Prison Lingo: Inmate Subculture

In his book, Criminal Justice Today: An Introductory Text For The 21th Century, author Frank Schmalleger inform us that two social realities coexist in prison setting; the first, being the official structure of rules and procedures put in place by the wider society and enforced by prison staff, the second, being the more informal and intimate world of the inmate, namely the prison subculture (Schmalleger, 2001). Prison subculture, in its broad sense, refers to the customs, beliefs, attitudes, values and lifestyles of prison inmates (Dugger, 2017). Here, inmates develop their own myths, slang, customs, rewards, and sanctions; with their own values, roles, language and leadership structure (Clear, Cole, Petrosino, Reisig, 2015).

Prisons hide prisoners from society. “If an 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” (Sykes, 1958, 8). The prison is an instrument of the state. However, the prison reacts and acts based on other groups in the free community. Some believe imprisonment

Leonard Peltier is a Native American man currently imprisoned for crimes he did not commit. Peltier is currently serving time in Leavenworth, Kansas, and it is likely that he will live the rest of his life in prison. Examining Peltier’s experiences through several different community systems frameworks will push human service professionals to help not only individuals but whole communities as well. In particular, the ecological systems theory, historical trauma, and the theory of social capital are helpful in making sense of Peltier’s experiences, and seeing them not as random events but as the culmination of years of mistreatment, oppression, and marginalization.

There are three models of prisons that have been prominent in American since the early 1940’s: custodial, rehabilitative, and reintegration. Each model is designed differently based on its overriding goal, and this affects the physical design, policies, and programs that are implemented within each of the models.

A report dated on April two thousand and seventeen stated that more than one hundred gay men have been arrested since the beginning of two thousand and seventeen. By the end of July, a report indicated that a hundred thirty more are looking for help since the persecution targeting the LGBTQ+ in Chechnya. Ethos is used by interviewing two former prisoners and victims during their time at the secret concentration prison camps.

Before the 1820s, most prisons resembled classrooms where inmates lived in large rooms together like a dormitory. The newer prisons of the era, like New York’s Auburn Prison, shepherded men into individual cells at night and silent labor during the day, a model that would prove enduring. Women at Auburn, however, lived in a small attic room above

Whenever you imagine prison, you think up ideas and violent images that you have seen in the movies or on TV.   Outdated clichés consisting of men eating stale bread and drinking dirty water are only a small fraction of the number of horrible, yet “just” occurrences which are stereotypical of everyday life in prison.   Perhaps it could be a combination of your upbringing, horrific ideas about the punishment which our nation inflicts on those who violate its’ more serious laws that keeps people frightened just enough to lead a law-abiding life. Despite it’s success in keeping dangerous offenders off the streets, the American prison system fails in fulfilling its original design of restoring criminals to being productive members of society, it is also extremely expensive and wastes our precious tax dollars.

Prison culture or the “values, norms and attitudes that inmates form in terms of institutional survival” (Bartollas, 2013), can be described in one of three models. The Deprivation Model describes the inmate’s behavior as the product of the environment, more specifically the attempt to adapt to that which he is deprived of as a result of incarceration (Bartollas, 2013). An example of such would be the pseudo family unit or physical relationships that inmates form as a result of the absence of such relationships while incarcerated.

Can words change person’s thoughts from desperation, violence, to peace and normality within a dehumanizing prison? Some prisoners spending short to long term sentenced, sometimes lose themselves in a world of violence and become worse off when coming into the prison system, than how they used to be before prison life. Trying to hold on to any bit of sanity or respect for humanity becomes an everyday struggle. Sometimes the smallest thing can help prevent the feeling, of going over that edge of no return from a dreadfulness act of death.

This paper is about the book 'Behind a Convict's Eyes' by K.C. Cerceral. This book was written by a young man who enters prison on a life sentence and describes the world around him. Life in prison is a subculture of its own, this subculture has its own society, language and cast system. The book describes incidents that have happen in prison to inmates. With this paper I will attempt to explain the way of life in a prison from an inmate's view.

According to the prisons inspectorate, the ‘health’ of a prison should be measured according to safety, respect, purposeful activity and resettlement (HMCIP, 2013). Choose one of these factors, and using academic research to support your argument, discuss to what extent this represents a critical element of imprisonment in contemporary society.

Since so much of jail life happens far from the public’s view, changes in implications and policy of long assumed truisms are infrequently observed by those that are not openly affected by penal system.

Excluding the members of the staff, prisons consist of individuals who have broken society’s set of laws. Prisons serve as a way to implement social order in the community. Different kinds of strategies are put forward in order for the prisoners to abide by the rules and be ready to get back in society, causing no threat to the community. However, despite the rules which exist, Goffman argues that inmates still create their own culture within themselves. They adapt themselves to the rules implemented, almost as if they create their own community within their own. He mentions: “It was then and still is my belief that any group of persons – prisoners, primitives, pilots, or patients – develop a life of their own that becomes meaningful, reasonable, and normal once you get close to it […]”. Prisons have a way of structuring individuals in order to make them conform. However, the inmates manage, in different ways to create a world of their own. For instance, they would have their own language, be it signs or code words, in order for the staff and the guards do not understand what they are communicating about. Moreover, within their own culture, they also develop their own sets of values which have to be respected. For example, inmates have their own groups, whereby, in order to fit in that specific group, the member has to conform to a certain set of norms and values implemented by his or her own peers. If those unofficial rules are not respected, sanctions might take place. Sanctions would be bullying or the member being set aside and excluded from certain

When we do research on daily prison life, we come across two typical but less than ideal situations: either social imaginaries cloud our judgment or information provided by the prisons themselves hide certain weak or bad aspects that they do not want to make public. We can also find information on TV, but most of the time it either exaggerates or minimizes the facts. In order to obtain more reliable information, we have to have access to people who are working or have worked in this institution, and such will be the sources of this essay. We will be describing and giving examples of prison violence according to three types of violence: sexual, physical and psychological violence.

Gresham M. Sykes describes the society of captives from the inmates’ point of view. Sykes acknowledges the fact that his observations are generalizations but he feels that most inmates can agree on feelings of deprivation and frustration. As he sketches the development of physical punishment towards psychological punishment, Sykes follows that both have an enormous effect on the inmate and do not differ greatly in their cruelty.