CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION
Fostering inmate-family relationships has only recently assumed some measure of importance to correctional planners and administrators with the advent of Work Furlough programs in several states and the Family Visiting Program in California. While prisoner visiting programs date back to the colonial period, relatively little time or effort was devoted to such programming, and the prisoners were in effect expected to maintain their family relationships as best they could under a number of restrictions involving eligibility, time limitations, and travel distances. Even today visiting and correspondence are largely viewed as "privileges" in many prison systems and not as an integral part of a treatment or rehabilitation program. l/
The growing awareness of the family and its importance in American correctional systems collates well with developments along these lines in other countries and with general social science theory and findings regarding delinquent sub-cultures and the dehumanizing effects of total institutions. 2/ Certainly it seems clear that other criminal justice agencies, such as the police and the courts, routinely take marital status and family ties into consideration in making very important decisions concerning the individual. 3/
In keeping with the current general trend in corrections toward community-based treatment programs and increased community involvement and recognizing the relative lack of information on the family and rehabilitation 4/, this report will attempt to pull together the existing information in California regarding the prevalence of various types of prisoner-family relationships, and their impact on inmate behavior, both inside prison and later on parole. Information from several independent sources is presented in this report, some obtained from already existing studies and some obtained from new studies designed to provide data for this report.
This work is an exploration of the subject and attempts only to define issues and look for probabilities rather than provide definitive answers. Even the strongest findings reported here suffer from a lack of replication.
Methodology and Overview
Chapter II introduces the subject by presenting data regarding the prevalence of the various kinds of marriage ties among newly committed inmates and how this prevalence compares with that in the general population. The data for this chapter were compiled by the Administrative Statistics Section of the Research Division of the California Department of Corrections. It covers all new admissions to the Department during 1968.
Chapters IV, V, and VI report the results of the investigation of the relationship of prisoners with their families. The basic concern was to find out what effects imprisonment had on the inmate's ties with the outside world and what effects these social ties had on his behavior, first in prison and later on parole. By way of setting the stage for these three chapters, Chapter III presents data on the frequency of outside contacts and the relationship of visitors and correspondents to the inmates. The data are broken down by ethnic group and marital status in order to show the diversity of social patterns inmates bring to the institution. Chapter IV takes up the problem of the deteriorating effect imprisonment is generally thought to have on the inmate's relationship with his family and friends. Here the concern is whether or not inmates who have served longer amounts of time have fewer outside contacts. Chapter V explores the relationship between the inmate's institutional performance and the number of his visitors and correspondents, attempting to answer the question, "Do inmates behave better when frequent contact with family and friends is maintained?" Chapter VI investigates the often stated proposition that maintaining strong family ties has a rehabilitating effect on the inmate. The inmate's performance on parole is analyzed in attempting to answer the question, "Are former inmates who had more contacts with the outside world while in prison more successful on parole?"
The data for this section were gathered at the Southern Conservation Center in Chino, California. The location of the center and its five conservation camps greatly facilitates visiting, as the vast majority of the approximately 1,000 inmates are from counties in Southern California. In the camps visiting is allowed all day Sunday in a picnic atmosphere, while the Center provides for visiting Wednesday through Sunday in the morning and afternoon. Each inmate is limited to a list of ten approved visitors, but the number of times he is visited by these people is limited only by the number of hours he has for this purpose. Similarly, all his approved visitors may visit at the same time. The list of approved correspondents is likewise limited to ten people, but no restrictions are placed on the total number of letters that can be received. Outgoing mail is limited, however, to one letter each day. To be approved each correspondent or visitor must first fill out and return a short questionnaire which is checked by the inmate's caseworker.
The sample used in the study consisted of the 843 inmates who appeared before the Adult Authority parole board at the Southern Conservation Center from July 1968 to July 1969. The usual procedure is for the inmate, after he becomes legally eligible for parole, to have a hearing before the board once each year until a parole date is granted. Thus the sample should adequately represent the institution's population. In the few cases which were heard twice during the year, only data developed for the first appearance were used.
