Section Language & Linguistics

WRITTEN EXPRESSIONS OF FEMALE PRISONERS IN THE PRISON

SVĚTLÁ NAD SÁZAVOU AS PART OF THEIR EDUCATIONAL AND RE-SO-
CIALIZATION INTERVENTION

Mgr. Kristián Šujan

Univerzita Jana Evangelisty Purkyně v Ústí nad Labem, Czech Republic

ABSTRACT
This text represents the results of a research in the prison Světlá nad Sázavou. The goal
was to analyze written expressions of female prisoners, who are voluntarily attending the
educational facility within this prison. Content and language findings show, that writing
is an important part of education in prisons. Written expressions cultivate personality of
prisoners, improving their language skills and the ability to think.
Keywords: prison, education process, written expressions of female prisoners, psycho-
logical profile of female prisoners, prison slang

INTRODUCTION
In the following text, we represent the partial continuous results of a research study, which
goal is to analyze language features resulting from the written expressions of the clients
in the prison Světlá nad Sázavou (referred as prisoners in the rest of the text, author‘s
note), in which they voluntarily attend the educational intervention focused on develop-
ment of re-socialization competences. Next goal is to observe the social-pathological phe-
nomenon in the manner of language expressions of respondents (frequency of prison
slang lexemes appearance in the written expressions).
In this text, we focus on the psychological profile of female prisoners, which we suppose
to be fundamental starting point for their re-socialization possibilities and also results of
effectiveness of educational intervene done by the author of this work with regard on the
analysis of written expressions of female prisoners. The gained information are valuable
for the concept of further education of female prisoners in the area of unassisted written
expression including creative writing as a mean of cultivation of personality and raising
the odds of the successful re-socialization. At the very least, educational and other activ-
ities within the Treatment programme, are an effective way against the total personifica-
tion of female prisoners, therefore a variant of easing up the negative impacts of adapta-
tion on the prison life and the following incapability of socialization after the release
from prison.

Psychological profile of female convicts

A basic tool for analysis of a psychological profile of prisoners is the Netíkov’s differen-
tiation, according to which it is possible to sort out the criminal subculture as a socialized
type, neurotic type, un-socialized type, mentally insufficient type, deviant socialized type
and type with massive psychotic disorder [1]. By the socialized type, the crime has usu-

https://doi.org/10.5593/sgemsocial2018/3.6 43
5th International Multidisciplinary Scientific Conference on Social Sciences & Arts SGEM 2018

ally episodic nature and there is no recidivism. Women usually have a well set back-
ground, working skills and habits and are able to return to the society without any bigger
problems. Vast majority is serving their time for the first time.
Neurotic type is characteristic by the occurrence of bigger or smaller neurotic disorders.
Symptoms of particular neurosis are seen often inside the prison and are more intense and
latent. These neurotic disorders influence the behaviour of individuals to a degree, that
they can become delinquent. Causes of delinquent behaviour can be connected with the
solving of intra-psychical conflict, whose occurrence is not being acknowledged by the
individual. The negative impacts of penitentiary process are the most risky by these
women [1].
Non-socialized type can be seen as the one with the personality disorder from the psy-
chopathology point of view. In the criminal subculture, these women have a numerous %
representation. The most common is a dissocial disorder of personality. All attempts for
positive stimulation, appealing on a moral values and feelings of guilt are mostly com-
pletely useless, because good will and good manners are seen as a weakness by the female
prisoners.
Mentally insufficient type typically contains people with weaker cognitive abilities. This
is about women, whose criminal activity is comparable with their rational abilities. They
are usually primitive, simple and straightforward. Because it is possible to count with the
more primitive motivation and easier to reveal it, these are most likely causes of higher
concentration of these women in facilities of penitentiary care. Deviant socialized type
represents persons, who adapted norms of represented social group very well. These
norms are not in a harmony with the norms of the society.
The massive psychic disorder type consists of people that suffer during the act itself, but
also during the penitentiary process with some of the specific psychotic disorder syn-
drome and illnesses (most often schizophrenia). From the delinquent behaviour point of
view it is mostly about violent, brutally committed crimes, with irrational motivation.
Influencing these people is mostly very difficult, it is nearly impossible to work with
them. These women belong primarily to the psychiatric care and the question of their
responsibility for their delinquent behaviour is questionable [1].
Talking about female criminals, there is a specific character of their delinquency, where
the commitment of each individual varies a lot. A very typical crime for a female is a
murder of a newborn. Female typically have also lower recidivism [2] rate and are so
organized, when compared to men. Women are mostly involved in various property
crimes, but are much more careful than men and usually serve as an assistant [2]. Accord-
ing to the year’s statistical tab [3] for the year 2016, most of the crimes done by women,
670 altogether, were tagged as a theft. Considering the crimes against the life and heath,
women mostly committed murders and deliberate serious health damage assaults. A very
important factor is an emotional subtext. This goes along with a fact, that most of the
victims belong into the inner circle of offenders, where the main motive is a long lasting
bad treatment or humiliation from the future victim [4].
If some women commit some crime activity repeatedly, it is mostly about various crime
activities. Most of them are subjugated to a punishment lasting from 9 months to a 1 year.
The biggest representation has a group of delinquents between 30-40 years. Next one is
the category between 40-50. The count of adolescent women is minimal on the contrary
[5].

