The Square, The Cool, The Life, and Those Bars

Reviews the book, Making It in Prison: The Square, The Cool, and The Life by Esther Heffernan (1972). Heffernan does not discuss the experiential initiation into the prison. She came as an interviewer, not as a prisoner or pseudo-prisoner. The adaptational experience must have seemed to her as it would have seemed to all of us--something only vaguely comprehensible and fleeting. But she does describe well the three modes of adaptation to imprisonment, all of them based largely on preprison experience. They are the "square," whose orientation to prison and prisoners is basically conventional, and whose crimes are nearly entirely passionate homocide and assault. There are those who were in the "life," including members of the underworld whose convictions are mainly for narcotics peddling and to a smaller extent, burglary. Finally, there are the "cool," whose motto is "Keep busy, play around, stay out of trouble, and get out," and who have been convicted mainly for burglary, larceny, and forgery. This is a monograph about Occaquam, a prison for women, now defunct. The data were collected more than ten years ago, but the situation in prisons seems hardly to have changed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)