The ‘inmate code’ in flux: A normative system and extralegal governance in a Ukrainian prison

Abstract

Building on a semi-ethnographic study in a Ukrainian prison, the first research of its kind in the region, this article discusses the normative and governance system of a post-communist prisoner world. The article offers empirical support for Skarbek’s theory of prison social order by demonstrating how prisoner extralegal governance evolves along with the changing structures in and outside the prison to sustain a predictable and tolerable environment within a dehumanising and intrinsically volatile context. Nevertheless, prisoner self-governance, although generally fairly administered, is itself brutal and institutionalises inequality. As the history of prison ‘societies’ in the US and UK demonstrates, far-reaching penal policy changes can radically transform the inner prison world. Such changes, widely referred to in Ukraine as the ‘humanisation of the penitentiary system’ and ‘Europeanisation’, have corroded the power and legitimacy of the traditional model of social control. Even so, the inability to resolve many inter-prisoner disputes through official channels and the state’s signal failure to meet the demand for protection and arbitration proved the utility of the private justice embedded in the inmate code and the institution of the illicit adjudicators, thus surpassing their legitimacy deficit and retaining the essence of the Soviet underworld.