Adapting to Prison Life: A Qualitative Examination of the Coping Process among Incarcerated Offenders

Research on general strain theory has demonstrated the impact of strain on decisions to engage in crime and delinquency. However, people differ in their responses to strain and only some resort to crime or delinquency. There remain gaps in our knowledge of when, and under what conditions, individuals will react to strain with offending behavior. We rely on interviews with 40 incarcerated men to understand how they cope with specific prison strains, and why they make such coping choices. We find considerable variation in inmates’ coping responses. They use a variety of coping strategies—behavioral, cognitive, and emotional—and only some of these strategies involve offending. Our findings indicate that responses to prison strain are partly a function of past experience with strains, including prior experimentation with coping techniques. Results highlight the unfolding nature of the coping process and expose factors that deserve further attention in tests of GST.     

Reviews

Paul R. Gregory, Restructuring the Soviet Economic Bureaucracy. Soviet Interview Project Series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, xii+181 pp., £25.00, $37.50.

Thane Gustafson, Crisis Amid Plenty—The Politics of Energy under Brezhnev and Gorbachev. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989, xxv+362 pp., $29.95.

John M. Kramer, The Energy Gap in Eastern Europe. Lexington: D. C. Heath, 1990, xiii+200 pp., $39.00.

William Moskoff, ed., Perestroika in the Countryside: Agricultural Reform in the Gorbachev Era. New York and London: M. E. Sharpe Inc., 1990, xii+135 pp.

Wlodzimierz Bras & Kazimierz Laski, From Marx to Market. Socialism in Search of an Economic System. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990, 177 pp.

B. P. Kurashvili, Strana na rasput'e. (Poteri i perspektivy perestroiki). Moscow: Yuridicheskaya literature, 1990, 176 pp., 60K.

Lajos Héthy, Mária Ladó & John E. M. Thirkell, eds, New Collective Forms of Work Organisation in Eastern Europe. Budapest: Institute of Labour Research, 1989, 210 pp.

Michael Kraus & Ronald D. Leibowicz, Perestroika and East‐West Economic Relations: Prospects for the 1990s. Geonomics Institute for International Economic Advancement Studies. New York: New York University Press, x+357 pp., $44.00.

George E. Hudson, ed., Soviet National Security Policy under Perestroika. London: Unwin Hyman, 1990, xv+343 pp., £38.00 h/b, £14.95 p/b.

Christoph Bluth, New Thinking in Soviet Military Policy. London: Pinter Publishers, 1990, viii+118 pp., £19.50 h/b, £7.95 p/b.

David E. Albright, Vanguard Parties and Revolutionary Change in the Third World: Soviet Perspectives and Their Implications. Institute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley: Policy Papers in International Affairs, No. 38, 1990, 126 pp., $9.50 p/b.

George Ginsburgs, ed., Soviet Administrative Law: Theory and Policy. Law in Eastern Europe, No. 40, issued by the Documentation Office for East European Law, University of Leiden. General Editor: F. J. M. Feldbrugge, Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1989, 516 pp., £92.50.

Albert J. Schmidt, ed., The Impact of Perestroika on Soviet Law. Law in Eastern Europe, No. 41, issued by the Documentation Office for East European Law, University of Leiden. General Editor: F. J. M. Feldbrugge, Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1990, 558 pp., £117.00.

Lynn Mally, Culture of the Future. The Proletkult Movement in Revolutionary Russia. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990, xxix+306 pp., $37.50.

Hans Günther, ed., The Culture of the Stalin Period. London: Macmillan, 1990, xxi+291 pp., £47.50.

George Sanford, ed. and trans., The Solidarity Congress, 1981: The Great Debate. London: Macmillan, 1990, x+270 pp., £40.00.

Ronald I. Kowalski, The Bolshevik Party in Conflict. London: Macmillan, 1991, x+244 pp., £35.00.     

Free radical production from controlled low-energy fires: toxicity considerations

Most fire departments respond within the first 5 min of notification of a fire. If fire victims are found at that stage by the firefighters, then incapacitation or death has occurred during the initial low-energy phase where smoke is being produced. Studies have shown that during this initial low-energy phase of the fire, gases commonly thought responsible for incapacitation or death are frequently not present in concentrations adequate to cause this result. In the current study free radicals, measured by electron spin resonance spectroscopy, were trapped in concentrations that we consider incapacitating, thus providing an explanation for "incapacitation without cause." This finding points the way to the design of more efficient temporary protective equipment for those who are in a high fire hazard environment, such as airline passengers, and suggests the idea of establishing a thermodynamic marker for the relative toxicity of building materials.     

