Imprisoned Men: Masculinity Variability and Implications for Correctional Programming

ABSTRACT

Prison is a place with an accumulation of men who espouse toughness and aggression, where those who deviate are punished and forced to renegotiate their thoughts on what it means to be a man. Behaviors not considered overtly masculine, such as receiving support in the form of correctional programming, may be off limits to men serving time. Guided by the larger masculinities and crime framework, we examine the perceptions of masculinity and its consequences through in-depth, semi-structured interviews with five incarcerated men in the state of Arizona. We focus on three questions: what does it mean to be a man? Does the prison experience alter this conceptualization? Does this conceptualization affect participation in correctional programming? Our results reveal that there is variation in how incarcerated men define what it means to be man, the incarceration experience matters for how incarcerated men define and express their masculinity, and what it means to be a man in prison indirectly impacts engagement in correctional programs.

KEYWORDS:

• Correctional programming
• masculinity
• incarceration
• prison code
• rehabilitation

Notes

1. A reviewer pointed out that not all prisons are violent. We acknowledge and agree that differences in the racial composition of prisoners and staff and the way that prisons are managed, for examples, can influence the level of violence within prisons (Steiner, 2009).

2. Prior to consenting the men, the Institutional Review Board of the authors’ home institution reviewed and approved the study to ensure integrity and ethicality.

3. Data available for the entire prison population did not include marital status, educational attainment, or number of years served on current sentence. As such, demographic comparisons between the sample and larger prison population can only be made for age and prior incarceration.

4. Quotes were edited for non-word utterances, speech fillers, and grammar to allow for ease of interpretation. Member checks were used to ensure accurate representation of the quotes.