Inmate Culture Research Articles

The social meaning of snitching in Chinese drug detention centers

Snitching is the act of providing information to the authorities in exchange for rewards. Although snitching is, strictly speaking, a taboo among street offenders and prison inmates worldwide, offenders regard some types of snitching as relatively more acceptable than others. Studies regarding the social meaning of snitching have mostly been conducted with reference to American and European contexts, while the situation in the Asian or Chinese context has not been thoroughly explored. This paper helps to fill a research gap by examining the characteristics of the social meaning of snitching in a severely under-researched context—the inmate culture within Chinese drug detention centers. Our discussion is based on data collected from semi-structured interviews with 28 former inmates of drug detention centers, and it endeavors to explore how offenders conceptualize snitching and why they perceive snitching in the way they do. Our findings show that, while inmates in Chinese drug detention centers generally despise snitching, they see some specific forms of snitching as normal or even necessary. We analyze how inmates rationalize snitching behavior in these specific cases, and argue that this process is shaped by the collective control system implemented in the detention centers: (1) the collective merit system that connects each person’s well-being to the collective well-being, and (2) the informant mechanism that divides inmates into competing factions. Finally, theoretical implications are provided.

“We’re all travelers, all sojourners” : A pseudo-ethnography of incarceration and adaptation

The study intends to describe the dynamics in jail, the notable features of incarceration, and cultural premises used by inmates to achieve adaptation to a different environment. Using participant observation and several indigenous methods of gathering data twenty inmates in a city jail were purposively selected for this qualitative study. Several findings are notable. First, traveling is a fitting metaphor to depict the inmate culture developed inside the jail, more so that it is consistent with how the inmates call their incarceration as a momentary “biyahe,” i.e., a sojourn. Second, the inmates reveal that a must-learn code of conduct “patakaran” or “magna carta” which is rooted in respect and discipline, is essential to survival. Third, by tacit agreement with the jail management, the inmates have organized themselves with distinctive hierarchical roles that should be respected to maintain discipline and order. Each cell has it its own structure to impose discipline and to accomplish every member’s task. Fourth, a system of meting out punishment to disobedience of rules is strictly enforced. Ultimately then, inmates adapt to a new environment and acquire behaviors appropriate to their community. Fifth, pockets of resistance are afforded, albeit in small and imperceptible manners. The study concludes that culture inside the facility is dynamic and inmates assert their roles beyond the prevailing social and structural forces.

“Not Model Children”: Culture and Contested Control at the Pennsylvania Industrial Reformatory

The Pennsylvania Industrial Reformatory (PIR) at Huntington, established on the principles of rehabilitative incarceration that underpinned the new penology of the late nineteenth century, was supposed to be one of the most modern, humane, and enlightened prisons of its day. Yet sensational charges of abuse and mistreatment of inmates within three years of the prison’s opening spurred a months-long investigation in 1892 that attracted national attention. This investigation uncovered the details of daily interactions between inmates, administrators, and guards at PIR, revealing the existence of an inmate culture rooted in institutionalization and state policies gone awry and exposing a wide gap between the theory and the practice of the era’s new penology. The results of the PIR investigation, however, ultimately circumscribed the possibility of systemic reform and helped to further entrench and normalize a punitive punishment regime that prioritized discipline over rehabilitation.

Health and healthcare access among Zambia's female prisoners: a health systems analysis.

