![]() They found that while the prisoners scored lower on extroversion, openness, and agreeableness, as you might expect, they actually scored higher on conscientiousness, especially the 'sub-traits’ of orderliness and self-discipline. For another recent paper – one of the few to apply the Big Five model to prisoner personality change – researchers compared the personality profiles of maximum security prisoners in Sweden with various control groups, including college students and prison guards. However, other findings offer some glimmers of hope. There is surprisingly little research on how these chronic features of the environment might change prisoners’ personalities in terms of the “Big Five” model of personality that dominates most modern research on the general, non-prison population (based around the key traits like extroversion and conscientiousness). Key features of the prison environment that are likely to lead to personality change include the chronic loss of free choice, lack of privacy, daily stigma, frequent fear, need to wear a constant mask of invulnerability and emotional flatness (to avoid exploitation by others), and the requirement, day after day, to follow externally imposed stringent rules and routines. Particularly for anyone concerned about prisoner welfare and how to rehabilitate former convicts, the worry is that these personality changes, while they may help the prisoner survive their jail time, are counter-productive for their lives upon release. ![]() It is almost inevitable then that time spent as a prisoner, in a highly structured yet socially threatening environment, is bound to lead to significant personality changes. But recent research has found that, in fact, despite relative stability our habits of thought, behaviour and emotion do change in significant and consequential ways – especially in response to the different roles that we adopt as we go through life. In the field of personality psychology, it used to be believed that our personalities remain largely fixed in adulthood. Or in the stark words of a long-term inmate interviewed for research published in the 1980s, after years in prison “you ain’t the same”. The prison problem that's often ignoredīased on their interviews with hundreds of prisoners, researchers at the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge went further, stating that long-term imprisonment “ changes people to the core”.In a report on the psychological impact of imprisonment for the US government, the social psychologist Craig Haney (who collaborated with Philip Zimbardo on the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment) was frank: “few people are completely unchanged or unscathed by the experience”. This is especially true for those facing long-term sentences – in England and Wales, around 43% of sentences now last more than four years. If they are to cope, then prisoners confined to this kind of environment have no option but to change and adapt. You are separated from family and friends. Love or even a gentle human touch can be difficult to find. ![]() There is threat and suspicion everywhere. Day after day, year after year, imagine having no space to call your own, no choice over who to be with, what to eat, or where to go. ![]()
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