5

Social Control

GreshamM.Sykesn/an/an/an/a

Men, Merchants, and Toughs: A Study of Reactions to Imprisonment¹

Many have argued that however much the prison may be softened by an accent on rehabilitation, the custodial institution must fail as an instrument of reform. We are urged to "break down the walls," to eliminate "useless relics of barbarism." In plain fact, however, there is no escape from the necessity of confining large groups of criminals under conditions of deprivation for some time to come. Probation and other alternatives to imprisonment may be used more frequently, new forms of therapy may be employed more widely, and psychiatric services may replace solitary confinement. But even the most sanguine reformer cannot expect the complete elimination of the custodial institution in the short-run future. If the criminals confined in state and federal prisons are not to be dismissed as hopelessly lost from the ranks of the law-abiding, we must find a way of converting the custodial institution into a therapeutic community while still maintaining the high degree of control called for by the tasks of custody and internal order.

Students of this problem have, in recent years, increasingly turned their attention to the inmate social system. Existing sociological theory is sufficient to let us guess that it is not the details of prison architecture or recreational programs which play a major part in resocializing the offender. Rather, it is the daily patterns of social interaction—of inmate with inmate and guard with inmate—which must eventually determine whether or not the prison succeeds in reforming the prisoner.…

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We are … confronted with two vital theoretical issues. First, to what extent and in what way does the existing inmate social system create, maintain, or strengthen criminal modes of behavior? And second, how can those aspects of inmate interaction which work against rehabilitation be modified? It seems clear that insofar as criminals in prison learn to play social roles which involve force, fraud, and chicanery in interpersonal relationships, the custodial institution is serving as a training ground for criminality rather than adherence to legal norms; and to the extent that these exploitative tactics are supported or reinforced by the social structure of the prison, the transformation of the custodial institution into a therapeutic community is faced with a major barrier. Before this barrier can be surmounted, we need more precise information about the nature and distribution of these social roles, and their determinants and consequences.

This paper, therefore, is an attempt to throw some light on (a) the prevalence of exploitative roles in the inmate social system, i.e., roles which involve force, fraud, and chicanery in inmate relationships; (b) the correlation between exploitation and allegiance to the inmate population; and (c) the status of individuals playing exploitative roles in the inmate social system.

The data for this paper are based on a random sample of one hundred and fifteen adult male criminals confined in a maximum security prison located on the eastern seaboard of the United States. It is difficult to gauge the extent to which the institution is a "typical" one; yet there is a good deal of evidence suggesting that prisons—and particularly maximum security prisons—have a remarkable tendency to over-ride the variations of time and place. Custodial institutions appear to form a group of social systems differing in detail but alike in their fundamental processes, a genus or family of sociological phenomena.

Information about the behavior of the inmate while in prison was secured from his official record, the files of the disciplinary court, and questionnaires administered to the guard of the inmate’s cellblock and the shop officer of the prisoner’s work detail. The use of prison officials to assess the behavior of inmates—as opposed, let us say, to the use of fellow prisoners—has certain admitted disadvantages. But three points should be noted: (a) the officials have had the opportunity for prolonged and detailed observation in a wide variety of situations; (b) the officials were asked for relatively objective facts rather than more subjective evaluations; and (c) there is some reason to doubt if inmates would be any more dispassionate in their description of one another than would officials, even if the suspicions of prisoners could be allayed successfully.

The crimes which brought the men in the sample to prison range from murder to desertion, but four general categories account for a majority of the offenders: 24 per cent have been convicted of felonious homicide, 24 per cent of burglary, 20 per cent of robbery, and 12 per cent of larceny in a variety of forms. The median age of the group is 35 years and 63 per cent have had less than nine years of formal schooling. Negroes comprise 38 per cent of the sample. The reports of the institution’s psychologist indicate that 55 per cent of the group are average or better in mental level, the remainder being classified as full normal, inferior, borderline, or deficient. In the matter of psychological abnormality, 24 per cent are said to have "no psychosis," 25 per cent are labelled "psychopathic personality," and 30 per cent are diagnosed as "constitutional defective." The terms epileptic, chronic alcoholic, constitutional inferior, and neurotic exhaust the rest. A large share—65 per cent—have experienced confinement in a penal institution for a year or more prior to their present imprisonment and only 16 per cent exhibit no previous criminal record. Half of the sample has been in the prison for three years or more and 25 per cent can look forward to being detained on their release for questioning by the police and possible trial in connection with other crimes. These are the outstanding characteristics of the group of prisoners to whose patterns of interaction in the inmate social system we now turn.

PATTERNS OF EXPLOITATION

In the literature of criminology, the totalitarian structure of the maximum security prison is usually presented as a striking anomaly in a democratic society. The detailed regulations extending into every area of the individual’s life, the constant surveillance, and the wide gulf between the rulers and the ruled—all are portrayed as elements of a repressive regime.

