Personal Control and Inmate Adjustment to Prison

Although this concept has rarely been investigated systematically, the prison is an environment that severely limits inmates’personal control. This article applies theoretical and empirical advances in the area of personal control to the issue of inmate adjustment to prison. Personal control has three components: outcome control, choice, and predictability of future events. Research findings suggesting adverse impacts of limited control are discussed in light of their implications for prisoner adjustment. Several models of personal control, including the environmental/learned helplessness, individual difference/self‐efficacy, and incongruency/reactance models, are applied to the process of prisoner adjustment. Using these models, a conceptual framework for integrating past research in the sociology and social psychology of corrections is proposed, and directions for future research are discussed.