The Positive And Negative Impact Of The Incarceration System

Being held in the incarceration system has been seen to negatively impact how the prisoners succeed when they leave prison and reenter society. Some of these barriers include education, employment, finances, housing, and family reunification. Forty three per cent of sentenced prisoners said they had lost touch with their families since coming to prison; and over one in five who were married when they came to prison had since divorced or separated (SEU, 112). Social isolation makes it hard for the person to interact with others on release, quite apart from the stigma of being an ex-prisoner. This social isolation can especially be seen in the context of a family. Parents who return from periods of incarceration still dependent on institutional
Being held in the prison system also has a very negative impact on the prisoners’ emotions. As a prisoner told the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health, “Being in prison and not knowing when you’re coming home-it smashes your head to pieces (SCMH, 2008).” It can be difficult to offer quality mental health treatment in corrections facilities, says Haney, because "prisoners are reluctant to open up in environments where they do not feel physically or psychologically safe" (Incarceration Nation, 5). Also, the transition to care outside of prisons often is spotty. "Prisoners essentially fall out of the system because there's not an effective pass-off to the service providers in the community," Haney says (Incarceration Nation, 5). There is little or no evidence that prison systems across the country have responded in a meaningful way to these psychological issues, either in the course of confinement or at the time of
There is this idea of positive psychology, which can be described as the study of the factors that produce and nurture positive emotion (Hatcher, 1). The concept of positive psychology is easiest to use in groups because it offers a number of “homework” exercises that can be completed outside of the group. By putting inmates into groups of 5-9, psychologists can start to instill positive emotions in inmates. Because of the abundance of negative feelings in prison, it makes sense that men who are incarcerated would welcome an opportunity to experience positive emotions. In the groups, the psychologists start by measuring positive and negative moods over the course of the group, and have in each group found an increase in positive moods and a decrease in negative moods from week to week. Second, the psychologists have had individual inmates who told them in no uncertain terms that they “had never thought like this” and that they found the process to be very helpful to them. With the constantly changing prison system, prison officials have begun to look at what they can do to help inmates in their time after release. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services says, “Prisoners must be given some insight into the changes brought about by their adaptation to prison life. They must be given some understanding of the ways in which prison may have changed them, the tools with which to respond to the challenge of adjustment to the free