Essay: Punitiveness as “Behavior Management”

• Author: Hans Toch
• DOI: 10.1177/0093854807309427
• Published date: 01 March 2008
• Date: 01 March 2008
• Subject Matter: Articles

388

ESSAY

PUNITIVENESS AS “BEHAVIOR MANAGEMENT”

HANS TOCH

State University of New York, Albany

Behavior management plans (BMPs) are temporary deprivation experiences that have been advertised as promoting the dis-

continuance of habitual misbehavior in institutions. In practice, these interventions are often invoked in retaliation or as pun-

ishment when individual inmates are uncooperative or troublesome. In settings that already offer a rock-bottom quality of

life—such as segregation units in prisons—BMPs reliably call for intolerably stressful conditions that tend to compromise

the mental health of persons who are subjected to these conditions. The cycle is predictably exacerbated when the behavior

that is targeted is symptomatic of mental illness in the first place, as is frequently the case.

Keywords: behavior modification; punishment; supermax; prisoners

Among prevailing views about how one goes about producing behavior change (espe-

cially, change in other people) a cherished notion has always been that it helps to

engender discomfort in the person to be changed. This assumption rests on the observation

that most consequential behavior—the sort of behavior that can be worth changing—tends

to be fairly ingrained and embedded, which means that someone’s lifelong habits may have

to be unfrozen for real movement to occur. We assume that pain and discomfort can pro-

vide an impetus to self-reviews.

Engendering discomfort has come to be particularly prized in behavior-modifying strate-

gies that have become fashionable in some correctional settings. Although behaviorism-

inspired treatment in the real world centers on the use of conventional rewards as incentives

for behavior, some correctional interventions have come to offer gradations of deprivation as

reinforcements. Diminishing distress or ameliorating of pain has thus come to be defined as

“rewarding,” and ingenuity has been exercised to find ways in which new deprivations could

be exacted or additional needs could be frustrated. Such exercises of ingenuity have reached

impressive heights (or lows) in the creation of progression or “level” systems in punitive and

administrative segregation settings, culminating in the design of stripped-down “baseline”

environments devoid of any conceivable need-satisfying amenity.

The rock-bottom destitution that is arranged for in these entry-level settings is not only

of questionable legality (Cohen, 2007) but can create a problem down the road for behav-

ior modifiers who come to feel that additional behavior change must be engendered.

At such junctures, super-duper-deprivation arrangements have somehow to be instituted,

deemed suitable for use with particularly recalcitrant inmates. Some of these enhanced

vehicles for inducing distress have been called behavior management plans (BMPs), and

CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND BEHAVIOR, Vol. 35 No. 3, March 2008 388-397

DOI: 10.1177/0093854807309427

© 2008 American Association for Correctional and Forensic Psychology

AUTHORS’NOTE: Correspondence regarding this essay may be addressed to Hans Toch, School of Criminal

Justice, 135 Western Avenue, Albany, NY 12222; e-mail: htoch@albany.edu.