Prison Violence

Conflict, power and vicitmization

Kimmett Edgar, Ian O'Donnell, Carol Martin

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317829096
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Criminologie

Prisons are dangerous places, and assaults, threats, theft and verbal abuse are pervasive - attributable both to the characteristics of the captive population and to an institutional sub culture which promotes violence as a means of resolving conflicts. Yet the crimes perpetrated by prisoners on other prisoners have attracted little interest, and criminological research has contributed little to an understanding of situations in which violence arises in penal institutions. This book seeks to remedy this, and to address and answer a number of key questions: how do features of the prison social setting shape conflicts?; what social norms guide the decision to use violence?; what are the personal and social consequences of spending months or years in places where distrust and anxiety are normal?; how do staff respond to the dangers that are part of daily life in many prisons?; is it possible to identify factors associated with risk and resilience?; and what methods of handling conflicts do prisoners use that could prevent violence? Prison Violence adopts a distinctive approach to answering these questions, and is based on extensive research, including interviews with both victims and perpetrators of prison violence; it pioneers a conflict-centred approach, seeking to understand the pathways into and out of situations where there is potential for violence, focusing on interpersonal and institutional dynamics rather than on individual psychological factors.

Chapter I

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Introduction and overview

Stewkley

I'm in his cell and I'm talking to him. We were talking sensibly. Then a mate of mine comes in and grabs my arm and tries to pull me out. As the door opens, there were loads of heads there and that must have made him change his mind – he started saying, ‘Get out! What you doing there, you little monkey?’ and he started pushing me. He threw me out like I was a rag doll, and I thought that was humiliating, so I retaliated by punching him in the face. He picked me up and steamed me into the wall. I said to myself, ‘He's big but he's slow’. He's still trying to grapple with me – I'm still hitting him to the head and face. I was upset because I didn't want to resort to that over something so trivial. I don't remember it at all but he fell down and I carried on kicking him. I heard the alarm bell and my friend pulled me out and I went into his cell and washed my face and got some of the blood off. I was hoping the officers wouldn't know who was fighting but they came for me and took me down the Block. They started to tell me it was assault but when I mentioned my solicitor, they said they would do me for fighting.

Warslow

I saw Stewkley come up the stairs and he came in my cell and pushed the door to. He starts being abusive to me. The way he was stood – side on and his hand kept going towards his pocket – I said, ‘You're tooled up, are you?’ I called him a kid and told him to get out. I'd avoid a confrontation if possible unless I'm being hit. I told him to get out but he had his foot against the door. I wanted him out of the cell, so I put my hands on his shoulders and moved him to the side through the door. As he went through the door, he swung his hand round and punched me in the face – he knocked my front tooth out. I put my hands back on his

shoulders to push him out. He tried to hit me again but he grabbed my shirt and I tripped over. Whilst I was on the floor, he kicked me three times in the face. An officer was there and shouted and it just broke up. He knew something was going on. Stewkley went into his friend's cell and I went into my cell. Staff came in straight away and said I had been assaulted. I then made a statement and signed it but I don't know why I got charged with fighting. I was taken to Health Care and then the Block.

The harm caused by imprisonment is multifaceted. Most evident are the material deprivations of prison life, isolation from families and reduced prospects for future employment. In addition to these, the prisoner runs the risk of becoming a victim of crimes such as theft, robbery or assault; and more rarely, rape or murder. Violent incidents, such as the fight between Stewkley and Warslow,¹ seem to confirm a stereotype of prisoners as volatile and dangerous individuals. Our aim is to explain the nature and extent of interpersonal prison violence and victimization; that is, incidents that arise between individual prisoners, including fights and assaults, but also threats, robberies and bullying. We will not deal with the uses of force in relations between prisoners and prison officers, nor will we discuss collective violence, such as rioting or destructive demonstrations.

This book brings together evidence from two major pieces of research on prison life (both conducted in England and Wales). The first, ‘the victimization study’, focused primarily on the extent of different forms of harmful behaviour, ranging from assaults with weapons to social exclusion. It was funded by the Home Office Research and Statistics Directorate (as it was then). The second, ‘the conflicts study’, grew out of the first. It gathered detailed information about the tactics prisoners used in dealing with problems that arose between them, and the circumstances that resulted in physical violence. It was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.

