Women, friendship, and adaptation to prison

While a considerable body of research exists on male strategies of adaptation to imprisonment, studies on the female response has been relatively limited to attempts to develop a theoritical model. This article applies an explanatory model with three adaptive approaches to women incarcerated in three prisons. Friendship, extra-prison, and prison specific variables are linked to adaptive responses and consequence variables. Prison specific variables seem to be the most influential; however, analysis reveals that friendship diversity has a critical impact on individual perceptions of prison conditions and on criminal identity. Our findings seem to coincide with recent studies. but depart from them by finding that pre-prison variables do not have key explanatory power. Friendship and prison specific variables are the core theoretical model variables linked to female adaptive strategies.