Institutional Agression

Institutional Agression

1. Importation Model

   • Interpersonal Factors
     • IRWIN & CRESSEY claim that prisoners bring their own social histories and traits with them into prison and this influences their adaptation to the prison environment. They argue that prisoners are not 'blank slates' when they enter [rison and that many of the normative eyelet,s developed on the outside would be 'imported' into the prison.
   • Gang Membership
     • Within prison environments, gang member ship is consistently related to violence and other forms of antisocial behaviour. Several studies have found that gang members disproportionately engage in acts of prison violence. Pre-prison gang member ship appears to be an important determinant of prison misconduct. Members of street gags offend at high levels than their non-gang counterparts and account for a disproportionate amount of serious and violent crime. For example, HUFF found that gang members in the US were ten times more likely to commit a murder and three times more likely to assault someone in public than were non gang members of a similar age and background.
   • Situational Factors - the 'deprivation' model
     • This model argues that prisoner or patient aggression is the product of the stressful and oppressive conditions of the institution itself (WATERLINE & PETERSON). These include crowding, assumed to increase fear and frustration levels and staff experience. For example, HODGKINSON et al found that trainee nurses are more likely to suffer violent assault than experienced nurses, and in the prison setting, length of service was also a significant factor with more experienced officers being less likely to suffer an assault (DAVIES & BURGESS).
   • The 'pains of imprisonment'
     • SYKES described the specific deprivations that inmates experience within prison and which might be linked to an increase in violence. These included the loss of liberty, the loss of autonomy and the loss of security. For example, SYKES found that the potential threat to personal security increased anxiety levels in inmates, even if the majority of prisoners posed no significant threat to them. Inmates may cope with the pains of imprisonment in several ways, Some choose to withdraw through seclusion in their cell or living space, whereas others choose to rebel in the form of violence against other prisoners or against staff.

2. Institutional Aggression Between Groups: Genocide

   • Dehumanisation - Although human beings usually have moral inhibitions about killing fellow humans, this changes if the target group is dehumanised so that its members are seen as worthless animals and therefore not worthy of moral consideration. In the RWAANDAN genocide, th influential Hutu-controlled 'hate' radio station RTLM encouraged Hutu listeners to murder their Tutsi neighbours by referring to the minority Tutsi and 'cockroaches'.
   • Obedience to authority - MILGRAM believed that the holocaust was primarily the result of situational pressures that forced Nazi soldiers to obey their leaders regardless of any personal moral repugnance. If, he argued, so many ppts in his study could administer painful electric shocks to a victim simply because they were told yo do so by someone in authority, the mighty Nazi regime would have no trouble making soldiers kill innocent, unarmed people.

3. Evaluation - Institutional aggression within groups: prisons

   • The Importation Model
     • This model have received some research support particularly in terms of individual factors such as age, education level and race. For example HARRER & STEFFENSMEIER collected data from 58 US prisons and found that the black inmates had significantly high rates of violent behaviour but lower rates of alcohol related and drug related misconduct than white inmates. These patterns parallel racial differences in these behaviours in US society and so support the importation model.
   • Gang Member ship
     • Evidence from DELISI et al challenges the claim that pre-prison gang member ship predicts violence whilst in prison. They found that inmates with prior street gang involvement were no more likely than other inmates to engage in prison violence. This lack of a correlation between the two, might,however, be explained by the fact that violent gang members tend to be isolated from the general inmate peculation, therefore greatly restricting their opportunities for violence. For example, FISCHER found that isolating known gang ,e,bears in a special management unit educed the rates of serious assault by 50%
   • The Deprivation Model
     • There is substantial research evidence to support the claim that peer violence is used to relieve the deprivation imposed by institutional cultures, such as prisons. MCCORKLE et al found that overcrowding, lack of privacy and the lack of meaningful activity all significantly influence peer violence. However, research in this area is not consistent in its findings. Research in psychiatric institutions, for example NIJMAN, found that increased personal space failed to decrease the level of violent incidents among patients.
   • Combining deprivation and importation models
     • JIANG & FISHER-GIORLANDO found support for both the deprivation and importation model as explanations of prison violence. They found that the deprivation model was better able to explain violence against prison staff, whereas the importation model was better able to explain violence against other inmates. The deprivation model is also challenged by research by POOLE and REGOLI. They found that the best indicator of violence among juvenile offenders was pre-institutional violence regardless of any situational factors in the institution.

4. Evaluation - institutional aggression between groups: genocide

   • The importance of bystanders
     • STAUB's model emphasises the importance of bystanders intervention in preventing genocide. Doing nothing, it appears, merely allows the killing to continue unabated and may even escalate it by signalling apathy or connect. However, bystander intervention does not necessarily end institutional aggression, as there is an important difference between the effect of intervention on duration and on severity of violence. In international or civil conflict, although intervention by outside agencies such as the UN can shorten a conflict, it might also hasten perpetrators to step up their genocidal policy within that period of time. In the Rwandan genocide, 800,000 people died in just 100 days, a staggering rate of 8,000 deaths per day.
   • Dehumanisation
     • Evidence for the destructive consequences of dehumanisation can be seen in many conflicts (Jews in the holocaust etc). However, dehumanisation may also explain violence against immigrants seen by some a 'polluting threats to the social order' (O'BRIEN).
   • Obedience to authority
     • MANDEL rejects Milgrams claims that obedience to authority was sufficient to explain the behaviour of the Holocaust perpetrators. He argues that Milgrams account is monocausal (i.e. ignore other possible causes) and simply does not match the historical record. For example, GOLDHAGEN suggests that the main causal factor in the atrocities was a for of anti semitism so deeply entrenched in the German people at the time that they implicitly condoned the elimination of millions of innocent Jews.

5. IDA's

   • Real World Application
     • A real world application of the deprivation model happened at the HMP Woodpile in the early 1990a. DAVID WILSON reasoned that if most violence occurs in environments that are hot, noisy and overcrowded, then this could be avoided by reducing these three factors. WILSON set up two units for violent prisoners that were less claustrophobic and 'prison like' and gave a view to outside. The typical noise associated with prison life was reduced and make by music from a local radio station. Temperature was lowered so that it was no longer stiflingly hot. Despite the fact that these changes virtually eradicated assaults on prion staff and other inmates, political pressures ('we can't have the worst prisoners having the best things') led to the units changing their regimes and developing in a different direction (WILSON)
   • Real World Application
     • Can we use insights into dehumanisation to explain a fairly recent social phenomenon - violence against foreign refugees or asylum seekers? Recent research suggests that personality may play an important role in this respect. Social dominance orientation (SDO) is a personality variable which predicts social and political attitudes. People who are high in SDO endorse social hierarchies and inter group inequality and see the world as a 'competitive jungle'. ESSES et al has demonstrated that individuals high in SDO have a tendency to dehumanise outgroup members and in particular foreign refugees and asylum seekers.
       • Media depictions of refugees portrayed as violating immigration procedures and trying to cheat the system cause greater contempt in SDO individuals than low SDO individuals and lack of sympathy for refugees in general. These negative attitudes become rationalised through 'legitimsing myths' (e.g foreign refugees are by nature socially deviant) which indicate to the high SDO individual that these groups deserve out hostility because they are somehow less human than others.