Please note: This story contains graphic descriptions of violent acts.
American prisons are violent places, and while not every prisoner falls victim to violence, most are exposed to violence during their incarceration.
Researchers are now learning that even indirect exposure to violence can have impacts that last long after a person is released back into society.
These experiences can actually be “what criminologists call criminogenic, or crime producing,” said Meghan Novisky, who teaches criminology at Cleveland State University. She explained violent environments can do the opposite of what most people expect of correctional institutions. Rather than rehabilitating offenders, people can exit prison at an even higher risk for additional criminal behavior due to the violence they experienced while incarcerated.
Novisky co-authored a study published last year that examined the lasting effects witnessing violence had on 30 former state prisoners in Ohio who had collectively served time across 19 state prisons. Every one of the 25 men and five women that she and University of Akron criminology professor Robert Peralta interviewed had either directly experienced violence or had witnessed it at some point during their incarceration.
The stories recounted in the resulting report, “Gladiator School: Returning Citizens’ Experiences with Secondary Violence Exposure in Prison,” are brutal.
Former prisoners told numerous stories of seeing simple objects weaponized, such as metal locks, which are often packed into socks and swung with force. They spoke of being stabbed, having bones broken and being sex trafficked while in prison.
But they also shared many indirect experiences with violence that impacted them profoundly, such as having to clean up the blood of other prisoners who were attacked.
“I mopped up blood all over the floor. I mopped that blood for an hour,” one prisoner told researchers.
Another told of cleaning up after a prisoner cut the throat of a well-liked teacher on staff at the prison: “I had to clean up … and we found her little finger in the blood. He (the perpetrator) had cut her finger off; it was in the blood. I used so much bleach in that bathroom … I just couldn’t look. I just kept pouring the bleach in it, and pouring the bleach in it, and then I would mop it.”
Listen to the podcast
Quotes in this story were taken from the first episode of “Walled In,” a podcast co-produced by Street Roots and The Exiled Voice. In each episode, co-hosts Emily Green and Joshua Wright explore a different, lesser-known aspect of what it means to be incarcerated in America.
Many of these stories echo the accounts of people who served time in Oregon state prisons, as was revealed in the first episode of “Walled In,” a new podcast from Street Roots and The Exiled Voice.
Padlocks as weapons, prisoners cleaning up blood and other aspects of Novisky’s report appear to be commonplace in Oregon prisons, too, including policies of abruptly transferring prisoners in the aftermath of violent altercations.
“When people get seriously injured in prison, you usually don’t know what happens to them,” said Cody Connel, who spent more than five years inside Oregon state prisons. “And that is a really scary thing when you’re an inmate, and you see a fellow inmate get basically killed in front of you. And then you’re like, well, what happened to him? … You’re like, ‘man, that could be me.’”
Connel, who was released in 2017, suffers from some of the same long-term impacts expressed in the report, such as being easily triggered by loud voices. Joshua Wright, the formerly incarcerated co-host of “Walled In,” also experiences lingering effects from violence he witnessed. Wright saw a young man hang himself upon arriving in the prison system, and it’s an image that continues to resurface in Wright’s mind. “Sometimes it’ll just pop into my head, like, I’ll be closing my eyes — I’ll blink — and I’ll see that image in my head of this, this young kid dangling from his bunk,” Wright said. “That’s one thing in particular that I still struggle with.”
Novisky and Peralta “found that witnessing violence was a significant source of emotional and psychological strain” for those they interviewed.
To learn more about how witnessing violence in prison affects people after their release, Street Roots spoke with Novisky on “Walled In” about her report. This is an excerpt from that interview.
Emily Green: What did you learn about the frequency of violence that’s experienced within American prisons during the course of your research for this report?
Meghan Novisky: What I learned is that violence exposure in prison is probably happening more often than people in the community realize.
We do know based on prior research that about 2% of deaths in custody each year are due to homicide, for example. We also know that people in prison face risks for physical and sexual victimization when they’re incarcerated. One example of that is that 25,000 cases of sexual victimization were reported to correctional authorities in 2015.
But if we brought in what we mean by frequency of violence, or violence exposure, and include not only personal cases of victimization but also cases where people have witnessed the victimization of others, violence exposure becomes incredibly common, more so than personal victimization. So in my study, every participant, for example, reported witnessing violence inflicted on others while they were in prison.
Emily Green: I want to draw attention to the name of this report that you wrote. You borrowed the title “Gladiator School” from a former prisoner who described his incarceration in this way. What do you think American prisoners are learning in this environment, this so-called gladiator school, that they then bring with them as they enter back into society?
Novisky: The concern is that people are learning that violence is normal, and that violence is practical or even necessary as a solution to solve problems. So I’ll note that in addition to the term “gladiator school,” which symbolizes hurt-or-be-hurt mentality, people also describe their experiences with incarceration as war or combat zones. So that’s incredibly concerning when you’re thinking about when people are coming back into the community. If that becomes their kind of normal environment, what implications does that have as they’re returning to communities?
Green: And what did some of the people that you interviewed in the study say about that? I mean, how did that impact their interactions with other people they might run into on the street or people in their personal lives?
