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42 Fed. Probation 21 (1978)
Social Climate and Prison Violence

handle is hein.journals/fedpro42 and id is 279 raw text is: SOCIAL CLIMATE AND PRISON VIOLENCE

And for those researchers who are involved
through the private business sector or through
governmental agencies, methadone is not a pana-
cea, nor is heroin maintenance. There must be
some manner of dealing initially with opiate ad-
diction whether chemotherapeutically, psycho-
therapeutically or a combination of both, so that
we can then deal with the addict psychologically,
socially, economically, and morally.
We cannot sit idly by and watch methadone
turn from a blessing to a curse. We must continue
to utilize all modalities of treatment and rehabili-
tation until we arrive at a viable alternative. To
suggest negatively that the solution to the prob-

lem is to completely eliminate methadone main-
tenance treatment programs without a positive
alternative is indefensible.
I personally agree that the use of methadone
for 60 percent of the clients so treated may merely
be substituting one addiction for another. But
these are exactly the same percentage of patients
who fail in therapeutic communities.
The answer in both cases, is more effort and
less complacency, and perhaps a combination of
both forms of treatment. I know of no therapeutic
drug community which is being fully utilized and
has a waiting list. Our goal should not be to de-
termine what will not work, but rather to deter-
mine what will work, and to make it work better.

Social Climate and Prison Violence
BY HANS TOCH, PH.D.
Professor of Psychology, School of Criminal Justice, State University of New York, Albany

HERE are two favored perspectives relating
to prison violence. One-which appeals to
would-be prognosticators (and to some war-
dens)--centers on violent inmates. This view has
it that some inmates are consistently violent per-
sons, who happen to be explosive in prison, but
are likely to act out in almost any setting. A sec-
ond portraiture conceives of inmate violence as at
least partly a prison product. The most extreme
version of this view is that of abolitionist critics
who see prison aggression as a natural (and pre-
sumably, legitimate) reaction to the frustration
of being locked up. Other critics also argue that
prison incidents denote lax security, and thus
suggest negligence. This view is to some extent
shared by prison administrators, who think of
controlling violence through perimeter architec-
ture, ingenious hardware and deployment of cus-
todial personnel. This context-centered view is a
negative one, because it seeks to prevent violence
by reducing the opportunities for aggression,
rather than by trying to affect the motives and
dispositions of violence participants.
In this article, I shall argue for a different
context-centered view of prison violence which
may offer more positive programming options
than those that are conventionally envisaged. The
view is also one that may have implications for
research and policy.

The Advent of the Contextual View
In the mid-sixties, the inmate-centered tradi-
tion was at its peak, and unusual prison incidents
were viewed as correlates of offender background
characteristics (MMPI profiles, prior criminality,
etc.) with an eye toward locating high-risk of-
fender groups.
Among exceptions to this trend was a subgroup
of The California Task Force to Study Violence
in Prisons. In studying inmate aggression, this
group partly focussed on the victimization inci-
dent, highlighting the immediate motives of in-
mate participants (aggressors and victims) that
went into producing each incident (Mueller, Toch,
and Molof, 1965). This sort of analysis illumi-
nated (among other things) the contribution of
extortion, homosexual relationships and pres-
sures, debts, stealing, and routine prison disputes
to the genesis of violent prison encounters in the
mid-sixties.
This focus made possible a new approach to the
motivational patterns of chronic, recurrent ag-
gressors (in prison and outside prison), which
dealt with trends in the way violent incidents
arose for the same individual (Toch, 1969). This
approach involved seeing violence-precipitation as
an intersection between violence-prone personal
dispositions and the situational stimuli that in-

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