27
METHODS AND TERMS: PRISON EXPERIENCE
27 March 2009
by
admin
Filed under
Men's Health-Erectile Dysfunction
One of our major problems of analysis was what to do about the portion of a man’s life spent in prison. To illustrate, let us take an unmarried twenty-five-year-old from our control group who attained puberty at age thirteen, and an identical male from our prison group. The control-group male has had 12 years of postpubescent life in which to develop heterosexual experience; the prison male may have had but half of that, thanks to a total of six years spent behind bars. On the other hand, the prison male not only has had as many years as the control-group male in which to develop homosexual experience, but has spent six years in a milieu especially conducive to homosexuality.
We met this problem in part by customarily excluding from our figures any and all sexual experiences during imprisonment. Thus when we are comparing, for example, the incidence of frequency of a particular sort of activity, we refer solely to activity outside of prison. However, we made an exception for homosexual experience, since this may well carry over into postprison life.
By taking into account the different number of years that the members of our groups lived out of prison, we could calculate frequencies and numbers of sexual partners on a “per year out of prison” basis. This refinement proved to be necessary in only a limited number of instances and almost always accentuated rather than diminished the differences or similarities between groups on the basis of more gross measurements lacking this eligible time constant.
We cannot in this book examine the impact of incarceration upon a man’s sex life during and after prison; though unquestionably important, it must be made the sole subject of an intensive study at some later date. Nevertheless, we must mention here that we are aware that a nonprison year is not the same for a man just released from prison as it is for a man never imprisoned.
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