The Non-Preferential Environments of Prisons

Prisons should not be nice places to live in. 

True or False?

What if, by making prisons too unpleasant, we were making people in the prison system more likely to become violent and suffer from negative health effects?

We learned from our readings this week that certain situations, particularly overcrowding and non-preferred environments, can lead to atypical social behavior (aggressiveness, irritability) and stress. We also learned that the stress response can lead to damaging physiological effects.

It seems to me that a definitively stressful, non-preferential environment would be a prison; low complexity, high coherence, and a complete lack of legibility and mystery make for a very boring environment. Photos of prison make them seem designed from the ground up to be soul-crushingly monotonous:

 As Kaplan states in the introduction to Chapter 7 of Humanscape, “An environment that neither provides stimulation nor permits it to be sought would surely be stressful.”

So, how do we combat this? Maybe the first thing to change would be public opinion about what should be allowed in prisons. Television, video games, and even yoga classes have all been publicly derided for making prisons “too comfortable”, even though it’s the prison administrations that often push to implement these amenities. Why? Because they make prisons safer for the people incarcerated and for the employees of the prison systems.

Targeting overcrowding would also be a huge step in the right direction, both from an ethical standpoint and from an Environmental Preference viewpoint. Statistics from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ Prisoners in 2013 report indicate that 18 states had prisoner populations larger than their listed facility capacity, some larger by as much as 50% (These are just the state-level numbers; individual prison overcrowding rates can be and are much higher).

So, my question to the readers is this: 

Knowing that prisons are overcrowded, and in the interest of reducing stress, what are other steps could we take to make prisons a more preferred environment?