are you hanging around with? Just a bunch of other criminals. And you’re going to become much worse. For any students who are interested in the topic, I recommend a 1980 article in Psych Bulletin by Bucktel and Kilmann, which is a classic. It’s almost never cited any more, but it’s a wonderful work.
Shelley Brown: I’m sorry, who?
Paul Gendreau: Bucktel and Kilmann.
Shelley Brown: OK.
Paul Gendreau: I’m glad to provide you the references if you ever use them in class.
Shelley Brown: I’m going to write that down and put it on the website.
Paul Gendreau: And this view comes from a sociological chronological perspective And it also comes from the work of developmental psychologists, like Patterson, many, many years ago. This theory has partial validity. It’s a very useful theory. And it indicates that individuals who are adversely affected by prison life, in terms of recidivism rates, are low-risk offenders.
And that makes sense from the point of view of any social learning theory or, in criminology, a differential association model, which was once an operant conditioning model. But they don’t say that, to protect the profession of criminology, and that is that low-risk offenders going into institutions where they are associating with high-risk offenders, the high-risk offenders generally call the shots. And when you associate with somebody, even though you’re leery of doing that, it’s going to have an effect.
Shelley Brown: It makes you worse.
Paul Gendreau: It makes you worse.
Shelley Brown: Schools of crime.
Paul Gendreau: So, it’s a school of crime. But it’s not a school of crime for high-risk offenders. I mean, they already have their PhD in crime before they ever get to prison. They’re A-plus students.
Shelley Brown: These are undergrads. Low-risk offenders are like undergrads.
Paul Gendreau: Yes.
Shelley Brown: Being trained by the PhDs.
Paul Gendreau: That’s right. Something like that. So the school of crime theory is an important one. And as a matter of fact, if I had one policy only to advocate in the criminal justice system, it’s divert low-risk offenders from prison. Put them on probation, far, far cheaper. Keep them out of the hands of high-risk offenders. That’s the only thing you could do. You’d have a huge cost savings and reduce crime by, I think, several percent.
The third theory is a Canadian born theory. Actually, it came out of criminology at one time. But it is two psychologists in Canada, Frank Porporino and Ed Zamble. Zamble is retired. Frank Porporino lives in Ottawa, as a matter of fact.
Shelley Brown: I did my PhD with Zamble, Dr. Zamble.
Paul Gendreau: OK. And it’s a psychological deep freeze theory. And it’s a powerful theory because many people don’t cotton on to it or ever even think about it, that, look, prisons aren’t, in theory, run in a somewhat ethical way that follows the Geneva Convention of rules. Prisons are just there, as it were. The behavior you see in prisons is the behavior you saw before the individual offender ever got into prison. The individuals that cope badly in prison, do poorly, are ones that showed bad coping mechanisms well before they got there.
Shelley Brown: So, they’re just importing what they already have.
Paul Gendreau: Importing. Thank you. Importation theory, I just forgot the name of it. And so this is a powerful theory that has a lot of credence to it. It doesn’t apply to everybody. And it’s due to Zamble and Porporina for their excellent work in that regard.
Another way of asking about the fact, can anything be done positively in prisons, we produced, Sheila French and I, a meta analysis in Criminal Justice and Behavior in 2005 showing that if you apply the principles of R&R to prison behavior, and we looked at programs that might reduce misconducts in prison. And we found that, in fact, the R&R theory works in terms of reducing misconduct, which is important for the safe and humane running of institutions. It shows the viability of the R&R model to a prison setting.
It also shows that misconduct behavior in prisons is a proxy. It’s a good facsimile of recidivism in general. So those individuals you see in prison who are acting out and being difficult and, as it were, committing crimes within the prison setting are ones that are going to have high recidivism rates when they are released.
The big issue I have here is that
Shelley Brown: Big final issue about prisons.
Paul Gendreau: Yeah. Who’s going to do this necessary research to look at these models in prison? And again, I’m living in the old days. I was fortunate enough to work at a time when you could work in prisons and do this kind of research. And now more and more prisons are becoming a closed shop. I hear comments that it’s almost impossible to access prisons to do the necessary kind of research. People who are interested in doing research, like myself and others, don’t exist in prisons. The prison psychologists have other things to do, and so on, and so forth.
