The Society of Captives

A Study of a Maximum Security Prison

Gresham M. Sykes

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781400828272
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Violence in Society
• Index: Social Sciences

The Society of Captives, first published in 1958, is a classic of modern criminology and one of the most important books ever written about prison.Gresham Sykes wrote the book at the height of the Cold War, motivated by the world's experience of fascism and communism to study the closest thing to a totalitarian system in American life: a maximum security prison. His analysis calls into question the extent to which prisons can succeed in their attempts to control every facet of life--or whether the strong bonds between prisoners make it impossible to run a prison without finding ways of "accommodating" the prisoners.Re-released now with a new introduction by Bruce Western and a new epilogue by the author, The Society of Captives will continue to serve as an indispensable text for coming to terms with the nature of modern power.

CHAPTER ONE

THE PRISON AND ITS SETTING

WHEN THE New Jersey State Maximum Security Prison was first built in the last decade of the 18th Century, it was surrounded by open fields beyond the limits of Trenton. The town, however, developed into a city and today the dwelling houses of the lower or lower-middle class border the prison on three sides and railroad tracks mark the fourth. A massive wall 20 feet high separates the free community from the prisoners, serving not only as the final barrier to escape but also as a symbol of society’s rejection—for this is a fort to keep the enemy within rather than without.¹

From the street outside the prison you can see the guards in their towers on the wall. Each is armed with a shotgun, a revolver, and gas grenades to quell a riot or strike down the inmate desperate enough to attempt escape. But these disturbances occur infrequently; the last riot took place in 1952 and no one has tried to scale the wall for more than a decade. The guard in his tower holds a position organized around the theme of potential crisis, the possible event made improbable by vigilance. It is a theme which we will encounter often in our examination of the prison.

Within the prison wall lie 13 1/2 acres of buildings, yards, and passageways. Cellblocks, offices, barber shops, laundry, industrial shops, chapel, exercise yards, dining halls, kitchens, and the death house are jammed together or piled one on top of the other, for this community of more than 1,500 individuals must be squeezed into an area not much larger than several city blocks. The society of prisoners, however, is not only physically compressed; it is psychologically compressed as well, since prisoners live in an enforced intimacy where each man’s behavior is subject both to the constant scrutiny of his fellow captives and the surveillance of the custodians. It is not solitude that plagues the prisoner but life en masse.

The main entrance to the prison is a small steel door with a slot of bullet-proof glass, set in the eastern wall. After passing through this portal the newly arrived inmate is led down a hall lined on both sides with administrative offices—an area labelled the Front House in the argot of the captives. Ahead of him lies another steel door and still another; and only after the last of these has shut behind him does he stand within the prison proper. Before he leaves the outer hall he is taken to a room where he is stripped and searched. His age, name, crime, sentence, and other information are duly recorded; his civilian possessions are taken away and he puts on the prison uniform. Thus he enters the custodial institution, a poor man in terms of material goods; later he will be given other things (a change of clothing, a cup, a spoon, blankets, etc.), but they will place him only just above the line of bare necessity. The prisoner is supposed to live in poverty as a matter of public policy, an unwilling monk of the 20th Century.

On the other side of the third steel door lies the Center— a large chamber which serves as the hub of the official communication system. This is the check point which all men must pass in moving about the institution; it is the place where extra weapons are stored, the constant counts of the inmate population are received, and the shifts of guards coming on duty at eight-hour intervals assemble for roll call and assignment of duties. It is said that whoever controls the Center controls the prison, for the reins of government are gathered here; and like many seats of government it has come to take on a symbolic quality transcending its physical details. In the vocabulary of the inmates, a center man is a prisoner who allies himself too blatantly with the world of the custodians; and in the eyes of the officials, arrogance or disrespect in the Center has a special significance as an affront to legitimate authority.

Radiating from the Center, in a ground plan reminiscent of Vilain’s Maison de Force,² are the cellblocks or wings which house the society of captives. A typical cellblock contains two banks of cells set back to back, rising from floor to ceiling in the center of the building, and it is in one of these honey-combed structures that the inmate lives for the duration of his sentence. Since the prison has grown piecemeal over a period of more than one hundred years, the cellblocks differ in the details of their construction, such as the size and number of the cells they contain, the nature of the locking devices for the cell doors or grills, and the means of ventilation. The largest cells in the institution are 15 feet long, 7 1/2 feet wide, and about 10 feet high; the smallest are 7 1/2 feet long, 4 1/2 feet wide, and 7 feet high. Regardless of their size, the official furnishings of these compartments are harshly Spartan: a toilet, a washbowl, a bed, a table, a footlocker, shelves, a set of earphones for the prison radio, and a single electric light hanging from the ceiling comprise the list.