Book reviews

Jerry F. Hough, The Soviet Union and Social Science Theory. Harvard University Press, 1977. Russian Research Center Studies, 77. xiv + 275 pp.

Fredrick J. Fleron, Jr. (ed.), Technology and Communist Culture: The Socio‐Cultural Impact of Technology under Socialism. Praeger Publishers, New York and London, 1977, 518 pp.

David Lane, The Socialist Industrial State: Towards a Political Sociology of State Socialism. London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1976. 230 pp. £5.95.

Edward L. Warner, III. The Military in Contemporary Soviet Politics: An Institutional Analysis. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1977. 314 pp.

Economic Relations Between Socialist Countries and the Third World, edited by Deepak Nayyar. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1977. xiv + 265 pp. £15.00.

Donald D. Barry, Georg Ginsberg, and Peter Maggs, Soviet Law After Stalin, Part I, The Citizen and the State in Contemporary Soviet Law. Leyden: A. W. Sijtoff, 1977. xv + 303 pp. D.fl.86.00. $36.00.

Fitzpatrick, Sheila (ed.), Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–1931. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1978. 309 pp. $17.50.

Tucker, Robert C. (ed.), Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation. New York: Norton and Co., 1977, xx + 332 pp. $19.95.

Maurice Friedberg, A Decade of Euphoria. Western Literature in Post‐Stalin Russia, 1954–64, Indiana University Press, Bloomington & London, 1977. xii + 372 pp. £13.15.

Gregory Walker, Soviet Book Publishing Policy, Cambridge University Press, 1978. xvi + 164 pp. £6.95

Raymond Pearson, The Russian Moderates and the Crisis of Tsarism, 1914–1917. London: Macmillan, 1977. 208 pp. £8.95.

Andrew Borowiec, Yugoslavia After Tito, Praeger Special Studies in International Politics and Government, New York and London: 1977. 122 pp.

B. Knei‐Paz, The social and political thought of Leon Trotsky. Oxford University Press, 1978. 629 pp. £15.00.

Bogdan Szajkowski, ed. Documents in Communist Affairs 1977. Swansea: Christopher Davies (Publishers) Ltd. in association with the University College Cardiff Press, 1978. 363 pp. £6.95 or £4.50 paperback.

Nonconformity and Dissent in the Ukrainian SSR, 1955–1975: An Annotated Bibliography. Compiled by George Liber and Anna Mostovych. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1978. xxxix + 245 pp.     

SCOTUS in the time of COVID: The evolution of justice dynamics during Oral arguments

We assess changes in oral arguments at the US Supreme Court precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the degree to which those changes persisted once the justices acclimated to the new procedures. To do this, we examine whether key attributes of these proceedings changed as the Court experimented with telephonic hearings and subsequently returned to in-person oral arguments. We demonstrate that the initial telephonic forum changed the dynamics of oral argument in a way that gave the chief justice new power and reconfigured justices' engagement during these proceedings. However, we also show that the associate justices adapted to this new institutional landscape by changing their behavior. The findings shed light on the consequences of significant, novel disruptions to institutional rules and norms in the government and legal system.     

Callous-Unemotional Traits and Social Information Processing: Multiple Risk-Factor Models for Understanding Aggressive Behavior in Antisocial Youth

This study examined multiple risk factor models of links among callous-unemotional traits, aggression beliefs, social information processing, impulsivity, and aggressive behavior in a sample of 150 antisocial adolescents. Consistent with past research, results indicated that beliefs legitimizing aggression predicted social information processing biases and that social information processing biases mediated the effect of beliefs on aggressive behavior. Callous-unemotional traits accounted for unique variance in aggression above and beyond effects of more established risk factors of early onset of antisocial behavior, social information processing, and impulsivity. These findings add to recent research showing that callous-unemotional traits are a unique risk factor associated with aggression and criminal offending and suggest that targeting both affective and cognitive vulnerabilities may enhance clinical intervention with antisocial youth.     

The Criminology of Homicidal Ideation: Associations with Criminal Careers and Psychopathology among Federal Correctional Clients

Homicidal ideation is a clinical construct that is almost entirely absent from the criminological literature. The current study examines the criminology of homicidal ideation using archival data from a population of federal supervised release felons from the Midwestern United States. ANOVA, Poisson regression, negative binomial regression, and epidemiological tables indicated that 12 % of offenders experienced evidence of homicidal ideation and these offenders perpetrated more murders, attempted murders, kidnappings, armed robberies, and aggravated assaults, had more severe and extensive psychopathology, and were more likely to be chronic offenders. Homicidal ideation is an important construct that should be studied more not only for its association with murder, but as an omnibus risk factor for severe criminality.