What Prison Does to a Person

Sociologist Erving Goffman described the intake procedure at a closed institution like this: your personal clothes are taken away, you are issued a uniform, your belongings are inventoried, your name is often replaced by a number, and from that point on, someone else makes your schedule. He called this the mortification of the self - not cruelty, but a conveyor belt that strips away everything a person once used to define themselves.

Then the lack of choice takes over. Inside, you don't have to decide when to get up, what to eat, or where to go: it has been decided for you. The ability to choose doesn't disappear, but it stops being practiced - like a muscle in a cast. That's why, after a long sentence, people often say the same thing: faced with a shelf of a dozen kinds of bread, they want to turn around and leave.

As early as 1940, this was called prisonization: a person absorbs the internal rules much as you absorb the language of a country you live in. In a 2001 review, psychologist Craig Haney broke it down into parts - and none of them looks like something broken. Each was a sensible response to an environment where weakness is noticed first.

How deeply this takes hold varies greatly: the length of the sentence, age, conditions, whether there was solitary confinement, and whether anyone remained outside all matter. There are few long-term observations after release, so the honest answer to the question "when will it let go?" is this: some habits fade over months, while others last for years.