Prisonization

The process by which a person confined in prison takes on, to a greater or lesser degree, the folkways, customs and general culture of the penitentiary. The sociologist Donald Clemmer introduced the term in his 1940 study of Menard Correctional Center, arguing that the degree to which an inmate is prisonized varies with how deeply the inmate participates in the prison's own social groups, and that a highly prisonized inmate finds readjustment to life outside prison correspondingly harder.