Criminology Research Council grant ; (1/82)
A sample of inmates from a maximum security prison (Goulburn, New South Wales) were asked to rank a series of statements concerning the prison environment on scales of importance and satisfactoriness. The statements concerned the following matters: quality of prison food, freedom of movement in prison, relations with prison officers, handling of inmate grievances, amount of prison earnings, frequency of cell searches, frequency of visits allowed to prisoners, fairness of prison discipline, fairness of classification criteria, certainty of release date, relations with other inmates, educational opportunities for inmates, quality of prison work and opportunities for inmate recreation.
It was hoped that by establishing separate scales for importance and satisfactoriness on these matters, the observed disparity between the importance attached to a specific issue, and its rated (un)satisfactoriness would provide an index of the sources of inmate dissatisfaction in prison. It was also expected that by linking the ranking of specific features of the offender (e.g., age, term of imprisonment, number of previous imprisonments etc.) the homogeneity of attitudes to the prison environment for different sub-groups of offenders could be examined. The results obtained from these procedures could then be used (a) to identify the important aspects of the prison environment to aid in the design and implementation of new prison programs; and (b) to provide a baseline from which to assess the effects of new prison programs in general.
The execution of the study was hampered by the small number (n = 65) of inmates willing to participate in it. It is unclear why the early willingness to participate gave way to resistance, however several inmates reported fears of victimisation. In any event the small number vitiated the possibility of comparisons among sub-groups of the prison population. Separate scales of importance and satisfactoriness for the entire sample were therefore established. The results suggested - (a) that quality of prison food and freedom of movement clearly ranked both the most important and most unsatisfactory features of the prison environment; (b) that the features of opportunities for inmate recreation and quality of prison work received low ratings of important and satisfactoriness, and (c) that there is greater homogeneity of attitudes among inmates as to what is unsatisfactory than there is with respect to importance.
These results, limited though they may be, suggest that the sources of inmate discontent still are the 'prosaic' issues raised by inmates during inquiries of the Nagle Royal Commission into prisons. Whether sub-groups of inmates differ in the relative importance or satisfactoriness they attach to the surveyed issues, and what the precise structure of inmate grievances may be, are questions which will have to await further research.