The document which supplied the data was the pre-board report to the Adult Authority. These reports are made up by each inmate's caseworker about a month prior to his parole hearing. Information on the inmate's contacts with his family and outside friends is contained in the "social" section of the report. The caseworkers compile this section from the inmate's visiting and correspondence card, on which each letter and visit is logged in. The caseworker lists each person contacting the inmate and tallies the number of visits or letters received since the inmate's last board appearance and then roughly divides these by months or weeks to get an overall average. By the name of each person, he lists his relationship to the inmate and the average frequency of his visiting or corresponding during the previous year (e.g., Mrs. Jones, wife, visits once a month, corresponds twice per week). In this report, the focus will generally be on the number of different people who have visited the inmate during the year rather than the total number of visits he has received.
Marital status is not routinely recorded in the pre-board reports and was available from another source for only 362 of the cases in the sample.
The institution's population is composed of short-term offenders doing their total sentence in the conservation program and long-term inmates sent from more secure institutions to finish their time under minimum security conditions. While this population has representatives of most of the categories of California prisoners, there are notable exceptions, such as sex offenders. In addition, the inmates in the conservation program are more likely to be at a later point in their institutional careers than their counterparts in medium security prisons. While this sample might be taken as reasonably representative of felon prisoners in California, no information was available to the authors on the comparability of California prisoners to those in other systems.
The most appropriate population to which the results of this study can be generalized is the minimum security inmates in California, although there are reasons to believe that most of the results could be replicated in California's medium security prisons. Any attempt to extend the findings to other populations, however, must be done highly tentatively. Because of this and the summary nature of the available data on contacts, we have chosen to interpret the results of the study conservatively. A difference of a few percentage points has generally been ignored unless it is reflective of a trend in the data or reinforced by other findings.
Chapter VI contains a follow-up of inmates in the sample to a point approximately two years after their parole board hearings and an evaluation of the parole performance during their first year after release of those who had been paroled before February 1970. Involved in this evaluation were 412 cases or about half the original group. The parole follow-up data were collected by the Research Measurement Unit of the Research Division of the California Department of Corrections. This unit also supplied the information for the parole follow-up in Chapter VII. In the system of the Research Measurement Unit, the parole status of each parolee is recorded at six months, one year, and two years. Any difficulty with a law enforcement agency is noted and the status on parole of each parolee is expressed in summary form in terms of the most serious disposition received. For purposes of this study, dispositions were classified into three categories, no arrests at one extreme, return to prison at the other, and all other dispositions in the middle.
In Chapter VII two experimental programs, Family Visiting and Temporary Release, are evaluated in terms of inmate acceptance and the success on parole of their participants. Both are viewed as constructive alternatives designed to overcome some of the problems associated with conjugal visiting programs. Since much of the resistance among prison administrators to marital visits appears to result from a concern about management problems which might be created by those who cannot participate, the reactions of inmates to these programs are examined closely to discover just how resentful non-participants actually are. The second part of the chapter compares the parole performance of inmates involved in the two experimental programs with a comparable group of non-participants to determine if participants have less difficulty on parole.
In the final chapter, there is an attempt to draw out some of the implications of these findings and suggest some directions for future research.
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1/ For example, see The Manual of Correctional Standards, American Correctional Association, 1969, p. 342.
2/ See, for example, Glueck, S. and E. Glueck, One Thousand Juvenile Delinquents, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1934; Rodman, H. and P. Evans, "Juvenile Delinquency and the Family: A Review and Discussion" in Task Force Report: Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, 1967; and Goffman, E., Asylums, Anchor Books, New York, 1961.
3/ See Babst, D. and J. Mannering, "Probation Versus Imprisonment for Similar Types of Offenders," Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, Vol. 2, No. 2, July 1965; and Cicourel, A.V., The Social Organization of Juvenile Justice, John Wiley & Son, Inc., New York, 1968.
4/ For details concerning an earlier attempt to introduce a family treatment program into the California correctional system see Fenton, N., The Prisoners Family: A Study of Family Counseling in an Adult Correctional System, Pacific Books, Palo Alto, California, 1959.
