Living in Prison: The Ecology of Survival

Living in Prison offers an inmates' view of prison life, set against a backdrop of ""objective"" information, to understand how individual prisoners relate to and cope with their environment. Several salient inmate concerns emerged: privacy, safety, structure (stability of the environment), support (prison programmes), feedback (outside ties), activity and freedom. A ""prison preference inventory"" is presented to measure the relative importance of environmental concerns for individual prisoners. The conclusion drawn from this study is that organisations are more likely to achieve their objective if an attempt is made to match persons with relevant characteristics of particular surroundings. ""Living in Prison"" aims to make a major contribution to the fields of criminal justice and human ecology. It captures the flavour of inmate life and presents fully documented evidence that stress can be ameliorated through direct and practical intervention.