Stone Walls and Iron Bars: Effects the Psyche of the Inmates

The prisons are nowadays called as correctional institutions and the prison service tries to reform and rehabilitate the prisoners to lead normal lives when they leave prison. To rehabilitate the inmates, one should understand the psychological sufferings and degrading experience of being locked in a cage. People in prison experience mental deterioration and apathy, endure personality changes, and become uncertain about their identities. First of all sending to prison itself is dangerous or traumatising, next comes the pain, miseries, loss of family, separation, etc. The paper focusses on psychological effects of incarceration which concentrates on deprivation of liberty, privacy, independence, loss of identity and diminished sense of self, social withdrawal and isolation (compulsory isolation from the system and voluntary isolation from oneself and others), and idleness. It briefly explains the means how conviction affects the family and children and within one night their world is collapsed. The paper pointed out how prisonization deconstructs the psyche and reconstructed oneself by adaptation and through reformation process. Also, the paper presenter observed that the most of the studies about inmates indicates that the prison population are taken as a whole or general and not individual being. In future the studies should be focussed on how individuals with particular personality characteristics or self-conceptions react to the conditions and situations of prison life.