Doctoral Dissertation Research: Under the Penal Gaze: An Empirical Examination of Penal Consciousness Among Prison Inmates

本研究的目的是更全面地了解两种不同类型的惩教管理-间接和直接监督-对被监禁人群的相对影响。间接监督的特点是官员和囚犯之间很少面对面接触，通常在传统的线性房屋设计的监狱中实施。相比之下，在公共区域较大的受欢迎的住房单元中，直接监督需要官员和囚犯之间更频繁的互动。直接监督是一种相对较新的囚犯管理策略，被联邦监狱局、美国惩教协会和国家惩教研究所称赞为“最佳做法”。本研究采用比较的定性设计来了解直接和间接监督的细微差别和工作原理。它通过对囚犯进行深度访谈的数据来建立刑罚意识新概念的框架——定义为囚犯理解和适应监禁作为惩罚的方式——然后探索不同环境下不同囚犯群体的刑罚意识。通过利用刑罚意识框架来更好地理解直接监督，本研究在很大程度上改进了直接监督的理论工作，这些工作在真空中接近囚犯管理，脱离了当前对监狱环境的理论理解。此外，它的定性设计扩大了调查的范围，以包含一个更全面、更情境化的观点，即囚犯如何经历和适应监禁作为惩罚。通过比较、定性的设计，本研究通过突出对受罚者的解释，为关于监禁的理论、实证和政策文献提供信息，以便更全面地理解作为生活经历和国家项目的惩罚的轮廓。

The purpose of this research is to more fully understand the relative impacts of two different styles of correctional management - indirect and direct supervision - on incarcerated populations. Indirect supervision is characterized by minimal face-to-face contact between officers and inmates and is often practiced in prisons with traditional, linear-style housing designs. In contrast, direct supervision entails more frequent interaction between officers and inmates in podular housing units with large common areas. Direct supervision is a relatively new inmate management strategy that has been lauded as a "best practice" by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the American Correctional Association, and the National Institute of Corrections. This research uses a comparative, qualitative design to understand the nuances and workings of both direct and indirect supervision. It does so by using data from in-depth interviews with prisoners to establish a framework for the new concept of penal consciousness - defined as the ways in which prisoners understand and orient to their incarceration as punishment - and then exploring penal consciousness among different populations of prisoners in different settings.By utilizing a penal consciousness framework to better understand direct supervision, this research improves upon the largely atheoretical work on direct supervision that has approached inmate management in a vacuum, divorced from current theoretical understandings of carceral environments. Further, its qualitative design expands the scope of inquiry to encompass a fuller, more contextualized view of how prisoners experience and orient to incarceration as punishment. Through its comparative, qualitative design, this research informs the theoretical, empirical, and policy literatures on incarceration by bringing to the fore the interpretations of those who are punished in order to develop a more complete understanding of the contours of punishment as both a lived experience and a state project.