The caged melting pot: Toward an understanding of the consequences of desegregation in prisons

This article tests the equal status contact hypothesis in the aftermath of desegregation in the Texas prison system. This study uses ten years of inmate-on-inmate assault data and compares the rates of violence among inmates racially integrated in a double cell versus inmates racially segregated in a double cell. The analysis revealed that violence between integrated inmates was not disproportionate to the level of violence between segregated inmates-in fact, it was lower. This article addresses the conditions under which positive racial group contact will likely be found in a prison setting and concludes with a discussion of implications. Introduction At the end of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, wave upon wave of immigrants poured into America. Irish, Italians, Germans, and a multitude of Eastern Europeans were absorbed into this country to forge one social and political community. Through this diversity came the notion of America as the great melting pot. Over time, however, it became evident that complete racial and ethnic assimilation did not take place (Berry 1965; Marden 1952). Mass attempts at racial and ethnic "Americanization" did not create one unified culture, and many new immigrants had in a sense become "unassimilable" (Dinitz 1978: 234). Racial and ethnic separation became the core topic of inquiry for early Chicago School sociologists who sought to understand the "unmeltables" (Berry 1965; Dinitz 1978:234). Although these researchers centered on criminality and delinquency, an important part of their work focused on the causes and consequences of intergroup contact in general, and in specific, interactions between different racial groups. Since then, race and racial relations has remained a major area of study in American society, and this is no less true today than it was a century ago. Periodic events remind us that issues with race are endemic to American society. Earlier examples include Brown v. Board of Education1 in 1954 and other important desegregation cases that followed in the ensuing decades-signaling legal attempts to minimize the distance between racial groups throughout public life. Racially charged riots in the wider society and the rise of the Black Muslims in prisons became important issues in the 1960s and 1970s, during the height of the civil rights movement. The infiltration of crack cocaine in American inner cities and the war on drugs response in the 1980s were replete with racial overtones (Walker 1998). More contemporary issues include the racially charged dragging death of a black man in Jasper, Texas; racial profiling in law enforcement; the Supreme Court's stamp of approval on school vouchers, which some tout as the next wave of school desegregation; and just recently, allegations of police misconduct in Inglewood, California, where a white police officer slammed, punched, and choked a black teenager. Importantly, these events have one thing in common: They all have an impact, both direct and indirect, on contact and outcomes between different racial groups. It is in the backdrop of these and other events that the study of race relations has remained prominent in sociological research. Indeed, whole sub-sections of sociology are devoted to studying everything from the concepts of race and ethnicity to stages and cycles of race relations, and finally to the determinants of interracial contact and the outcomes of that contact, including prejudice, discrimination, and conflict (Berry 1965). In this same tradition, the present study seeks to understand the consequences of racial group contact in a prison setting. To do this, we examine ten years of inmate-on-inmate violence data from the Texas prison system in the aftermath of federal court intervention that required the desegregation of two-person cells. In short, this article examines the impact of forced desegregation on racially mixed cell partners. Interracial Contact and the Equal Status Contact Hypothesis One theoretical framework on race relations that has received much attention by social scientists for nearly fifty years has been the equal status contact hypothesis (Allport 1954; Powers & Ellison 1995). …