Nowhere is myth more commonplace than in the correctional setting. With its foundation firmly implanted in tradition and folklore, a great deal of prison management is based on intuitive principles. Moreover, the popular theoretical positions concerning the impact of incarceration have been equally intuitive, or at best ideologically based in the liberal humanist tradition of academia. Generally, these positions bemoan the deleterious effects of incarceration. In contrast, the empirical literature presents a much more equivocal view. Numerous studies report no psychological or intellectual deterioration. These studies include the following: (1) a study of prisoners' psychological characteristics in which longer periods of incarceration were associated with lower levels of pathology; (2) a study of self-esteem which illustrated the complexity of the incareration process; and (3) a cross-sectional survey of psychological and attitudinal attributes that show amount of time served was differentially related to prosocial sentiments depending on sentence length. In this debate, questions of effect have been confused with questions of value. When this occurs, reason succumbs to sarcasm and anger. An empirically-based response to the misplaced anger of humanists must be balanced by a rejection of the inevitable embrace offered by corrections administrators. (A seven-page reference list is included). (Author/ABL)