Both projects were carried out at the University of Oxford Centre for Criminological Research. This book grows out of a long assocation with the centre, where all the authors were employed at various periods between 1992 and 2002. Each project pioneered new approaches to the study of prison life and led to a number of publications (including Edgar and O'Donnell 1998; O'Donnell and Edgar 1996, 1998a, 1998b, 1999; Edgar and Martin 2000; Edgar et al. 2002a, 2003). What is novel about Prison Violence is that, for the first time, it weaves together the two studies to construct a detailed account of the forces shaping individual prisoners' experiences of conflict, fear and the struggle for power.

We aim to focus systematically on prison violence in a way that might lead to a deeper understanding of how often and why it occurs, and to develop thinking about how this problem can be minimized. Our primary sources are the prisoners' recollections of their thoughts, feelings and interpretations, especially when they found themselves in conflict. We describe the prison experience as seen through the lens of troubled relationships.

The prison subculture

The sociology of prisons has been extensively discussed, and we do not intend to review the general literature here. Indeed, rather than attempting to incorporate fleeting references to numerous studies, we have concentrated on a modest number of sources, some drawn from beyond the confines of traditional criminal justice research. By freeing up the text in this way and concentrating on prisoners' narratives, we hope to lower the barriers between the reader and the lived reality of prison violence. However, a brief sketch of how others have described the functions and meanings of violence within prison culture will set the scene for the chapters that follow.

The classic works of prison sociology describe the processes of acculturation, particularly the defining features of the inmate ‘code’. Donald Clemmer initiated this research tradition with his landmark text, The Prison Community (1940), a work of extraordinary breadth and detail. Clemmer compiled a dictionary of prison slang, elaborated the structural dimensions of social differentiation and organization, and studied sexual and economic behaviour among prisoners. He developed the concept of prisonization, which he defined as ‘the taking on in greater or less degree of the folkways, mores, customs and general culture of the penitentiary’ (ibid.: 299).

Almost twenty years later, Gresham Sykes described how prisoners maintained an uneasy balance between solidarity and mutual exploitation. His book, The Society of Captives (1958), is short and elegantly written. The prisoners Sykes studied were united in opposition to the prison authorities, ‘their captors’, but were also engaged in a war of all against all. Sykes (ibid.: 77) summed up the situation facing a prisoner in New Jersey in the mid-1950s in words that still ring true today: ‘While it is true that every prisoner does not live in the constant fear of being robbed or beaten, the constant companionship of thieves, rapists, murderers and aggressive homosexuals is far from reassuring.’

Like Clemmer, Sykes believed that prisoners' lifestyles reflected the particular adaptations they had to make to prison environments. This understanding came to be referred to as the ‘deprivation model’ of prison adjustment. Within this school of thought, violence was seen primarily as a tool prisoners used in securing for themselves as comfortable a lifestyle as was possible in the deprived environment of the prison. In the institution described by Sykes, prisoners used violent force to:

• deter others by shows of toughness

• exploit others through robbery

• maintain their image against insults

• obtain sexual gratification.

Other writers, such as John Irwin and Donald Cressey (1962), emphasized the ways the inmate code reflected values that offenders brought with them into prison from their criminal networks outside. Breaches of the code which governed their behaviour (for example, passing information to staff) were met with violence. It was largely assumed that prisoners' conduct was shaped by conformity to the code. The general thrust of this theory, which is labelled the ‘importation model’, was to untangle the ways that inmates' behaviour in custody was an extension of the ‘criminal subculture’ more generally. Hence, the importation model tends to stress the extent to which prisoners enter custody already committed to values that support the use of violence.

Martin Grapendaal (1990) and others have since advocated an ‘integration theory’ proposing that some of the aspects of culture in prison are imported from outside and some originate in the special conditions of confinement. Prisons are not seen as monolithic environments and prisoners differ in their perceptions of, and responses to, similar experiences. Kenneth Adams (1992) provided a useful summary of research on prisoners' culture from the deprivation, importation and integration perspectives. He charted the developmental nature of adjustments to institutional life. For example, self-mutilation, emotional disorders and rule infractions are most likely during the early phases of incarceration. Adams argued that ‘maladaptive’ behaviour in prison has much in common with maladaptive behaviour in the community and that programmes that result in positive changes in prisons should spill over to community settings. In other words, there would be a diffusion of benefits associated with improvements in prison safety.