BackgroundResearch exploring the drivers of health outcomes of women who are in prison in low- and middle-income settings is largely absent. This study aimed to identify and examine the interaction between structural, organisational and relational factors influencing Zambian women prisoners’ health and healthcare access.MethodsWe conducted in-depth interviews of 23 female prisoners across four prisons, as well as 21 prison officers and health care workers. The prisoners were selected in a multi-stage sampling design with a purposive selection of prisons followed by a random sampling of cells and of female inmates within cells. Largely inductive thematic analysis was guided by the concepts of dynamic interaction and emergent behaviour, drawn from the theory of complex adaptive systems.ResultsWe identified compounding and generally negative effects on health and access to healthcare from three factors: i) systemic health resource shortfalls, ii) an implicit prioritization of male prisoners’ health needs, and iii) chronic and unchecked patterns of both officer- and inmate-led victimisation. Specifically, women’s access to health services was shaped by the interactions between lack of in-house clinics, privileged male prisoner access to limited transport options, and weak responsiveness by female officers to prisoner requests for healthcare. Further intensifying these interactions were prisoners’ differential wealth and access to family support, and appointments of senior ‘special stage’ prisoners which enabled chronic victimisation of less wealthy or less powerful individuals.ConclusionsThis systems-oriented analysis revealed how Zambian women’s prisoners’ health and access to healthcare is influenced by weak resourcing for prisoner health, administrative biases, and a prevailing organisational and inmate culture. Findings highlight the urgent need for investment in structural improvements in health service availability but also interventions to reform the organisational culture which shapes officers’ understanding and responsiveness to women prisoners’ health needs.

Cultural competence in correctional mental health

Cultural competence is an essential aspect of competence as a mental health professional. In this article, the framework of cultural competence developed in general psychiatry—acquiring knowledge, attitudes, and skills necessary to understand the interaction between culture and the individual—is applied to the prison setting. Race and ethnicity, extremes of age, gender, and religion are highlighted and examined as elements of the overall culture of prisons. The model of the cultural formulation from the DSM-IV is then adapted for use by clinicians in the correctional setting, with particular emphasis on the interaction between the inmate's culture of origin and the unique culture of the prison environment.

The Culture of the Condemned: Pastoral Execution and Life on Death Row in the 1930s

Between 1830 and 1930, the removal of legal and extralegal executions from public view in the United States bolstered the law’s efficiency while expanding its reach. Scholars have focused on external political effects, largely ignoring the lives of the condemned in the modern killing states. As they were withdrawn ever further behind prison walls, the condemned rearticulated the meanings of their deaths, which would to exceed, to whatever extent possible, new biopolitical regimes. An examination of inmate culture reveals death row as a site of subtle, supple struggle between the modern state and those it would kill.

Inmates' Cultural Beliefs About Sexual Violence and Their Relationship to Definitions of Sexual Assault

Effective strategies aimed at prison sexual assault require inmates to possess the same definition of sexual assault as prison administrations. This article argues that prison culture is rape-supportive and inmates may not define sexual assault as such. After analyzing questionnaire responses given by male and female inmates in a large Southern prison system, results suggest that increases in subscriptions to inmate rape-supportive beliefs restrict acts of sexual violence from being defined as sexual assaults. Policy recommendations focus on changing inmate culture in addition to informing inmates about what behaviors constitute prison organizations' definition of sexual assault.

Imprisoning men in violence: Masculinity and sexual abuse: a view from South African prisons

This article explores sexual violence in male prisons in South Africa. It focuses on the social meanings and identities that surround sexual violence, particularly the ideas of manhood that shape both the perpetration of sexual abuses and how it is dealt with – or not. The dominant inmate culture endorses prison rape and long-term relationships of sexual abuse, largely through legitimising violence and through replicating societal notions of gender and sexuality. The Department of Correctional Services and its staff have so far failed to meaningfully engage with the problem of sexual violence in prisons, or to provide adequate support for victims. There are indications that the department may be beginning to address the problem, but past attempts to get the issue of sexual violence recognised, provide cautions as to how this should be done. Specifically, there is a need to ensure that damaging and brutal notions of masculinity are challenged rather than accentuated in the process of addressing the problem.

Relational Violence in Women's Prison: How Women Describe Interpersonal Violence and Gender

Using data from interviews with former female inmates, I focus on how women describe aggression and violence in prison. Interviewees outline the connection between prison violence, gender, and interpersonal relationships. Similar to in previous studies on adolescent girls, women describe ostracism and rumors as a form of aggression. Furthermore, they detail how some inmates fight over correctional officers as the only men in their lives. I define this form of aggression as relational violence, which is commonly described as adolescent behavior. This article broadens the current work on gender and inmate conflict by focusing on violence used by adult female offenders. Moreover, it extends understanding of inmate culture by allowing interviewees to verbally construct the social reality of prison violence from their perspective to evaluate how they connect violence to gender roles.