Hot in the summer and cold in the winter, cramped and barren, the stone and steel cellblock would seem to express the full nature of imprisonment as seen in the popular fancy. Indeed, if men in prison were locked forever in their cells, shut off from all intercourse with each other, and deprived of all activities of normal life, the dimensions of the cell would be the alpha and omega of life in prison. Like so many animals in their cages, the inmate population would be an aggregate rather than a social group, a mass of isolates rather than a society. The duties of the officials would consist prima-rily of administering to the physiological needs of their captives in their individual enclosures and the prisoner would interact only with himself.

In fact, however, prisoners are released from their cells each day to engage in a variety of activities under the direction and supervision of the custodians. Inmates are freed from their cells and marched to the messhall for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Inmates are freed from their cells to perform the innumerable chores involved in the daily round of institutional existence. Stoking fires, cooking, barbering, washing clothes, sweeping, working as hospital orderlies—all are necessary duties which are carried out by prisoners. Inmates are freed from their cells to exercise in the Yard, to work in the industrial shops, to watch television in the recreation hall, to study in the prison school, to attend religious services. It is these patterns of release and reconfinement which set the stage for a wide range of social interaction between inmate and inmate and guard and inmate; and in this interaction we can begin to see the realities of the prison social system emerge.

In a very fundamental sense, a man perpetually locked by himself in a cage is no longer a man at all; rather, he is a semi-human object, an organism with a number. The identity of the individual, both to himself and to others, is largely compounded of the web of symbolic communications by which he is linked to the external world; and as Kingsley Davis has pointed out, “. . . the structure of the human personality is so much a product of social interaction that when this interaction ceases it tends to decay.”³ It was the recognition of this fact that played a large part in the abandonment of solitary confinement for the general inmate population of the American prison. Humanitarian motives, combined with a growing doubt about the efficacy of solitude and meditation as means of reform, led to a search for alternatives to isolation, in New Jersey as elsewhere. Emil Frankel, in reviewing the development of penal philosophy in New Jersey over a 250-year period, notes that:

In his annual report of 1838, the Keeper admitted that . . . solitary confinement apparently had little influence in decreasing the amount of crime committed within the state. And his annual report for 1839 contained an admirable analysis of the fundamental defects in the system of solitary confinement on the physical health of the prisoners through the impossibility of taking normal methods of exercise. But even worse was its effects upon the mental health of the prisoners, it leading to solitary vices and mental degeneration. The choice between the congregate and solitary type of confinement, he held, was fundamentally the problem as to whether vicious association is more to be deplored than mental and physical deterioration.⁴

In addition, there was the constant social demand to reduce the financial burden of imprisonment on the free community to a minimum—a demand ill met by keeping the inmate locked in his cell both day and night. Today, then, solitary confinement is used in the New Jersey State Maximum Security Prison only for those prisoners who are being punished for infractions of the prison rules and it represents the ultimate penalty that the custodians can inflict rather than the common fate of the man in custody. Yet if the prison officials no longer force their captives to remain constantly within the confines of their cells, neither do they permit them to roam freely within the limits set by the wall and its armed guards. In the eyes of the custodians, such a course is prohibited by the elementary requirements of security and the need to maintain order; the prison exists in an uneasy compromise of liberty and restraint.

II

When we examine the physical structure of the prison the most striking feature is, perhaps, its drabness. It has that “institutional” look shared by police stations, hospitals, orphan asylums, and similar public buildings—a Kafka-like atmosphere compounded of naked electric lights, echoing corridors, walls encrusted with the paint of decades, and the stale air of rooms shut up too long.

Yet the New Jersey State Prison does not represent acute physical discomfort, nor is there evidence of shockingly bad living conditions. Rather, it gives the impression of a grinding dullness, an existence lacking the amenities of life we take for granted, but an existence which is still tolerable. In this sense, the physical conditions of life in prison would seem to reflect a sort of half-hearted or indecisive punishment, the imposition of deprivation by indifference or forgetfulness rather than by intent. And in fact large segments of our society would much prefer to forget the confined offender, for no matter how just imprisonment may be, the free community is reluctant to face the conclusion that some men must be held in bondage for the larger good. The prison wall, then, does more than help prevent escape; it also hides the prisoners from society. If the inmate population is shut in, the free community is shut out, and the vision of men held in custody is, in part, prevented from arising to prick the conscience of those who abide by the social rules.

