The influence of importation and deprivation factors on prison adaptation: Insights from Chinese prisons

While prison adaptation has been studied extensively in Western societies, relatively few studies have examined incarcerated people in China. Given the differences in sociocultural and prison environments, findings from Western nations may not be generalizable to the Chinese context. Adopting the importation and deprivation models, we specifically examine how incarcerated individuals' adaptation in the form of attitudes toward imprisonment and rehabilitation is shaped by various pre- and post-incarceration factors. Using a unique dataset collected in Zhejiang, China, we demonstrate that prison adaptation is associated more with importation factors than with deprivation factors. Specifically, prison adaptation is positively associated with the province of origin, parental attachment, peer attachment, and neighborhood cohesion. Furthermore, sentence length shows an unexpected positive association with adaptation. Situated in the literature, our findings further confirm that prison adaptation is a multifaceted phenomenon and that distinctive aspects of adaptation are evidently influenced by different sets of factors.