“Somebody Comes By and Just Crumples It up”: Meaning Making Efforts In the Prison Environment

Background and Purpose: Having a sense of meaning or purpose is a global predictor of well-being and may be especially important for people in prisons, helping them endure incarceration and supporting personal growth. However, it is unclear how exactly incarcerated people engage in this process. Analysis of qualitative interviews with incarcerated people focused on the following questions: 1) How do incarcerated participants describe their purpose and their search for meaning within the context of the prison? 2) To what extent do incarcerated participants relate to Viktor Frankl’s (1946) theorization of three primary avenues of meaning making (creating a work or doing a deed, experiencing something or encountering someone, and the attitude one takes toward suffering)? 3) How does the prison environment affect the search for meaning?

Methods: Conducted as part of a larger parent study, one-hour, semi-structured interviews took place at a large men’s maximum security state prison. The 62 participants in the original interview sample were generally representative of the population. Interviews broadly explored participant’s experiences and needs in the prison, and were conducted and audio-recorded in private classrooms in the prison. Using a phenomenological approach to analysis, our four-person team engaged in data immersion, holistic case-based memoing, construction of episode profiles for each participant, and iterative refinement of the profiles to better capture the following phenomena of interest.Thematic salience was reached after analyzing 19 interviews. Data were summarized in an analytic case matrix, enabling identification and comparison of patterns within and between participants.

Results: All of the participants affirmed the relevance of meaning in their lives, and most of them expressed some success in finding it despite their circumstances. The ways participants often found meaning were largely consonant with Frankl’s three avenues, though we found that participants engaged the avenues as various facets of one multidimensional process. While participants sometimes found meaning in formal prison programming, they more often described ways the prison constrained their attempts practically (e.g., a dearth of opportunities) and existentially (e.g., isolation, dehumanization). From a critical perspective, we also found that meaning making processes interacted with power structures in the hierarchical prison environment. Participants adopted different orientations to the prison that were inherently and necessarily related to how they “make sense” of themselves and their purpose within the institution and society.

Conclusions and Implications: For incarcerated people, meaning making supports well-being, coping, and survival. However, meaning making efforts may be constrained by the prison environment and influenced by relationships to power. Providers working with incarcerated people should encourage meaning making,especially personal and expressive avenues of meaning that may translate into new contexts upon release and re-entry. Institutions should alleviate barriers to meaningful activities, yet may benefit structurally from maladaptive relationships between prisoners’ meaning making and the prison’s aims.