In reality, of course, the prison wall is far more permeable than it appears, not in terms of escape—which we will consider later—but in terms of the relationships between the prison social system and the larger society in which it rests. The prison is not an autonomous system of power; rather, it is an instrument of the State, shaped by its social environment, and we must keep this simple truth in mind if we are to understand the prison. It reacts to and is acted upon by the free community as various groups struggle to advance their interests. At certain times, as in the case of riots, the inmates can capture the attention of the public; and indeed disturbances within the walls must often be viewed as highly dramatic efforts to communicate with the outside world, efforts in which confined criminals pass over the heads of their captors to appeal to a new audience. At other times the flow of communications is reversed and the prison authorities find themselves receiving demands raised by a variety of business, political, religious, ethnic, and welfare interest groups. In addition, there is the fact that the personnel of the prison—both the inmates and custodians—are drawn from the free community, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, and they bring with them the attitudes, beliefs, and values of this larger world. The prison, as a social system, does not exist in isolation any more than the criminal within the prison exists in isolation as an individual; and the institution and its setting are inextricably mixed despite the definite boundary of the wall.

Ill

Lying somewhere between total annihilation of the offender on one hand and warning or forgiveness on the other, imprisonment is generally viewed as the appropriate consequence of most serious crimes. The issue is put more bluntly by prisoners themselves in their aphorism, “If you can’t pull the time, don’t pull the crime,” but the thought is much the same.

Yet why is imprisonment appropriate? On what grounds is imprisonment justified? It is a cliché of modern penology that placing the offender in prison is for the purposes of punishment, deterrence, and reform. There is a beguiling neatness and simplicity about this three-pronged aim but it requires examination. The social system of the New Jersey State Maximum Security Prison lies in a philosophical environment as well as a physical one and the nature of the prison’s social system only becomes clear when we understand the rationale on which it is based.

The idea of punishment as the purpose of imprisonment is plain enough—the person who has committed a wrong or hurt must suffer in return. The State, through its agent the prison, is entitled if not morally obligated to hurt the individual who has broken the criminal law, since a crime is by definition a wrong committed against the State. Imprisonment should be punishment, not only by depriving the individual of his liberty, but also by imposing painful conditions under which the prisoner must live within the walls.

Now it is true that there are few persons directly concerned with handling the offender who will advance this view of the prison’s purpose as baldly as we have stated it here. Penologists, prison psychiatrists, prison administrators, judges —all are far more apt to claim that we do not place the criminal in prison to secure retribution but to accomplish better things. Yet there is some reason to doubt that this denial of punishment as a legitimate aim of imprisonment accurately reflects the opinions of the general public. However harsh an insistence on retribution may appear to be, it cannot be ignored as a social force shaping the nature of the penal institution, whether in the form of community reactions to accusations of “coddling” prisoners or the construction of budgets by the state legislators.

The idea of deterrence as the aim of imprisonment is somewhat more complicated, for the argument contains three parts which need to be treated separately. First, it is claimed that for those who have been imprisoned the experience is (or should be) sufficiently distasteful to convince them that crime had best be avoided in the future. This decision to forego crime is not expected to come from a change in the attitudes and values concerning the wrongness of crime. Rather, it supposedly flows from a sharpened awareness of the penalties attached to wrongdoing. Second, it is argued that imprisonment is important as a deterrent not for the individual who has committed a crime and who has been placed in prison but for the great mass of citizens who totter on the edge. The image of the prison is supposed to check errant impulses, and again it is fear rather than morality which is expected to guide the individual in his action. Third, there is the assertion that the deterrent effect of imprisonment is largely a matter of keeping known criminals temporarily out of circulation and the major aim of imprisonment is to keep offenders within the walls where they cannot prey on the free community, at least for the moment.

Like those who argue for imprisonment as retribution, the adherents of imprisonment as deterrence tend to support those polices which would make life in prison painful, with the possible exception of those who argue for simple custody alone.⁵ They are faced with a moral dilemma when it comes to justifying punishment for the criminal in order to deter the noncriminal, for as Morris Cohen has pointed out, we feel uneasiness in hurting Peter to keep Paul honest. A more serious problem, however, is presented by the fact that the view of imprisonment as deterrence is based on a hypothetical, complicated cause-and-effect relationship. Does the prison experience actually induce the criminal to refrain from wrongdoing through fear of another period in custody? Does the image of the prison, for those who have never been within its walls, really check the potential criminal in mid-act? Affirmative answers to these questions must be secured before the use of imprisonment for the purpose of deterrence is rationally justified and this has proven to be no easy task. The usual procedure has been to make the common-sense assumption that men are rarely so good by ei...