6.6: Social withdrawal and isolation
Some prisoners learn to find safety in social invisibility by becoming as inconspicuous and unobtrusively disconnected from others as possible. The self-imposed social withdrawal and isolation may mean that they retreat deeply into themselves, trust virtually no one, and adjust to prison stress by leading isolated lives of quiet desperation. In extreme cases, especially when combined with prisoner apathy and loss of the capacity to initiate behavior on one's own, the pattern closely resembles that of clinical depression. Long-term prisoners are particularly vulnerable to this form of psychological adaptation.
Figure 6.2 Isolation by Trudi Radtke. (CC BY 4.0 )
Indeed, Taylor wrote that the long-term prisoner "shows a flatness of response which resembles slow, automatic behavior of a very limited kind, and he is humorless and lethargic." In fact, Jose-Kampfner has analogized the plight of long-term women prisoners to that of persons who are terminally-ill, whose experience of this "existential death is unfeeling, being cut off from the outside (and who) adopt this attitude because it helps them cope."