Doing Well or Just Doing Time? A Qualitative Study of Patterns of Psychological Adjustment in Prison

The rich body of prison literature suggests that imprisonment is a painful experience, even though imprisonment does not appear to uniformly cause psychological deterioration. However, psychological adjustment and its variations remain poorly defined in the literature. The aim of this study is to provide a framework for understanding psychological adjustment and describe patterns of adjustment of prisoners who are close to their release. Thirty semi‐structured interviews were conducted with male and female prisoners. Even in the same prison environment, prisoners showed a wide variety of patterns of psychological adjustment, characterised by differences in coping ability and functioning, mental health, subjective well‐being and outlook on the future.