chapter 14

1 chapter 14 OUTLINE Introduction The Male Inmate s World The Female Inmate s World The Staff World Prison Riots Prisoners Rights Issues Facing Prisons TodayPrison LifeLEARNING OBJECTIVESA fter reading this chapter , you should be able to Describe the realities of prison life and prisonsubculture from the inmate s point of view. Illustrate the significant differences between men sprisons and women s prisons. Describe the realities of prison life from the correctionsofficer s point of view. Describe the causes of prison riots, and list the stagesthrough which most riots progress.

2 Discuss the legal aspects of prisoners rights, andexplain the consequences of precedent-setting Court cases in the area of prisoners rights. Describe the major problems and issues that prisonsface Justice Today: An Introductory Text for the 21st Century, Eleventh Edition, by Frank Schmalleger. Published by Prentice 2011 by Pearson Education, : 0-558-8661 1-5 Prison LifeCHAPTER 14489489 Criminal Justice Today: An Introductory Text for the 21st Century, Eleventh Edition, by Frank Schmalleger. Published by Prentice 2011 by Pearson Education, : 0-558-86611-5 Jurisdictions should develop, with theassistance of prosecutors and others, communitysupervision programs that allow all but themost serious [offenders] to avoid incarcerationand a conviction record.

3 American Bar Association, Criminal Justice Section2 Mass incarceration seems to have made the streetssafer. The vast increase in the prison and jailpopulation from about 380,000 in 1975 to milliontoday overlaps with equally stunning declines incrime.. Many critics of incarceration argue (a bittoo quickly) that crime would have fallen without theprison boom. Perhaps. Still the value of saferneighborhoods is immediate, while the costs ofexcessive imprisonment are theoretical and vague. Jason DeParle1490 PART 4 CorrectionsINTRODUCTIONOn the FOX TV show Prison Break, Wentworth Miller plays the role of an engineer namedMichael Scofield who holds up a bank so that he can join his brother in the fictional FoxRiver State Penitentiary.

4 Scofield s brother, Lincoln (Dominic Purcell), has been convictedof a sensational murder and is housed on the prison s death row. The show, which centersaround Michael s elaborate plan to break Lincoln out and to prove that he s innocent, drawsa large weekly audience and demonstrates the fascination that the American public has withprison many years, prisons and prison life could be described by the phrase out of sight, outof mind. Very few citizens cared about prison conditions, and those unfortunate enough tobe locked away were regarded as lost to the world.

5 By the mid-twentieth century, however,this attitude started to change. Concerned citizens began to offer their services to prison ad-ministrators, neighborhoods began accepting work-release prisoners and halfway houses,and social scientists initiated a serious study of prison life. Today, as shows likePrison Breakmake clear, prisons and prison life have entered the American mainstream. Part of the reasonfor this is because prisons today hold more people than ever before, and incarceration im-pacts not only those imprisoned but family members, friends, and victims on the Purcell (left) andWentworth Miller, stars ofthe hit FOX TV show PrisonBreak.

6 Why do so many TVviewers find prison lifeintriguing?John Zich/CORBIS-NYCriminal Justice Today: An Introductory Text for the 21st Century, Eleventh Edition, by Frank Schmalleger. Published by Prentice 2011 by Pearson Education, : 0-558-8661 1-5 Prison LifeCHAPTER 14491 This chapter describes the realities of prison life today, including prisoner lifestyles, prisonsubcultures, sexuality in prison, prison violence, and prisoners rights and grievance proce-dures. We will discuss both the inmate world and the staff world. A separate section on womenin prison details the social structure of women s prisons, daily life in those facilities, and thevarious types of female inmates.

7 We begin with a brief overview of early research on prison on Prison Life Total InstitutionsIn 1935, Hans Reimer, who was then chairman of the Department of Sociology at IndianaUniversity, set the tone for studies of prison life when he voluntarily served three months inprison as an incognito reported the results of his studies to theAmerican Prison Association, stimulating many other, albeit less spectacular, efforts to ex-amine prison life. Other early studies include Donald Clemmer s The Prison Community(1940),4 Gresham Sykes s The Society of Captives(1958),5 Richard Cloward and DonaldCressey s Theoretical Studies in Social Organization of the Prison(1960),6and Cressey sedited volume, The Prison(1961).

8 7 These studies and others focused primarily on maximum-security prisons for men. Theytreated correctional institutions as formal or complex organizations and employed the ana-lytic techniques of organizational sociology, industrial psychology, and administrative modern writers on prisons have observed, The prison was compared to a primitivesociety, isolated from the outside world, functionally integrated by a delicate system ofmechanisms, which kept it precariously balanced between anarchy and accommodation. 9 Another approach to the study of prison life was developed by Erving Goffman, who coinedthe term total institutionin a 1961 study of prisons and mental describedtotal institutions as places where the same people work, recreate, worship, eat, and sleep to-gether daily.

9 Such places include prisons, concentration camps, mental hospitals, seminaries,and other facilities in which residents are cut off from the larger society either forcibly or will-ingly. Total institutions are small societies. They evolve their own distinctive values and stylesof life and pressure residents to fulfill rigidly prescribed behavioral speaking, the work of prison researchers built on findings of other social sci-entists who discovered that any group with similar characteristics confined in the sameplace at the same time develops its own subculture.

10 Prison subcultures, described in thenext section, also provide the medium through which prison values are communicated andexpectations are made known. Learn more about prison research at Library Extra 14 institutionAn enclosed facility separatedfrom society both socially andphysically, where the inhabitantsshare all aspects of their Extra 14 1A notice posted on a prisonwall. Custody and controlremain the primary concernsof prison staffers throughoutthe country a fact reinforcedby this notice. Is the emphasison custody and controljustified?