44
 Section Language & Linguistics

Treatment programme
The prison Světlá nad Sázavou is in a class of prisons with security. Up to 853 prisoners
served their time here by 19. January 2018 [6]. They are split into different categories
when it comes for the prisoner regime. Those categories are – full supervision, supervi-
sion and adolescents, higher supervision and control. This prison is also the only one in
the Czech Republic with a devoted department for mothers with children from 1 to 3
years old. This specific department is characteristic by almost 0 recidivism rate of its
inhabitants.
To make sure that prisoners spend their time in prison most effectively, there is a pro-
gramme called “the Treatment Programme”, that includes many activities and actions for
prisoners. The term “treatment of prisoners” means all the activities, that is realized by
the inmates in the prison facilities with the goal of filing the purpose of serving their time
inside the prison and at the same time, to prevent both physical and psychical degenera-
tion of their personalities.
The prison Světlá nad Sázavou offers many tools with the important penitentiary reach
included in the Treatment Programme, in which beside working activities, therapy, free-
time and extramural activities, we can also find the educational activities. Those are
granted by the ŠVS (School and educational center), that is from the year 2008 an external
part of Prague training institute Na Veselí 51. Prisoners that cannot work from the various
reasons have educational activities instead of the working ones.
Prisoners are studying on their own request and can choose between many subjects. At
this moment, ŠVS offers programmes for 2 years like sewing the clothes and operational
services, both for 16 students in each grade. Czech language is being tough for 2 hours
weekly. After absolving the programme, students get the apprenticeship certificate. ŠVS
also offers the course called “Elementary school” that consists of 5 hours of Czech lan-
guage per week. It is primarily for people with the mental disorders, or mentally insuffi-
cient (for example the people with only practical school). Weekly subsidy of 2 hours of
Czech language also contains the Czech language course for foreigners. Besides ŠVS,
female prisoners can also get the apprenticeship certificate in programme cook-waiter
due to the cooperation of the prison Světlá nad Sázavou and the High school of business
and services Jihlava. The course takes 3 years of daily study and after the passing of the
final exam, the prisoners get the apprenticeship certificate that does not say, that they got
it while serving their time and looks like any other.
Based on the practical internship in the prison Světlá nad Sázavou, we got a detailed and
thematic plans of mentioned programmes and courses. For example, Czech language is a
part of education process in the first grade of programmes. Discussed curriculum contains
the introduction to the language theory, grammar, preparation for writing an essay fo-
cused on administrative correspondence, creation of a CV and working with text and in-
formation. Thematic plans for the second grade contains literature. Elementary school
course contains the elementary basics of the Czech language focused on understanding
the meaning of term like letter, syllable, word, sentence, word order, writing i and y, or
word classes. A very similar is the course of the Czech language for the foreigners, which
also puts emphasis on the vocabulary and conversation.
A sample for the first research that was conducted during December 2016 in the prison
Světlá nad Sázavou, were written expressions of students of “Operation service” and

https://doi.org/10.5593/sgemsocial2018/3.6 45
5th International Multidisciplinary Scientific Conference on Social Sciences & Arts SGEM 2018

“Sewing clothes” programmes. Material gathered is original and unique. Part of the ana-
lyzed materials we got directly from the teachers of the School and education center
Světlá nad Sázavou, more dozens of written materials were created during the educational
process that I personally conducted during the Czech language classes. It is necessary to
note, that all the materials are anonymous due to the protection of personal details. Be-
cause of that, it is impossible to figure out the personal anamnesis of the authors of these
written expressions and with it, the levels of education they reached or health status of
individuals. It is possible to divide their creations to separate units that were created by
the female prisoners and the same time, outline the motivation for their creation.

