How prisons can help inmates change their stripes
Research into ‘enclothed cognition’ reveals that what we wear can alter how we see ourselves
In 2006, the Utah Department of Corrections (DOC) decided it had to do something about the female inmates in its facilities. The women were unruly and anxious, often refusing to comply with regulations and occasionally acting violently. The guards took a rare step back, thought for a second and came up with a theory. The female inmates might be feeling dehumanized — and acting accordingly — because of their clothes.
The guards noted how many of the women’s feet were slipping around in shoes three sizes too large, and how their sanitary pads could be seen through the near-translucent fabric of their uniforms. “A male’s white uniform doesn’t do much for (a woman’s) selfrespect,” Jack Ford, a DOC spokesman, told the Salt Lake Tribune. So the DOC made some changes. The women were given brand-new uniforms the colour of plum wine. The prison lifted its ban on cosmetics and the inmates picked out lip colours, eye shadows and blushes. Maybe a lot of this sounds too gender-normative for the 21st century, but it seemed to work: disciplinary problems plummeted. That’s because, thanks to their new uniforms, the women inmates no longer see themselves as prisoners but as people. The clothes they wear have altered how they perceive themselves, and the world.
Earlier this year, cognitive psychologist Abraham Rutchick was sitting in on a surgery and needed to take a break to go to the bathroom. While washing his hands, Rutchick stared at his reflection in the mirror, his eyes lighting upon the surgical scrubs he’d borrowed from the hospital in order to enter the ER.
“I’m looking at them in the bathroom, and I’m realizing, ‘These pants are the most comfortable pants I’ve ever worn in my entire life,’ ” Rutchick says.
But it wasn’t just that his legs felt comfy in cotton — he felt the scrubs had put him into a looser state of mind. Which sounds a little crazy, but he had just done the research to back it up. Several months before, in 2015, Rutchick had led a study to determine exactly how clothing choices can affect a person’s mental state. His team found that when participants donned expensive, tailored suits, they were more likely to forgo a $12 reward that day in order to receive a $20 reward a day later. The researchers argued that these participants were demonstrating better abstract processing, the kind of big-picture thinking CEOs are required to perform on a regular basis.
“We do see people, when they wear formal clothing, shift toward long-term planning,” says Rutchick.
On the flip side, participants who wore clothing typically associated with lower-status positions demonstrated greater levels of “machine” thinking, the kind required to perform basic duties more efficiently. That’s why in many cases, institutional management will encourage executives to wear power suits while giving mailroom employees uniforms. “If you’re in an organization, you want some people to come up with big ideas, and you want other people to carry them out.”
Rutchick is at the forefront of a field of study called “enclothed cognition.” The theory is that clothes really do make the man or woman; what we wear alters our thoughts, abilities and relationships.
Enclothed cognition affects us most of the time but one subset of clothing, uniforms, has an outsized impact on the way we think across a range of settings. After all, 35 to 40 per cent of Americans spend their working lives in some kind of uniform and 23 per cent of U.S. students wear uniforms to school.
The regularity with which uniforms are implemented in institutional settings shows we sort of knew about enclothed cognition intuitively, even if we didn’t have a word for it.
“One of the things you’re trying to do (by making people wear uniforms) is trying to create an implicit sort of control over the range of behaviours people engage in,” says Adam Galinsky, a social psychol- ogist at Northwestern University. “In other words, you’re trying to mute individuality.”
Galinsky designed an experiment to test his hypothesis that clothing, at least in part, can drive behaviour. He gave subjects long white coats and told some that they were wearing lab coats and others that they had on painter’s coats. The ones who believed they were wearing lab gear did better on an array of cognitive tasks related to “close attention,” the consistent and laserlike focus required for performing many medical procedures. Galinsky’s work shows how uniforms can tailor our thoughts to better fit a specific position or task. But in the process, they can change and even strip away identity.
“If we wear clothing that conveys a particular role with a meaning, we’ll take on that role to some degree,” Galinsky says.
Consider one of the most notorious studies on imprisonment ever performed. Lasting one week on the campus of Stanford University in the 1970s, the Stanford Prison Experiment demonstrated that just a few added variables can turn ordinary people into tyrannical guards or timid prisoners. In a simulation, the “guards” were given khaki uniforms and Ray-Bans, and the “inmates” got tight-fitting caps and ugly smocks.
The results of these clothing assignments cannot be overstated, experts say. “Think about it,” Rutchick says. “If you put on guard uniforms, you’ll have ‘guard-y’ thoughts. If you put on prison uniforms, you’ll have ‘prisoner-y’ thoughts.”
The prison uniform has a particular grip on the American imagination — stripes and orange have been associated with criminal and aberrant behaviour in the media for decades. Those perceptions can quickly lead to real-life consequences: One recent study showed if a prisoner wears an orange jumpsuit to court, the person is more likely to get convicted. When we think a person’s clothing tells us everything we need to know about how he or she fits into our world, sometimes we don’t look further.
Whether the Utah redesign represents progress for the prison system depends on whom you’re talking to, but over the past15 years, many prisons have moved in the opposite direction. A handful of facilities have returned to stripes, with their sheriffs claiming that coloured jumpsuits didn’t look punitive enough.
One warden returned his prison to striped uniforms after the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black (which premiered in 2013) made the colour “cool” amongst his inmates, he told USA Today. A sheriff, the notorious Joe Arpaio of Arizona’s Maricopa County, has forced the inmates of the “Tent City jail” in Phoenix to don bright pink underwear. As he reasoned dryly to a Washington Examiner reporter, “Why give them a colour they like?”
These changes came after U.S. prisons instigated a “no-frills” movement at the turn of the century. The movement was implemented to eradicate prisoners’ “unearned” comfort, based on a philosophy of deterrence by punishment. The problem is this philosophy is outdated and probably counterproductive.
The trend can still be turned around, one jumpsuit at a time. Redesigned uniforms based on the principles of enclothed cognition could do more than just mitigate the dehumanizing effects of stripes. They could become empowering. By boosting creative powers, IQs and selfesteem, better uniforms could ultimately give inmates a better shot at readjusting to the outside world. It’s up to the various players in the prison-industrial complex to figure out if that’s what they want.