Institutional aggression in the context of prisons: dispositional and…

The idea

Two rival accounts of why prisons turn violent. The dispositional or importation model, from Irwin and Cressey, says inmates carry street values, gang ties and violent histories in through the gate, so prison concentrates aggression rather than creating it; DeLisi found gang-affiliated young inmates were the ones who offended inside. The situational or deprivation model, from Sykes, blames the regime: the pains of imprisonment, lost liberty, autonomy, goods, intimate relationships and security, plus overcrowding and poor staffing, make aggression a way of regaining control. Steiner's survey of over five hundred prisons found inmate-on-inmate violence tracked situational variables, while Camp and Gaes found near-identical misconduct in randomly allocated security levels.

What earns the marks

• Definition: institutional aggression is violence occurring within an organised setting such as a prison, between inmates or directed at staff.
• Situational explanation, the deprivation model: Sykes's pains of imprisonment plus regime factors such as overcrowding, heat and staffing, with Steiner's prison-level situational predictors as evidence.
• Weighing the two: Camp and Gaes randomly allocated inmates across security levels and found similar rates of misconduct, which favours importation over the regime.

Common mistakes and how to put them right

• Swapping the labels: importation is the dispositional explanation and deprivation is the situational one, and reversing them costs the whole answer.

• Listing the pains of imprisonment without explaining why deprivation should produce aggression, namely as a coping response that restores some control.

• Leaning on Zimbardo's Stanford prison simulation as though it were evidence from a real prison, without noting the student volunteers and the demand characteristics.

• Describing prison violence in general terms instead of attaching each study to one named model.

Exam tips

• The stem gives the steer: a prisoner with gang tattoos and a violent record is dispositional, a newly overcrowded wing with staff shortages is situational; quote the detail as you name the model.
• Discuss expects both explanations, so keep the description tight and spend the remaining marks comparing how well each predicts who becomes violent.
• Finish by stating which model the evidence favours and why, rather than concluding weakly that both play a part.