A summary of analyzed written expressions of prisoners

In our analyzed specimen, we focused our attention to written expressions of respondents,
which we got from the headmaster of a prison. It is about 28 pieces, that were addressed
to headmaster of a prison, mostly requests and complains, calls for help, but it included
ordinary announcements too.
We viewed 28 written expressions addressed to headmaster of the prison Světlá nad
Sázavou and one letter addressed to the minister of justice. Criteria, according to which
we analyzed the essays, were: communicational function, emotions and postures, gram-
mar and spelling. Syntax, prison slang, content/theme, addressing, diacritics, stylistics,
style of writing, aesthetical functions and extent of essays.
From the communicational function point of view, prisoners wrote 13 requests at total, in
which they requested verbal interviews with the headmaster without stating the reason,
or requests about transfer to different cell and premature release. Four written essays were
pleas for help, when considering their communicational function. 7 other essays were
written as complain, 4 were in a form of a note or announcement.
According to the second criteria – emotional part and stance of authors – it was written
14 neutral, without any emotions shown, authors just wrote basic and required infor-
mation to the headmaster. In following 14 essays, we have found significant emotional
phrases. Authors were trying to make clear to the headmaster, that they like him, trust
him and that they know, that he will always help them. Some negative postures appeared
in few essays as well, where authors were trying to express their anger, discontent and
feelings of injustice coming from the society. In some, phrases showing helplessness were
easily spotted.
As a third criteria, we focused on the grammar and spelling. The author of a half of essays,
J.J, suffers from dysgraphia. She has no basic knowledge about grammar and spelling in
Czech – she does not know what we called “listed verbs”, prefixes vy-vý, she releases
sounds – “kerej and kuli”. Authors of another 6 essays are dealing with dygraphia too,
they do not have elementary knowledge of grammar and spelling, do not separate words
with prepositions, some are spelling words the same way they hear them, they are also
choosing wrong preposition before words, they use useless symbols over the soft conso-
nant – “zasláňí (sending), pochopeňí (understanding), podáňí (submitting).
From the syntactic point of view, only 2 essays from all analyzed ones were correct, alt-
hough one was missing punctuation. All other essays were not managed well from the
syntactic point of view. Even though some essays had logically connected sentences and

46
 Section Language & Linguistics

made sense over all, the right word formation and word continuity are not correct. Punc-
tuation was one of the biggest problems and no one had it right. Features, such as
“anakolut” (in Czech, it means deviation from the word formation), attraction and con-
tamination, were almost not present.
Prison slang was not present in any of analyzed essays. One had the Moravian slang – já
su, aj já (with correct form being “já jsem, já take”).
From the point of view of content and topics, which authors selected in their letters, were
pleas for help the most common, more specifically transfers inside the prison, to a differ-
ent department. Also, they wrote get the premature release or for verbal interview. We
got complains about the behaviour of prison guards or doctors. As a last topic, we got
essays about daily life situations that were just happening in the lives of authors.
As the seventh criteria, we analyzed, if authors address the headmaster properly at the
beginning of their letters. We find the proper form in almost all essays. The most common
form is: Dear Headmaster. If authors had pre-filled forms, in which they had a sentence:
“I request to speak with:”, they always added who they want to speak with. For
example, “I request to speak with headmaster”. The proper addressing is missing only in
2 cases.
From the diacritic point of view, there were just 5 essays that had no diacritic mistakes.
The rest of 23 essays had a lot of diacritic mistakes.
The eight analyzed criteria was usage of correct grammar and words. All authors tried to
use the correct grammar and right words, but we found incorrect and slang words in their
letters too. Just 5 letters can be tagged as ones with absolutely fine grammar with correct
words without any sign of slang.
From the stylistic point of view, we focused mainly on which function style they used,
which language approach they used and if the text was coherent or not. All authors tried
to use functional or administrative style in their letters. Even though we encountered fea-
tures from the administrative style, the most common was the simple communicational
style. Language approach used the most was informative, sometimes storytelling. Ap-
proximately half of essays had a coherent text, other half did not.
Authors mostly used writing style. Four essays were written by capital block letters. Ac-
cording to criteria – aesthetic function, we focused on readability of letters and choice of
paper. Almost all handwritten essays were readable, with couple being less or more read-
able. Six letters had a form of prefilled request note, 15 letters were written on a linked
papers of A4 format, or on unlinked ones. The rest of letters used an A5 format or partly
torn papers. Some letters were aesthetically really nice, some did not. The last criteria that
we dealt with, was the size of text. Eight letters were more sizeable – it was between 2
A4 pages up to 8 A4 pages. Other letters were shorter, ranging between 1 A5 page to 1/3
of A4 page. All of them were very different. Some criteria confirmed our expectations
and some surprised us – see the addressing that was not missing almost in any of es-
says/letters and the effort for correct grammar without slang words. We can agree that
almost all of analyzed authors have problems with grammar.

