Social Organization of Prisoners: An Empirical Test

Five hypotheses are derived from thieories about the inmate social organizatioll of prisons. Interview and record data are gathered in a hospital serving imprisoned narcotic addicts. A Guttman scale is constructed, and associations are measured. The results generally affirm that a prison code is an institutional product expressive of the norms of a prisoner social organization, which serves to help inmates overcome the deprivations of prison living. Evidence also indicates that individual ties to the outside community, as well as individual expectations of possible legitimate rehabilitation, affect thle solidarity of that prisoIn social group. In 1960 the Social Science Research Council published a pamphlet dealing with the social organization of prisons.1 In that pamphlet several social scientists presented theoretical schemes for explaining various aspects of penal institutions in terms of general sociological theory, rather than in terms of the familiar social problems approach. Two articles in that collection propose theories whiclh can be sumlmiiarized in terms of a set of testable propositions. In the first of these, Sykes anid Messinger2 suggest that the prison code is sometlhing more thanl a version of the criminal code. They main* This research was made possible by a grant from the Hogg Founldation for Mental Health. The authors wish to acknowledge the helpful cooperation of the staff of the U. S. Public Health Service Hospital, Fort Worth, Texas, particularly Dr. J. F. Maddux. Invaluable assistanice was also rendered by Richard J. Hill and Harry W. Martin of the University of Texas. 1 Theoretical Stutdies it Social Organi.ation of the Prison, Social Science Research Council Pamphlet, No. 15, 1960. 2 Gresham M. Sykes and Slheldoni L. Messiniger, The Inimiate Social Syistemii, ibid. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.144 on Thu, 22 Sep 2016 07:05:19 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms SOCIAL ORGANIZATION OF PRISONERS 217 tain, rather, that it is expressive of a set of norms peculiar to the social organization of an iinmate comimuniity. This inmate social organization is itself a product of the deprivations associated with prison life, not the least of wlhiicl is alieniation, or isolation, from society. Sykes and Messinlger propose that this organization serves to give prisoners a meclhanism for controlling their environment and mnaintaining their self digniity. Life for the prisoners tlhus grows less difficult as the group moves toward solidarity. Once the system is establislhed it is maintained by the persistence of the originial conditions, anid it is perpetuated by a socialization process somiietimes called prisonization.3 In another discussion, Cloward4 advances a similar theory to explain the presen-ce of an inmate social system with values that are anltirehabilitative in nature. He, like Merton,5 suggests that rehabilitation requires not only reorientatioln to nlew goals, but also access to the legitimate meanis of achieviing those goals. When society fails to accord suchaccess to former conivicts, recidivism often results, an-d offenders develop the feeling that rehabilitation is impossilble. When this belief is reinforced hy other inmiiiates and passed on to lneoplhyTtes in the prisonl commlnunity, it gives imilpetus to further acceptance of the prison way of life and rejection of the values of the prisoni rehabilitative program. Witlh some over-simplification, these theories can be sumimarized in the following propositions: 1. A prison code is a normative manifestation of an institutional social system, the mlajor theme of which is inmnate group solidarity. 2. The iinmate social system emerges to couniteract the deprivations of prison life. 3. A mnajor depriving element of prison life is alienation, or isolation, from society, botlh plhysically and psychically. 4. Lack of access to the legitimiiate means for attaining the goals of society gives a rationale for acceptance of the anti-rehablilitative values of the iiimate social group. The availability for study of a hospital serving imprisoned narcotic addicts offered an opportunity to test several hypotlheses derived fromn these propositionls. The institution studied contains approximately 800 patients about equally divided between the narcotic-addict and neuro-psyclhiatric sections. The addict population is composed primarily of term "patients" wllo are committed witlh a Federal court sentence ranging from a few mionths to several years. The addict population also includes committed voluntary patients, wlho submit themselves for hospitalization as a condition of probation or suspenision of sentence from a state or local court. A third componienlt is the volunteer patient, who comes to the lhospital of hiis own will, and wlho can leave at his own discretion. For most volultary patients the recommended period of treatmllent is about six months, although most (1o not stay that long.6 WVhile all the acldicts are not technically prisoners," they all live uncler custodial restrictions characteristic of prison life. The fact that physical deprivatiolns at the hospital are comiparatively mild does not alter the relevance of the theories, since incarceration and alienation from the larger society are no less real. We could reason from the theory that if the l)rison code is a product of iiistitutional life, theni individual stubscription to it should vary wvitlh length of timiie spent in the hospital. Wheeler used this samie reasoniing and founcd that non-conlformiity to staff expectations, an indirect index of subscription to the prison code, (lid indeed vary with length of time spent in the institution. AMoreover, his data slhowed that recidivists were resocialized along witlh the