General descriptions of prison culture acknowledge that within prisons the potential for violence is ever present, but rarely do they explore the consequences of fights and assaults for the prison as a community. They say little about how the extent and threat of victimization structure social relations among prisoners.

Violence and social order

More recently, research has examined the structures and processes which generate and maintain ‘order’ within the prison community. Richard Sparks, Anthony Bottoms and Will Hay (1996: 119) defined social order partly in terms of the absence of violence. In the interpersonal context, they viewed order as a kind of reliable predictability:

… an orderly situation is any long-standing pattern of social relations (characterized by a minimum level of respect for persons) in which the expectations that participants have of one another are commonly met, though not necessarily without contestation. Order can also, in part, be defined negatively as the absence of violence, overt conflict or the imminent threat of the chaotic breakdown of social routines.

Their book, Prisons and the Problem of Order focused on ‘the perennial problem of securing and maintaining order in prisons, rather than the special problem of the occasional complete or near-complete breakdown of order’ (ibid.: 2, emphasis in original). Their definition viewed violence as an interruption in social order. None the less, they also recognized that prisoner culture could create competing understandings. In a later essay, Bottoms (1999) made clear that, among prisoners, violence might become routine, part of the everyday expectations that participants have of one another. Rather than being disruptive, violence can be seen as a convention. He described prison societies in these carefully balanced words (ibid.: 275): ‘The evidence that we have about the prisoners’ own world suggests both that it is a special kind of social context unusually weighted toward coercive power and that it nevertheless frequently contains elements of predictability and order.’

Bottoms also cited evidence that most prisoners seem to feel safe most of the time. These insights raise key questions about the influence of violence at the level of prisoner culture. How can it be that prisons exhibit high rates of assault, threats of violence and other unsettling behaviour, yet prisoners are not disabled by fear? How is it possible for institutions to function if violence – and the threat of violence – is routine, a way of life?

Violence, then, appears to have three possible roles in regard to social order:

1. When order is conceived as stable relations based on a minimal level of (mutual) respect, violence represents chaos and disorder, a break in social stability that requires resolution before orderly routine can resume (violence as disruption).

2. In other contexts, chaos might be brought to an end by violence used as a regulating device. In these situations, violence has a temporary function, to restore order, at which point the need to inflict harm comes to an end and routine is re-established (violence as regulator).

3. If human nature is viewed as naturally violent; if violence is believed to be inevitable, and interpersonal harm seen as the way things are; if we imagine a society in which violence is the expectation each party has of everyone else; then violence is part of everyday reality (violence as convention).

Clearly the first and third meanings are mutually exclusive: violence cannot be a break in the order and order itself. Bottoms's reference to the role of coercive power and predictability implies that prison culture might exhibit a perverse kind of order in which violence is the norm. Joe Sim (1994: 104) has gone further and related the ordinariness of violence to the expression of masculinity:

Violence and domination in prison can therefore be understood not as a pathological manifestation of abnormal otherness but as part of the normal routine which is sustained and legitimated by the wider culture of masculinity: that culture condemns some acts of male violence but condones the majority of others.

The extent to which violence is a disruption of social order, a regulating device or a convention is partly an empirical question. If violence could be shown to be extremely rare, it would then be difficult to support the claim that it is part of everyday prison life. If most prisoners are likely to experience or witness physical violence over the course of a period in custody, then the prevalence of violence would seem to confirm the hard image of prison as a place where each member might reasonably expect everyone else to attempt to inflict physical harm. One of our major aims is to clarify the extent to which prisons are ruled by force, to investigate whether Sykes's war of everyone against everyone reflects prison life in general.

The relationship between violence and order can be presented as a difference of perspective. Take, as an example, an assault on an informer. Prisoners for whom violence is a convention would accept this as an inevitable (and normal) part of everyday prison life. Those who subscribe to the values of inmate solidarity might judge that the beating was necessary as a regulator of inmate ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and tables
• About the authors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction and overview
• 2 Methods and key concepts
• 3 The extent and nature of victimization
• 4 Reciprocal victimization and bullying
• 5 Fear and vulnerability
• 6 Conflicts I: interests, relationships, catalysts
• 7 Conflicts II – interpretations, purposes, social context
• 8 Power contests
• 9 Pathways to safety
• Appendix
• References
• Index