But the loss of liberty, although it is fundamental to all the rest, is only one of the many deprivations posed by confinement. The prisoner is also faced with the loss of material goods and services, heterosexual relationships, personal autonomy, symbolic affirmation of his value as an individual, and a variety of other benefits which are more or less taken for granted in the free community. In one sense these are simply frustrations inflicted by society as a penalty for crime, but it is important to recognize that they represent profound threats to the captive’s ego as well. The inmate is stripped of the usual marks of status in a culture which tends to equate material possessions with personal worth. The preoccupation with homosexuality, commonly observed among prisoners and guards alike, is evidence in part of the anxieties about one’s masculinity which appear among men without women. And as Bettelheim has tellingly noted in his materials on the concentration camp, individuals under guard are subject to the ego-threat of losing their identification with the normal adult role; i.e., inmates are under pressure to accept a picture of themselves as weak, helpless, or dependent.

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One solution for the deprivations posed by imprisonment lies in the exploitation of fellow captives by means of manipulation and conniving. Sharp dealings in the exchange of goods stolen from the supplies of the mess hall, workshops, and maintenance details; trickery and fraud in gambling; sycophancy to secure one’s ends; never "giving" but always "selling"; hoodwinking officials to effect the transfer of another inmate either to eliminate an unwelcome competitor or to make a position available for a confederate—all are forms of a manipulative mode of adjustment to the frustrations of prison life whereby escape from frustration is bought at the expense of other prisoners. In the argot of the institution studied, the individual who adopts such a role is frequently called a merchant or peddler. A rough measure of this mode of adjustment for the inmates in the sample is provided by the ratings of the cellblock guard and shop officer accorded each prisoner on four items. The items, couched in the work-a-day language of the institution, consist of questions about the inmate’s behavior and the dichotomized responses form a Guttman scale with a coefficient of reproducibility of .95. The items appear on the scale—from highest to lowest frequency of positive responses—as follows: (a) skill in "figuring angles"; (b) "stinginess" toward other inmates; (c) "gypping" other inmates in transactions; and (d) "brown-nosing" other inmates for personal gain.

These tactics of exploitation, so largely compounded of fraud or chicanery, are clearly distinguishable from another pattern of reaction to the deprivations of prison life which involves the use of violence as a means to gain one’s ends. The inmates speak of the tough or gorilla who establishes a satrapy based on coercive force; weaker or more fearful inmates are intimidated into providing the amenities of life, sexual favors, and gestures of deference. Actually, it would appear that three types of violence crop up in the patterns of interaction among inmates and only one of these can be accurately labelled as instrumental violence. The explosive, expressive violence generated in a quarrel and the smouldering violence of the man who is pushed to the limits of endurance also exist. The items in the questionnaire administered to the guards with the design of eliciting information about the inmates’ use of violence as a means show some ambiguity. None the less, four questions concerning the prisoner’s proneness to the show of force provide a scale which apparently measures instrumental violence fairly successfully. The pattern of dichotomized responses has a coefficient of reproducibility of .98 and the questions, again in order of frequency of positive responses from highest to lowest, deal with the following topics: (a) arrogant or overbearing behavior; (b) the show of physical "toughness"; (c) the use of force "to get things"; and (d) starting fights with other inmates. The last item, which might appear on the surface to reflect expressive, rather than instrumental, violence, seems to reveal a use of force to insure dominance instead of an outburst of anger.

Since the scale of manipulation and the scale of instrumental violence are each composed of four dichotomized items, there are five ranks in each scale; and if we group the ranks on each scale into "highs" and "Iows" (scale types 4–3–2 versus scale types 1–0), we can classify the inmates in the sample into four major patterns of adjustment. (See Table 1.) At this point we must be cautious, since the classification of individuals into particular patterns of adjustment is based on the arbitrary division of the two scales which in turn are marked by the weakness of a small number of items. But bearing these limitations in mind, there seems reason to believe that a large proportion of the inmate population is playing social roles which involve the exploitation of fellow-prisoners through force, fraud, or chicanery.

TABLE 1 PATTERNS OF ADJUSTMENT AMONG 115 ADULT MALE PRISONERS

PATTERNS OF LOYALTY TO THE INMATE SOCIAL SYSTEM

A number of writers have hypothesized that building iron bonds of loyalty to other prisoners as a group is an important part of turning an inmate into a hardened criminal while in prison. The individual supposedly learns to identify himself with other offenders, to develop a sense of alliance with a criminal world which is in conflict with the forces of law and order. However, we do not believe this to be true; instead, we suspect that the individual who becomes most deeply enmeshed in criminal modes of behavior is the individual who is alienated from both fellow-prisoners and prison officials.