And so now we have people doing research in prisons who have never been in a prison themselves. In a sense, they’re trying to do the best they can. But they’re armchair quarterbacks. And you have to work within the prison to get the necessary data that we were able to when we had lots of psychologists who had an empirical bent to generate that information. So, it’s a fun area, exciting kind of theories.
Shelley Brown: So, lots of good nuggets regarding prisons. So, students, three important theories of prisons, why they’re supposed to work. First one is deterrence theory. Put people in jail, put them in longer, they won’t do crime when they get out, but the research doesn’t support that.
Second perspective is that prisons are schools of crime. So, if you put low-risk offenders in with those high-risk offenders, you’re actually going to make those low-risk offenders worse. Prisons are a school of crime. They’re not actually going to deter people. If you put lower risk people in, you’re going to actually make themw worse, make them better criminals.
And the last one was this notion of a deep freeze. People go into prison with what they’ve got, the problems that they’ve got, and they just are frozen in time. That prison isn’t doing anything to change and rehabilitate. R&R works in prison to the same extent it does outside. It reduces prison misconducts. And it is getting a little more challenging, perhaps, to do research in prisons. It’s not insurmountable, but more challenging.
So how about solitary confinement. Do we have a two-minute sound bite?
Paul Gendreau: A two-minute soundbite?
Shelley Brown: A two-minute sound, what do students need to know about solitary confinement and what the current political climate and/or debate is, research debate. It’s we shouldn’t do it, or we should do it. What do you think? Is it a
Paul Gendreau: Well, first of all, the view that solitary confinement produces the dramatic effects that many people say they do is not based on much evidence. It’s based on ideology.
Shelley Brown: So, the evidence that people say it has detrimental effects to that health and well-being is
Paul Gendreau: Strong limitations as to how that prison is run.
Shelley Brown: OK.
Paul Gendreau: It is really a complex matter. All of these publications are coming out now by ourselves and our own research group, Bob Morgan at Texas A&M and ourselves here. And so I almost sort of dumbfounded as to how to close a conversation on it because there are so many things to say, but then I would produce a [? confused ?] message. So all I can say is that you have supplied all of the references and the material, and they can be presented and gone over in class.
Shelley Brown: Do you know what? I think we can put out maybe one of your most recent publications on segregation.
Paul Gendreau: By the way, we have a dual replicating meta analysis coming out in an APA journal in the next month that outlines all of the minefields and the issues. And we’ll leave it at that.
Shelley Brown: OK. So I’m closing the main point to take away about segregation. Jeez, can we even summarize in
Paul Gendreau: Well, I’ll summarize it
Shelley Brown: In a minute.
Paul Gendreau: this way. When you see disruptive behavior, disturbing behavior, in institutions, it’s more how people are treated by their captors. And there’s an interaction, because some of the people in segregation or some inmates are not nice people. And their interaction with their guards can be explosive. And that causes a problem, much more so than the physical conditions of their incarceration, if they meet general humane standards that we’re supposed to meet. All bets are off when you have the pelican days where people are denigrated and they’re locked up under conditions that you’d see in a prisoner of war camp.
The other point of view is that we underestimate how many individuals do adjust to solitary and do very well. Now, that’s another complex argument. But that’s not an argument for using segregation. We’re on record, Jim Bonta and I, way back in 1984, that people, if they go into segregation, should be monitored carefully, at least every two weeks, that they should not be there for more than 30 days, and that the use of solitary confinement is a lazy way of running a prison. And there are some very promising ways of making the situation better. But there are a few individuals that may need continuous, as it were, dosage of very close control because they are so violent.
Shelley Brown: So, students, in summary, solitary confinement, this is a great area to do future research in and policy development, is how I’ll leave that.
Paul Gendreau: And by the way, our own government has cut down the use of solitary substantially.
Shelley Brown: They have, indeed.
Paul Gendreau: But I won’t get into the reasons why that is, but we’ve written about it elsewhere.
Read this interview and answer the following questions.
Name and describe each key prison theory discussed by Dr. Gendreau.
Describe why prisons in and of themselves do not actually reduce crime.
What does Dr. Gendreau’s think about solitary confinement (also known as segregation)? Is he for it? Is he against it?
