Institutional Aggression in The Context of Prisons

4 Key excerpts on "Institutional Aggression in The Context of Prisons"

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  Doing Social Science

  Evidence and Methods in Empirical Research

  • Fiona Devine, Sue Heath, Fiona Devine, Sue Heath(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  Explanations for violent behaviour in prison are customarily described as falling into one of two camps. Researchers from psychological backgrounds have sought to account for violence in prison with reference to the internal personal characteristics of individual aggressors, such as biological or psycho-logical traits (Megargee 1982; Williams and Longley 1987). Those who take a more sociological perspective have emphasized the importance of social and situational factors, such as the deprivations and frustrations of prison life, whereby physical force may be used to obtain goods and services, and the dominant culture of masculinity in which prisoners are required to demon-strate their strength through aggression and toughness (Cooke 1991; Sykes 1958). However, whilst internal dispositions are rarely powerful enough to determine actions in all situations, no environment alone can ordain the action people take and produce identical responses from individuals (Zamble and Porporino 1988). It is thus now commonplace to seek to explain prison violence using an interactionist approach. This should consider both individ-ual and environmental factors and recognize (i) that the environment’s effect on behaviour is mediated by the way prisoners interpret and respond to their situation, which may be in turn influenced by their individual psychology, and (ii) that prisoners and staff themselves shape the nature of the prison setting (Bottoms 1999). Bottoms, however, argues that researchers following interac-tionist approaches have ‘rarely addressed the minutiae of the average prison day, or considered in detail how violence can arise within this social order’ (ibid.: 212). This challenge is taken up by Edgar et al. in Prison Violence , who not only take the unusual step of focusing on mundane, ‘everyday’ incidents of violence between prisoners, but also seek to examine the context of microrelations from which this violence emerges.

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  Bullying Among Prisoners

  Evidence, Research and Intervention Strategies

  • Jane L. Ireland(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Ellis and colleagues focused on the ‘aggressive transgressions’ of prisoners defined as ‘any behavior proscribed by prison rules that harms or injures another person’ (1974: 18). Finally, Johnson (1978) used the terms ‘prison games’ or ‘peer games’ to describe some of the abusive behaviours that occurred between prisoners, including incidents involving teasing and ostracising. The range of terms to describe aggression between prisoners is not evident in the research conducted in the United Kingdom where, with very few exceptions (e.g. O'Donnell and Edgar 1996a, 1996b), the term bullying has been systematically applied. Thus, researching aggression between prisoners within a framework of bullying is primarily an English phenomenon. Since the focus of the current and following chapters is on bullying behaviours among prisoners, I will concentrate on those studies that have dealt specifically with this phenomenon, although in parts it will be necessary for me to expand the discussion to include research that has applied more general terms such as violence or victimisation. The first study conducted into bullying among offenders was that of McGurk and McDougall (1986). Since then there have been thirty-six studies addressing bullying among prisoners. The majority of these studies have not been published in academic peer-reviewed journals, with only sixteen appearing in such publications to date. Of the remaining studies, the majority have either been presented in ‘in-house’ professional journals (e.g. Marshall 1993) or been completed as surveys designed solely for use within prisons (e.g. Bolt 1999). A summary of the studies conducted to date is presented in Table 1.1

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  The Meanings of Violence

  • Elizabeth A Stanko(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Part IVViolence, meaning, and institutional contexts

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  11 Institutional violencePrison conflicts in context

  Kimmett Edgar, Carol Martin and Ian O’Donnell

  The Conflicts and Violence in Prison project team (CVP) examined interpersonal violence – that is, fights, assaults and other forms of deliberate harm – among prisoners. The prison context is a specialised area within which to study violence because of the unusual characteristics of prisons as total institutions (Goffman 1961). However, the innovative contribution that the CVP makes to research into violence is to examine violent incidents in the context of conflicts.

  This chapter1 is based on data gathered in four prisons in England: a young offenders’ institution, a local prison, a female establishment and a high-security prison. The CVP surveyed 590 prisoners about prison violence. In addition, it interviewed 209 of the prisoners surveyed, all of whom had recent experience of disputes. Some of these prisoners had reported in the survey that they had recently been involved in a fight or assault. Others were recruited to the study following disciplinary hearings adjudicated by the prison governor. Still others (forty-one) were interviewed about disputes that they said had been settled without physical violence. In total, the in-depth interviews covered 141 disputes, ninety-seven of which had resulted in a fight or assault.2

  The CVP worked from an understanding of conflict as any situation in which the interests of two or more parties clashed. The 209 accounts of conflicts were analysed according to a framework based on the six dimensions shown in Figure 11.1 .

  These dimensions help to describe the way in which the CVP defined conflict. The purposes of setting violence in the context of conflict are:

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  Applied Social Psychology

  • Gün R Semin, Klaus Fiedler, Gün R Semin, Klaus Fiedler(Authors)
  • 1996(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  The final section will be devoted to strategies and proposals for reducing aggression and violence, ranging from individual-centred psychological intervention to long-term measures implemented at the sociopolitical level. Aggression and violence: definition and nneasurennent While 'aggression ' is an established term not just among psychologists but also in the vocabulary of ordinary language, defin ing its exact meaning is by no means a straightforward task. As Krebs and Miller (1985) point out, definitions can focus on different aspects, varying in their implications for the identi-fication and classification of behaviours as 'aggressive ': they may concentrate on observable behaviours as opposed to intentions and motives, on verbal as opposed to physical aggression expressed in direct or indirect forms, on the psychological vs. physical effects of aggression, either immediate or long term. There appears to be general consensus nowadays that a purely behavioural definition of aggression, as 'a response that delivers noxious stimuli to another organism' (Buss, 1961, p. 1), falls short of capturing the psychological signifi-cance of the concept. Additional aspects have to be included in the definition to eliminate behaviours not commonly thought of as aggressive: -the intention to cause harm to a person or damage an object (e.g . to exclude the driver killing a pedestrian who crosses the road without looking); -the expectancy that the behaviour will result in harm to the target (e.g. to exclude the helper who aggravates the injuries of an accident victim by taking the wrong actions through lack of competence); Aggression and Violence in Society 345 -the willingness on behalf of the target person to avoid the harmful treatment (e.g. to exclude the doctor who performs an operation on the patient's request). The actual consequences of an aggressive action do not feature in the definition of aggression along these lines.

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