Book Review: Living in Prison: The Ecology of Survival
| Author | Grant Wardlaw |
| DOI | 10.1177/000486587901200209 |
| Date | 01 June 1979 |
| Published date | 01 June 1979 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
56
BOOK
REVIEWS
ANZJ Crim (1979) 12
politics
concerned
withpolitical institutions as
law
-shapingbodies.
However,
many
of
Dr
Hopkins' statements
appear
to lack definition for the reason that
he
fails to
specify
in
much
detail
what
he means, for example,
when
he talks of "business"
and
"vested
interests",
groups
to
whom
he
attributed
significant law-influencing
functions as such.
The
reader
is left largely to superimpose his
own
particular
ideas
of these concepts,
which
consequently colours his impressions
of
the validity
of
some
of
Dr
Hopkins' arguments. .
In conclusion, Dr
Hopkins
has
attempted
to deal,
somewhat
concisely,
historically, sociologically
and
politically,
with
the
development
of
our
antitrust
or
trade
practices law. In its
comparative
brevity
lies its
appeal
as a
broad
introductory
text to this
topic
and, as such,
Dr
Hopkins provides atext well
worthy
of consultation. As
already
discussed,
however,
the
scope
and
definition
of
some
ideas
presented
becomes
correspondingly vague for the reason
cited
above,
and
also
due
to
the
fact th-atsome of
the
sociological assertions
presented
are
insufficiently substantiated from
the
information sources disclosed in such a
short
work. This is
something
which
would
not
perhaps
have
happened
in a
study
of
some
greater
depth.
ANDREW
GOLDSMITH
Renmark, SA
Living in Prison:
The
Ecology
of
Survival. Hans
Toch,
New
York:
The
Free
Press (1977) xii +
3l8pp
$16.25.
It is a constant source
of
irritation for prison designers
and
administrators to
find themselves planning
and
operating
environments to serve
people
who
often
seem
ungrateful. Designers of mental hospitals, mass housing projects,
and
schools similarly are
often
perplexed
by
the
ingratitude of the
people
who
eventually inhabit their creations.
For
Toch, aprofessor
of
psychology at
the
School of Criminal Justice, State
University of
New
York at Albany, one of
the
central causes of
the
failure of
planned
environments to
meet
the
needs of their inhabitants is that
the
planners
work
towards
satisfying hypothetical, average
people
and
do not
account
for
the
diverse
and
changing
nature
of
real peoples' interactions
with
the
environment.
Nowhere
are the
consequences
of this limited
perception
more
manifest than in
the closed, controlled setting of a prison. It is here,
more
than
anywhere,
that
the
transactional nature
of
man-environment
relations is ignored.
And
it is inside
prisons which
Toch
and
his
team
attempt
to analyse stress transactions
with
a
view
to suggesting ways of
preventing
stress
through
ecological interventions.
The
method
chosen for this study was to
interview
700 inmates
and
200 staff
of the
New
York State prison system and,
from
the information gained, to
develop
aspecial instrument which was
administered
to 2650 inmates in five
major prison systems.
The
in-depth
interviews
uncovered
several distinct areas
of inmates' concern
about
their
environment,
and
their needs with
respect
to it.
Privacy, activity, safety, structure (stability of
the
environment),
support
(prison
programs),
freedom,
and
feedback
(outside ties)
are
all discussed in detail using
substantial excerpts
from
the
interviews. Differences in inmate responses to these
areas of concern are
then
analysed
according
to race, age, marital status,
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