Novisky: Well, there was just some general struggles as far as probably things that come naturally for human interaction. So, for example, I remember talking to one person who recently got a job in retail and had anxiety when they were working because customers were always kind of standing around. And this person felt the need to kind of account for where other people were at all times because of fears they had based on their incarceration experience. So if you’re working in a retail environment and there are customers behind you, in front of you, to your side, that can be very anxiety provoking. So just kind of this feeling of constantly being on edge and hypervigilant of your surroundings can really impact interaction with other people.
Green: Some of the violence described in this report is just, it’s horrifying. But so are some of the byproducts of that violence that were described to you by people interviewed for this study. Former prisoners talked about seeing a person badly beaten, but then having no idea of whether they even lived or died because they would be removed from the general population and possibly transferred to another prison. Others talked about prisoners having to mop up massive amounts of blood after a fellow prisoner was badly beaten. And while your study took place in Ohio, we heard Joshua and Cody talking about really similar experiences right here in Oregon and our state prison system.
And I’m wondering, when correctional facilities have these policies around the aftermath of violence of having prisoners clean up the blood and of taking people out of the general population, just sort of disappearing them into the system, what kind of impact do these policies have on prisoners who might not have been directly involved in the violence but who either witnessed it or were responsible for cleaning up the mess afterward?
Novisky: I’m really glad you brought this up. I think this is so important. I don’t think we’re going to know the answer to this question fully without additional research looking at impacts longitudinally or over time. So we need some research studies that are tracking this. However, I can say that based on interviews that I had with people who experienced these byproducts, that they themselves perceive these events as having impacted their levels of anxiety, as having contributed to nightmares — they would have horrible dreams, taking them back to those moments — and in triggering psychological distress, even months or up to a year after release.
One thing that stood out to me in the interviews is participants I spoke with often stated they try to not even think about those experiences, because of the level of distress that it provokes in them. So there was this kind of understanding or this message that they were willing to talk to me about it because they were hoping that the study would lead to some positive policy changes. But otherwise, they try to kind of just almost pack it away and not think about it.
So I think the key point here is that narrow views of prison violence, so as looking at violence as having a victim and a perpetrator alone, it really misses capturing some of this collateral damage of prison violence that occurs to others who maybe weren’t the victim or the perpetrator, but were still very much affected and may be affected over their life course over a long period of time.
Green: I definitely saw that in a reporting project I did recently. I shadowed a man who was released from prison after spending 50 years of his life behind bars, who was also dying at the time of his release. His name was Billy Baggett, and as his life drew to an end, he kept returning again and again to traumatic events he had experienced in prison decades ago in the ’70s ’80s and ’90s. And it seemed he never really found a way to process a lot of this trauma.
What do you think we can do as a society to better help heal people like Billy, people who exit the system with these deep emotional wounds?
Novisky: I think that this is a really difficult question. It’s a very important question. I think the first step to helping people like Billy heal is for society to recognize that prison residents are human beings. So these are our neighbors, our parents, our brothers and sisters, our co-workers. And being convicted of a crime should not strip someone of their humanity or serve as a free pass to traumatize them.
Second, and relatedly, we need to acknowledge the harms that occur inside prison walls. And I like to point out that in no other context would it be acceptable for people to be violently victimized or exposed to these types of violent circumstances. This standard needs to apply to prisons as well. I think those two things, in combination with continuing to advocate for criminal justice reform and ensuring people like Billy have adequate mental health resources in place post-release so when they return to the community, are necessary next steps to help repair the types of wounds that you’re talking about.
Green: What kind of impact are you hoping that this report will have? And have you seen any impacts already since it was released last year?
Novisky: I hope the findings of our study serve as a call for more research on the extent of violence in correctional facilities. I mentioned an example earlier about expanding how we think about prison violence, looking at some of those collateral damages related to witnessing violence.
I also hope that our findings provide context about some of the barriers that people face when they’re attempting to reintegrate back into society, when they leave prison, and why incarceration should be a sentence of last resort.
So environments like the ones described in our report — and if listeners get a chance to kind of read through some of these accounts, they’ll see — these type of circumstances or environments are not therapeutic or rehabilitative. They’re actually what criminologists call criminogenic, or crime producing. In other words, these are the types of conditions that risk making people more at risk of additional criminal behavior versus making them less at risk, which, you know, should be the goal, of course, with any correctional intervention, including incarceration.
These types of environments are also dehumanizing, which can make people cynical about the criminal justice system, which also creates problems with additional criminal behavior, compliance with legal actors and things like that.
I guess, to kind of sum all that up, incarceration is used far too often, in the United States in particular. Our sentences are often far too long. And I believe that our findings shed some light onto the dangers of continued over reliance on incarceration as a solution to crime.
And as far as what impacts we might have seen so far, I can’t say that I’ve seen any direct impacts from the research so far; this study just came out later last year. But I have seen, you know, on a national scale, more conversation, more talk about prison reform, criminal justice reform. I know on the agenda right now is phasing away from use of private prisons, for example. So I’m optimistic that we’re having more of these important conversations.