Violence in Prisons, Revisited

A close review of prison violence makes it obvious that a disproportionate amount of such violence is related to the mental health problems of prisoners, and that, in the U.S. at least, this appears to have become increasingly the case. One reason for the trend is that prison administrators have been routinely relegating disturbed disruptive inmates to disciplinary or administrative confinement settings that exacerbate their difficulties. The familiar cycle of symptomatic behavior-to-punitiveness-to-symptomatic behavior-to-disruptiveness can be tracked through chronological reviews of individual prison careers; the same reviews can serve to illustrate the prospects of addressing mental health problems and interrupting violence chronicity through ameliorative interventions.