Prison's Spoilt Identities: Racially Structured Realities Within and Beyond

This article begins by seeking an explanation for the solidarity between Malay inmates and guards in perpetrating abusive and discriminatory treatment towards Malay transvestites. In the course of explaining an empirical phenomenon in the Singapore prison, this article has examined Singapore's history and ethnic demography, the ethnic Malay minority's lack of socio-economic development and modernisation vis-à-vis the ethnic Chinese majority, geo-politics, the ideology and strategic choices of the state's political elite and their implications for inter-ethnic interactions between Malays and Chinese. As this article will argue, prison culture, rather than being divorced from larger society, is in effect able to articulate and elaborate on the processes of social exclusion faced by ethnic Malay minorities and male transvestites in Singapore society. By shifting the conceptual focus from ‘prison in society’ to ‘prison of society’, a new analytical dimension of informal inmate culture and social structure has been realised; one which suggests immense possibilities for prison literature.

Violence in the Supermax

The supermax prison was designed to control the most violent, assaultive individuals, gang members, and other prisoners who could not be managed in less secure settings. Pelican Bay State Prison, which houses California's supermax, holds approximately 1,300 inmates in its security housing unit (SHU). This article examines the mission, architecture, and organization of Pelican Bay State Prison, the architecture and procedures in the SHU, the training and mind-set of correctional officers who work at Pelican Bay, the inmate culture and mentality, and the findings of the federal court in Madrid v. Gomez, which addressed conditions in the SHU. The authors maintain that the mission of Pelican Bay, combined with the officer and inmate cultures, creates a self fulfilling prophecy: the super violent supermax.

Rules of engagement: Structuring sex and damage in men's prisons and beyond

This paper analyses data from a recent study of ex‐prisoners and prisoners in Gauteng Province, South Africa, to consider the moral economy established by hegemonic inmate culture in which sexual interactions are negotiated. It argues that while this system is based on outside norms of heterosexism, ruptures with these norms occur. Male prison populations are rearranged into gendered categories through intricate inmate rituals, causing dramatic breaks in the ways that some prisoners are understood by others and themselves. The rituals and rules involved in the constructions appear to be unfamiliar from an ‘outside’ perspective, but have roots beyond prison walls. Similarly, the gendered positions generated are distinct from those they imitate, but also emerge in relation to them, beyond mere imitation. Even as new structures of identity emerge then, breaks with the outside are never total. Neither is the hold of the moral economy that inmate culture works so hard to create. Another order of rupture happens when prisoners transgress the rules of this economy, and subvert the meanings on which both the oppressive gender‐sex status quo of the inside and that of the outside, rely.

Doing Time: A Group-Analytic Perspective on the Emotional Experience of Time in a Men's Prison

A group-analytic approach is described within the context of a therapeutic community setting in a high security prison. In group therapy inmates are described gradually unfreezing and speaking about the locked and secret internal world experiences that have been sources of pain and trauma to them. The concept of trauma being frozen in time and undisclosed unless appropriate therapeutic space is available for its unfolding is contrasted with the prison inmate culture which normally discourages emotional openness.

Intersections of Race, Religion, and Inmate Culture

SUMMARY Over the past decades, research on Islam in American prisons has failed to fully capture the essence of the prison Muslim movement because it has focused mainly upon religious rights and management issues. This paper articulates the real meaning of the Muslim prison movement by examining the historical development of Islam within the American correctional system using relevant literature, court cases, and other documents. First, the study presents various stages of Islamic growth in American prisons to illustrate the changes that the movement has encountered. Second, the paper uses a three-dimensional approach that combines race, religion, and inmate culture to identify the main factors that have contributed to the development of Islam in American prisons. The study concludes by addressing the significance of the prison Muslim movement for the reform possibilities of those who accept Islam while incarcerated.

