Imprisoned Men: Masculinity Variability and Implications for Correctional Programming

Prison is a place with an accumulation of men who espouse toughness and aggression, where those who deviate are punished and forced to renegotiate their thoughts on what it means to be a man. Behaviors not considered overtly masculine, such as receiving support in the form of correctional programming, may be off limits to men serving time. Guided by the larger masculinities and crime framework, we examine the perceptions of masculinity and its consequences through in-depth, semi-structured interviews with five incarcerated men in the state of Arizona. We focus on three questions: what does it mean to be a man? Does the prison experience alter this conceptualization? Does this conceptualization affect participation in correctional programming? Our results reveal that there is variation in how incarcerated men define what it means to be man, the incarceration experience matters for how incarcerated men define and express their masculinity, and what it means to be a man in prison indirectly impacts engagement in correctional programs.