Form Of Institutional Violence Research Articles

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AbstractAt this political moment within the university, mass incarceration and its most recognizable constituents, the prisoner and the prison, are at a predictable tipping point: the violence of inclusion. Neoliberal multiculturalism appears capacious enough to hold select representations of mass incarceration in its pursuit of new markets and deft enough to deploy this difference to whitewash other forms of institutional violence. Building from a long genealogy of scholarship and organizing that maps the coconstitutiveness of the university with our prison-industrial complex, this essay makes visible emergent lines and arrangements of power and resistance that inhibit and build abolition.

Battlegrounds: mobilizing humanitarian discourses in São Paulo detention centers

The text presented here, based on ethnographic research conducted in institutions of social control in São Paulo, such as prisons, juvenile detention units, and custodial and psychiatric treatment hospitals, is an attempt to examine, in spaces of confinement that operate as battlefields, the distinct uses that are intrinsic to the lexicon of human rights. Starting from the power struggles that play out in spaces of detention, we focus on two important vectors: (1) the activation of the discourse of human rights as a tactic of struggle, mobilized by adolescents who dispute for control over internment spaces; and (2) the continuum between the legal lexicon and forms of institutional violence, where the humanitarian discourse is intertwined with the practice of torture in São Paulo detention facilities. In this analysis, it is important to shed light on the distortions, uses and mobilizations that permeate human rights discourses, a prism that allows us to pass from law as a promise of pacification to politics as permanent war.

Prison Homicide: An Extension of Violent Criminal Careers?

This study investigated prison homicide perpetrators through the lens of the career criminal perspective. Prison homicide, while a rare event, has critical implications for the prison environment. Despite its importance as a form of institutional violence that must be addressed, only four studies in the past five decades have explored the characteristics of homicide perpetrators/victims, the motives, and circumstances of the crime. The goal of the current study was to develop a better understanding of prison homicide by examining 54 perpetrators who committed 37 inmate homicides over 40 years in a mid-Western state prison system. Results showed that prison homicides typically involved a younger male inmate perpetrator, acting independently, murdering an older inmate, in his cell, by stabbing or beating the victim during an altercation. Perpetrators, in comparison with victims and prisoners in general, had a record indicating more prior community homicides, elevated institutional risk scores, and higher rates of serious and assaultive prison misconduct, all indicative of prior community and prison maladjustment. Consistent with career criminal research, prison homicide perpetrators constitute a small but distinct subset of habitually deviant criminals that perpetrate high rates of criminal and violent behavior regardless of context.

Impediments of Labor Contracts on Prison Administrators’ Response to Staff–Inmate Sexual Misconduct

Sexual violence in adult correctional facilities led to the enactment of the 2003 Prison Rape Elimination Act as one approach to reducing this form of institutional violence. The current study examined collective bargaining agreements governing correctional agencies to identify impediments that may impact administrators’ responses to sexual violence, specifically in instances of allegations of staff–inmate sexual misconduct. In addition, structured interviews and focus groups with correctional administrators and labor representatives were used to develop policy recommendations. Contract language and interview participants demonstrated that a myriad of cultural and structural characteristics of prisons as well as pragmatic considerations may serve to inhibit the implementation of some policy changes. Interview participants identified several insights about contemporary prison settings and modifications that may aid in reducing some forms of institutional violence.

Inmate homicides: Killers, victims, motives, and circumstances

Despite popular media depictions, prison homicides are quite infrequent, averaging only four per one hundred thousand inmates annually in U.S. prisons during the current decade and declining over 90 percent in the past thirty years. Only a handful of studies had examined this most serious form of institutional violence. This study examined thirty-five inmate homicides, involving fifty-two perpetrators, occurring in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice for 2000-2008. The majority of homicides occurred in inmates’ cells, involved a single assailant, resulted from beatings, or was cross-racial. Often multiple motivations for the homicides were present. Hispanic inmates were overrepresented as perpetrators and victims. Perpetrators and victims were overwhelmingly male, and likely to have records of violent arrests and problematic prison adjustments. A substantial proportion of both perpetrators and victims had suspected or confirmed gang affiliations. Perpetrators were differentiated from victims by younger age, higher IQ scores, greater educational attainment, and sentences for armed robbery.