https://doi.org/10.5593/sgemsocial2018/3.6 47
5th International Multidisciplinary Scientific Conference on Social Sciences & Arts SGEM 2018

CONCLUSION
After the final evaluation of all written expressions we have come to a conclusion, that
all authors prefer their own specific style of writing, which is reflected by the level of
their education, abilities and the length of the time served in the prison. We have to state,
that the biggest problems of the most analyzed groups were grammar, syntax and diacrit-
ics. During the spelling, authors mostly made mistakes in past participle (-li/ -ly in Czech)
and in third and sixth case of personal pronoun “I” (já in Czech). Doubling some conso-
nants, but also the endings of adjectives in both plural and singular were problematic as
well. From the syntactic point of view, authors often could not create the right word order,
so wrong (defect) sentences were often created. Another big problem was diacritics.
Authors did not care too much about using diacritic marks. In some expressions, diacritic
marks were overused. Overall, contextual and language finding reflect, that writing offers
meaningful time consumption during their incarceration, but also helps to stimulate them-
selves in everyday stereotypical environment. Education of incarcerated women is an im-
portant part of a Treatment Programme in general and can be used hand-by-hand with the
job finding process after their release. Preventive part of an education is priceless too,
raising the success rate of reintegration of incarcerated women back into our society.
Written expressions cultivate personalities of prisoners besides all other stated functions,
they also improve their thinking process, communicational abilities and the ability to
compose their own text. They also contain the aspect of potential use in case of their
release and successful return into a society.

REFERENCES
[1] FISCHER, S., ŠKODA, J. Sociální patologie. Analýza příčin a možností ovlivňování
závažných sociálně patologických jevů. Praha 2009. ISBN 978-80-247-2781-3, pp. 166-
171.
[2] VÁLKOVÁ, J. Kriminalita žen. Praha: Institut pro kriminologii a sociální prevenci,
1993, pp 24-25.
[3] MÄSIAROVÁ, L. Statistická ročenka Vězeňské služby České republiky za rok 2016.
Available at: http://vscr.demicko.cz/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Statistick%C3%A1-
ro%C4%8Denka-2016.pdf
[4] BARTŮŇKOVÁ, E. Problematika osobnosti pachatele v kriminologii. Praha, 2008.
Diplomová práce (Mgr.). Univerzita Karlova v Praze, Právnická fakulta, Katedra
trestního práva, pp 58.
[5] MÄSIAROVÁ, L. Statistická ročenka Vězeňské služby České republiky za rok 2015.
Available at: https://www.vscr.cz/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Statistick%C3%A1-
ro%C4%8Denka-2015.pdf
[6] Vězeňská služba České republiky. Týdenní statistické hlášení pro rok 2018. Available
at: https://www.vscr.cz/informacni-servis/statistiky/tydenni-statisticke-hlaseni/tydenni-
statisticke-hlaseni-pro-rok-2018/

48
Copyright of International Multidisciplinary Scientific Conference on Social Sciences & Arts
SGEM is the property of STEF92 Technology Ltd. and its content may not be copied or
emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written
permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.