experiencing
imprisonment
As we saw in chapter 1, many criminal psychologists work within
prisons where they will assess, manage and treat offenders in their
care with the aim of reducing their likelihood of reoffending on
release from prison. In addition to these responsibilities, prison
psychologists also conduct research related to imprisonment.
Such research can aim to increase our understanding of what
imprisonment is like with a view to enhancing rehabilitative
efforts or it may focus on the evaluation of the effectiveness of psy-
chological interventions in place. Academic criminal psycholo-
gists working in universities have also been conducting such
research.
While chapter 10 outlines the research on the rehabilitation of
offenders, this chapter will introduce you to the research con-
ducted on how being imprisoned can affect prisoners and how
they cope with this experience.
So, when considering the numbers of people affected by
imprisonment, how many are we actually talking about?
According to the International Centre for Prison Studies there are
over 8.5 million people imprisoned worldwide. Although this is a
very high number, should we really be concerned about how
imprisonment affects these people? Some newspaper reports
132