How Prisons Create Crime: Prisonization and the Practices of Ex-Prisoners

• In Event: Deterrence, Labeling and Prisonization

Abstract

Sociologists have explained the rise of mass incarceration in terms of broad social and historical shifts driving punitive penal policy: the growth of populations marginalized from the formal labor market, the angst and insecurities of late modernity, the breakdown of old regimes of racial control. But the current scale of imprisonment is only made possible by processes that create recidivism as a systemic feature of the prison system: the last nationwide study by the Bureau of Justice statistics found that two-thirds of those released from state prison are back behind bars within three years. A growing body of quantitative research suggests that one mechanism driving recidivism is built into the prison itself: the criminogenic effects of incarceration. Drawing on ethnographic research living at a halfway house and life history interviews with former prisoners, I examine the relationship between incarceration and crime by re-framing prisonization using concepts from Bourdieu’s theory of practice. I draw attention to the way imprisonment transforms basic habits and dispositions, and show how the process of prisonization interacts with broader structures impacting the lives of former prisoners to produce the criminogenic effects of incarceration.

Author

• Liam Martin, Boston College