Prisoner Perspectives on Inmate Culture in New Mexico and New Zealand: A Descriptive Case Study

Medium security prisoners in two nations provided personal insights into the inmate social systems found in their facilities: Southern New Mexico Correctional Facility is located near New Mexico's border with Mexico; Christchurch Prison is in New Zealand's South Island. Besides personal biographical and sociolegal questions, the inmates in both facilities responded to a series of closed- and open-ended questions about inmate values and norms. The only modification was to cast them in terminology relevant to the prisoners in each facility. In this analysis, the authors turn to three critical dimensions of alleged inmate values. Inmate orientations on qualities or features in others that they respect provide the first focus. The second explores the respect given to a series of 15 different types of criminal offenders. The final focus is the nature and extent of prison code adoption in both facilities. The authors also address several theoretical and practical concerns revealed by these analyses.

Smoke 'Em if You Got 'Em: Cigarette Black Markets in U.S. Prisons and Jails

Since the mid-1980s, cigarette-smoking policies have become increasingly restrictive in jails and prisons across the United States. Cigarette black markets of various form and scale often emerge in jails and prisons where tobacco is prohibited or banned. Case studies of 16 jails and prisons were undertaken to understand the effects of cigarette bans versus restrictions on inmate culture and prison economies. This study describes how bans can transform largely benign cigarette "gray markets," where cigarettes are used as a currency, into more problematic black markets, where cigarettes are a highly priced commodity. Analysis points to several structural factors that affected the development of cigarette black markets in the visited facilities: the architectural design, inmate movement inside and outside, officer involvement in smuggling cigarettes to inmates, and officer vigilance in enforcing the smoking policy. Although these factors affect the influx of other types of contraband into correctional facilities, such as illegal drugs, this study argues that the demand and availability of cigarettes creates a unique kind of black market.

EFFECTS OF ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE ON INMATE STATUS AND THE INMATE CODE OF CONDUCT

ABSTRACT This case study describes the process of status assignment among inmates in a maximum security penitentiary. The research involved analysis of both qualitative and quantitative data from semi-structured interviews with a random sample of inmates and selected prison officials. Results show that inmate status is largely dependent upon adherence to an inmate code of conduct. Participants in this study identified components of an inmate code which mirrors almost exactly the code described by previous researchers. This code includes “loyalty” (don't be a snitch), “doing your own time”, “standing up” for one's self and “smartness”. In addition to these factors, the type of offense for which the individual was serving time was reported to have a significant effect of status. Other factors, including preprison status and gang affiliation, were also discussed. The data also yielded serendipitous findings which indicate that historical changes in the structure and organization of this penitentiary have diluted the inmate culture through which status assignment is determined. The implications of these findings for sociological theory and prison policy are discussed.

Personal Precautions to Violence in Prison

Although studies have documented increased levels of violence in U.S. prisons, little attention has been given to how this violence shapes inmate behaviors and life-styles. This article presents results from a survey of 300 adult males incarcerated in a maximum-security facility, providing data on the types, prevalence, and social correlates of personal precautions to violence. A factor analysis of responses revealed two distinct dimensions of precautionary behavior. The more fearful, older, and socially isolated inmates primarily used avoidance behaviors to reduce the threat of victimization. On the other hand, younger inmates who use the inmate culture as a source of status and privilege tended to employ more aggressive or proactive techniques to deter attacks.

“Doin' time”: Violent youth in a juvenile facility and in an adult prison

“Doin' time”: Violent youth in a juvenile facility and in an adult prison

A Comparative Analysis of Organizational Structure and Inmate Subcultures in Institutions for Juvenile Offenders

This study provides a partial test of the importation and deprivation models of prisonization by examining inmate subcultures in ten different cottage units in four institutions for juvenile offenders. A typology of juvenile institutions based on both the correctional goals pursued and the methods of intervention and social control distinguishes four different treatment models used in institutions for juveniles. Matching and controlling for the effects of differences in inmates' background characteristics within and between settings, the study describes the relationships between the formal organizational structure and respective inmate culture. The study demonstrates a clear and consistent rela tionship between the formal and informal organizations: The more custodial and punitive settings had inmate cultures that were more violent, more hostile, and more oppositional than those in the treatment-oriented settings. The crucial organizational differences were in the extent to which staff members contained and controlled subterranean inmate violence by encouraging the communication of information about the activities within the inmate sub culture.