Inmate Society in the Era of Mass Incarceration (original) (raw)
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Where “Old Heads” Prevail: Inmate Hierarchy in a Men’s Prison Unit
American Sociological Review, 2017
Research of inmate social order is a once-vibrant area that receded just as American incarceration rates climbed and the country's carceral contexts dramatically changed. This study reengages inmate society with an abductive mixed methods investigation of informal status within a contemporary men's prison unit. The authors collect narrative and social network data from 133 male inmates housed in a unit of a Pennsylvania medium-security prison. Analyses of inmate narratives suggest that unit "old heads" provide collective goods in the form of mentoring and role modeling that foster a positive and stable peer environment. This hypothesis is then tested with Exponential Random Graph Models (ERGMs) of peer nomination data. The ERGM results complement the qualitative analysis and suggest that older inmates and those who have been on the unit longer are perceived by their peers as powerful and influential. Both analytical strategies point to the maturity of aging and the acquisition of local knowledge as important for attaining informal status in the unit. In sum, this mixed methods case study extends theoretical insights of classic prison ethnographies, adds quantifiable results capable of future replication, and points to a growing population of older inmates as important for contemporary prison social organization.
Critical Criminology, 2004
This article employs a convict perspective to examine the evolving nature of imprisonment in the United States. Drawing from the prison literature, and placed within the political economy of the wider society, it utilizes personal accounts of the author (an ex-convict) and his interactions with prisoners to provide a critical look at the changing structures, inequities, and hierarchical social relations of the prison system and their effect on the lives of people behind bars.
Over the past 20 years, the United States has experienced a massive increase in imprisonment. The number of people incarcerated and the clustering of that incarceration in the inner-city black population raise the prospect that incarceration may be undermining less coercive institutions of social control such as families or communities. The long-term result of this incarceration policy, then, would be increases, rather than the expected decreases, in crime. There is some empirical evidence to support this position. Increases in incarceration have been clustered in groups and places and have been of the magnitude that could affect less coercive institutions in those areas. Large proportions of the imprisoned population are involved in families and communities at the time of their imprisonment. Incarceration has been shown to reduce family formation for blacks but not for whites.
The curious eclipse of prison ethnography in the age of mass incarceration
County Jail, the largest detention facility in the 'Free World', to give a ground-level sense of how the entry portal of the US detention system operates by way of prelude to this special issue on the ethnography of the prison. A survey of the recent sociology and anthropology of carceral institutions shows that field studies depicting the everyday world of inmates in America have gone into eclipse just when they were most needed on both scientific and political grounds following the turn toward the penal management of poverty and the correlative return of the prison to the forefront of the societal scene. Accordingly, this issue seeks to reinvigorate and to internationalize the ethnography of the carceral universe understood both as a microcosm endowed with its own material and symbolic tropism and as vector of social forces, political nexi, and cultural processes that traverse its walls. Field researchers need to worry less about 'interrupting the terms of the debate' about the prison and more about getting inside and around penal facilities to carry out intensive, close-up observation of the myriad relations they contain and support. This article discusses the obstacles to such research, including questions of access and funding, the professional organization of academe, the lowly social and therefore scientific status of the object of investigation, and the (mis)use of the military metaphor of 'collateral damage'. It concludes by suggesting that getting 'in and out of the belly of the beast' offers a unique vantage point from which to contribute to the comparative ethnography of the state in the age of triumphant neoliberalism.
Social Networks, 2016
This study examines the social networks of detainees before and after their incarceration. We use unique panel data on 702 detainees and their core discussion networks. Our results show that while the size of the core discussion network remains stable, detainees have replaced more than 60% of their network members after incarceration. By far not all new core network members are truly new: in particular friendship ties have a higher change to deteriorate and be replaced by ties to relatives. We estimate multinomial multilevel models and find, moreover, that changes in the core discussion network are most likely to occur for detainees who have served a longer prison spell, who did not return to the same place of residence, who had fewer strong or family relationships, and who were suspected of involvement in a violent or sexual offense.
The Ethnography of Prisons and Penal Confinement
Annual Review of Anthropology, 2014
Centered on the ethnography of prisons and field research on penal confinement, this review maps out current developments and characterizes them in relation to key themes that shaped earlier approaches. Further internationalizing the ethnographic discussion on prisons by broadening the predominant focus on the United States and the English-speaking world, the review is organized around a main line of discussion: the prison–society relation and the articulation between intramural and extramural worlds. More or less apparent in field research, this articulation is addressed from different perspectives—within and across different scales and analytic frames—whether centered more on the workings of the institution or on prisoners and their social worlds, both within and outside walls. The porosity of prison boundaries, increasingly acknowledged, has also been problematized and ethnographically documented in different ways: from prison-in-context to interface approaches, both more reflexi...