The Phenomenon of Informal Prison Hierarchies and the Simulacrum of Prison Subculture in Contemporary Power Relations (original) (raw)

European Political and Law Discourse

Abstract

Based on an interdisciplinary approach, the study demonstrated that the issue of prison subcultures and informal prison hierarchies that produce the relevant subcultures is not a monopoly of criminology, sociology or criminal law. The study of this issue through the prism of political science is more promising since it is political science that allows us to analyze these issues from a higher perspective of national and supranational security. Informal prison hierarchies are a matter of relations of power and subordination, power struggles in prisons and a free society, and the use of prisons and subcultural prison symbols to spread political power by powerful actors, including states. The research has led to the conclusion that the external attributes of prison subculture, which are produced and disseminated by informal prison hierarchies, in fact, only conceal the true nature of this phenomenon, where such nature is related only to the organization of the extraction and subsequent distribution of material resources by informal prison hierarchies. At the same time, such seizure and distribution of material resources are connected to gaining power in penitentiary institutions and a free society. The experience of informal prison hierarchies in many countries shows that due to the greater openness of prisons to society and the spread of the influence of prison criminal organizations on free society, it is possible to argue that the boundaries between the concepts of "criminal subculture" and "prison subculture" are increasingly dissolving. This is especially evident in the United States, Mexico, and South America, where the concept of a "street gang" is automatically a "prison gang" and vice versa. Moreover, similar trends are also becoming characteristic of European countries due to the penetration of prison gangs from the New World into the European "market". The rise of informal prison hierarchies worldwide raises the issue of the "rehabilitative ideal" and its – literally – protection from the spreading influence of informal prison hierarchies and their subcultural symbols. After the "rehabilitative ideal" crisis in the 1970s, it has not yet gotten rid of the signs of marginality. The influence of informal prison hierarchies should be considered the main obstacle to implementing rehabilitation programs in prison; in many countries, this influence makes this marginality absolute. As of today, the relations between the Ukrainian and Russian professional criminal worlds and the respective informal prison hierarchies remain those of a colony and a metropolis, where the latter is making every effort to keep the former "colony" (as well as other "colonies") under its control, using all possible political tools, technologies and levers of influence, as a result of which Russia has acquired the characteristics of not even a police state or even a carceral state, but a prison state. A prison state is not about the number of prisons, the number of prisoners, or the number of prison staff. It is about Russian citizens' approval and internal perception of the idea that the state should be governed by "concepts" where a separate, sufficiently large group of citizens should be imprisoned. However, the rest of the citizens should be only "temporarily and conditionally escorted." The 2022 War has become a turbulent time for the years of established contacts and relations between Ukrainian and Russian criminals, including organized crime, in terms of servicing ordinary criminal business, common sales channels and logistics networks, and has destroyed them. However, the possibilities of the information society, hybrid forms of warfare, and propaganda drive subcultural influence devoid of physical borders and jurisdictional restrictions. Russia's formal authorities cannot but use (ignoring official state borders, customs services, and border guard detachments) these channels of penetration into Ukrainian "territory" – in the broadest sense of the word – to further support its postcolonial policy, which is becoming increasingly unsuccessful given the European and Euro-Atlantic vector of Ukrainian society, finally formed after Russia's full-scale military invasion of Ukraine. Since the Soviet era, young people have been used by professional criminals to recruit into their ranks. Many juvenile inmates in correctional facilities were a favourable environment for establishing a prison subculture among people whose consciousness at this age is unstable and prone to maximalist decisions. Furthermore, the network of penal colonies was the "closed social network" where the criminal world had unlimited opportunities to spread its antisocial "knowledge" and views. Ukraine has taken many steps to limit this influence – the number of juvenile prisoners has been rapidly decreasing with…

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