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AbstractAt this point it is clear that the pursuit of the rehabilitative ideal is stitched into the DNA of American corrections. However, in our collective quest to establish and defend 'what works,' correctional rehabilitation has lingered in a state of preoccupation with risks, deficits, and individual pathology. The framework of Positive Psychology provides an alluring blueprint for an approach to correctional rehabilitation where people are not considered different humans who are reduced to their deficits and their worst decisions. In the current paper we explore the possibilities of incorporating the principles of Positive Psychology into correctional rehabilitation to help promote a notion of correctional success that is more dynamic, humanizing, and inclusive. We begin by discussing the development, progression, and current state of correctional rehabilitation. We then turn to discussing the development, progression, and current state of Positive Psychology, suggesting that there is a missed opportunity in applying its principles to people who are impacted by the criminal justice system. We conclude with a section discussing the opportunities and challenges of bringing correctional rehabilitation and Positive Psychology together.

AbstractWhat does it mean to say that a prison has a "culture?" Scholars have long emphasized the presence of a "prison code" and, more recently, a "racial code" as salient cultural domains in men's prisons. Yet, even though most people intuitively understand what is meant by "prison culture," little progress has been made regarding the conceptualization and operationalization of culture as an analytical construct in prison scholarship. The current study makes two primary contributions to this literature. First, drawing on advances in anthropology, cultural sociology, and cognitive science, we incorporate the concept of cultural schema to provide a concrete analytical construct. Second, we test varying conceptualizations of cultural schema as either characterized by consensus or as overlapping relational structures. Using cultural consensus and correlational class analyses among a sample of 266 incarcerated men, we find little evidence of a culture of consensus for either the prison code or the racial code. Furthermore, we show evidence of heterogenous schema among these cultural domains. Our study is relevant to wider disciplinary work on culture as the problem of analytical precision we address is characteristic of much of the work in criminology and criminal justice that evokes culture as an explanatory device.