Female Initial Psychological Adjustment to Prison as Related to Ethnicity and Other Relevant Characteristics

Female Offender Research Today, it is not surprising that the literature reported reflects the ongoing need to fully understand the criminal mind, personality dynamics and behavior, as well as how to rehabilitate this individual. This statement is especially true for male offenders. Yet with the recent emergence of the female criminal within the past three decades, a paucity of research has been done and reported on this group in the Criminal Justice System and with the correctional department in particular. A variety of reasons ranging fro sexism to racism have been offered to explain this shortage. French (1978) contends that men suffer from a self-deception concerning women, an attitude which is internalized during the socialization process and is employed to rationalize the subordinate roles females are assigned in our social order; hence, males are hesitant to credit females with such "masculine" action such as crime. Another explanation indicates that female criminality was really Black criminality (Sarri, 1986). Still others suggest that because women have had unequal economic and political status, they have therefore had unequal access to both services and research (Rasche, 1975). The most compelling reason noted is that the preponderance of male criminologists who rail to consider women's criminality as worth serious study (Johnson, 2002; French, 1980; Silverman, 1982). Consequently, this group of offenders and their problems are relegated to secondary and tertiary status within the United States' Criminal Justice System. Although the number of studies reported on female prisoners has shown small increases in recent years, it is clear that they do not come close in rivaling the volumes of systemic and comprehensive data reported on male prisoners. This imbalance has and is creating problems for the female correctional system; namely that few, if any, female prisoner models exist today. Consequently, the female correction systems continue to adopt and use male prisoner models that lack female concerns, input, and understanding, but equally as important, have highly questionable validity for use with women in this correctional environment (Schram et al., 2004; White, 2002; Langan & Pelissier, 2001; Chesney-Lind, 1991; Denmark & Jaffee, 1979; Rasche, 1975). This lack of comprehensive understanding does not bode well for the female correctional system, given the projected number of females being convicted of various crimes and subsequently court committed to prison according to the United States Department of Justice. Since the early 1960's, when female prison population was 7,688, there has been a steady growth, but the real explosive growth began in the decade of the 80's when the female population was 13,420 and, ended with an incarcerated female population of 40,556 (United States Department of Justice, 1991). This increase of 27,000 plus represented growth of 202.2% within the decade. As of year-end 1995, the number of women under jurisdiction reached a record 68,544 (United States Department of Justice, 1996). That is a 61,146 and 7,398 State and Federal inmates respectively. This growth of female inmates continued at a steady pace and as of year-end 2005, the U.S. Department of Justice (2006) reported a total female prison population of 106,174. This trend suggests that the female population could be well over 150,000 by year-end 2015, given an annual growth rate of about 5.2%. The focus of the limited amount of research on female prisoner adjustment has been restricted in scope, type, and settings. Although the literature reports on various phases of female prisoner adjustment (Jiang et al., 2006: Islam-Zwart & Vik, 2004; Walters 2003; Loper, 2002; Casey-Acevedo & Bakken, 2001; Mackenzie et al., 1995: Paulus & Dzindolet, 1993), hardly any have focused primarily on the initial adjustment to the prison environment coupled with implications for correctional management of mental health management. …