Now it is true that the percentage of inmates defined by the guards as individuals who would probably side with the inmate group in an ultimate crisis of loyalties such as a riot is 45 per cent, 50 per cent, 12 per cent and 3 per cent in the patterns of adjustment I, II, III, and IV respectively; in this limited sense, inmates who play the role of exploiter and who are presumably being "trained" in criminal modes of behavior tend to identify themselves with fellow offenders. (See Table 2.) Yet solidarity with other criminals is perhaps not best measured by how the individual may behave in a rare crisis; rather, we should look to the more common acts of betrayal and disloyalty which take the form of "ratting" or "squealing" on fellow inmates.

If the betrayal of a group member to the enemy is the touchstone of solidarity, the cohesiveness of criminals in prison is sadly lacking—41 per cent of the individuals in the sample are identified by the guards as men who "squeal" on their fellow prisoners.… And it is the exploiter who tends to engage in this form of disloyalty. (See Table 2.) To a large extent, informing on fellow inmates is another

TABLE 2 PERCENTAGE OF PRISONERS IN PATTERNS OF ADJUSTMENT BY SELECTED CHARACTERISTICS form of exploitation, since it usually involves an attempt to secure preferential treatment at the expense of others or a skillful tactic of internecine warfare whereby officials are gulled into settling inmate grudges. But it is exploitation with a difference, in that it more or less requires a clear breach in the individual’s identification with the inmate population.

It is doubtful if this lack of allegiance to other criminals is a token of ideological commitment to the forces of law and order or that it even represents the bare beginnings of reformation. Rather, it would appear that the reverse is true—that the inmate who is alienated from fellow prisoners to the extent that he exploits and betrays them for his personal aggrandizement is a man who has set his face against all normative demands. A rough indication of this is given by the guards’ estimates of which inmates will "go straight" when released. The data show that the inmates in pattern IV receive this accolade far more frequently than the inmates in patterns I, II, and III. (See Table 2.) And it is certainly true that exploiters present more serious behavioral problems in prison than do non-exploiters. When we examine the disciplinary record of the inmates in the sample, we find that the percentage of individuals convicted of offenses against the institutional rules is highest in the exploitative patterns of adjustment. (See Table 2.) Although many of these infractions represent rebellion against the officials, it is also true that a large number of these detected violations involve coercion and deceit in inmate-inmate relationships. In short, there is reason to believe that in so far as the individual’s role in the inmate social system of interaction influences criminality, it does so not by inculcating a sense of identification with the criminal world—as represented by fellow criminals in prison—but by habituating the individual to a war of all against all.

Before we leave this admittedly complex and difficult issue, one further point should be noted. The question can be raised as to whether there are not "islands of solidarity" within the larger inmate group in the form of tightly-knit cliques made up of exploiters. It is true that our materials show that all 16 of the prisoners identified as "clique-men" in the sample are to be found in patterns of adjustment I and II, but unfortunately, the questionnaire data are not sufficient to give us a definite answer about the extent of solidarity within the clique. However, unstructured interviewing of guards and inmates indicates that cliques of exploiters are at best an uneasy alliance, often marked by suspicion and a rigid stratification in terms of domination and subordination, and that they are held together by fear rather than mutual identification.

PATTERNS OF RESPECT

In many social groups certain roles are accompanied by both the respect of others and more material rewards. These two benefits, buttressing one another, often provide an adequate picture of the motives which lead an individual to assume a particular part in the system of interaction. In the prison, however, exploitation is the major route to winning goods and services beyond the subsistence level and the exploiter tends to stand low in the eyes of his fellow prisoners—the percentage of inmates characterized as "not respected" in the exploitative patterns of adjustment is higher than in the non-exploitative pattern. (See Table 2.)

This fact is particularly interesting in the light of the frequently held assumption that it is the role of the tough (however it may be labelled) which is accorded the highest prestige in the society of the prison. Undoubtedly there is a good deal of ambivalence on this score.… It is possible therefore, that although many inmates fear and condemn the individual who manipulates and coerces them,² they still aspire to reverse their roles. The exploitative prisoner may exercise great influence in the life of the prison—not as an admired leader to whom others willingly subordinate themselves, but as a model for behavior which is viewed with both disparagement and desire; and we can presume that the actual assumption of the exploiter’s role is accompanied by a series of rationalizations which justify taking advantage of companions in misery.

However, the fact that individuals who score low on both scales of exploitation tend to be respected seems to be due to something more than refraining from the use of manipulation and violence. The sample data indicates that these individuals are characterized as inmates who "keep their promise," exhibit bravery, possess a certain aloofness which is perhaps best described as "personal dignity," and so on, with a significantly greater frequency than prisoners in patterns of adjustment I, II, and III. The vocabularies of the guards and inmates do not have any clear-cut term to designate the cluster of behavior patterns which is accorded respect in the inmate social system, but the phrase real man seems to be used more than any other; and the traits which go into the argot-role of real man appear not simply as a lack of exploitation but also, and more positively, as mutual aid and personal worth.

From a structural point of view, this role has an obvious utility to the compressed prison population existing under conditions of prolonged deprivation. It calls for cooperation rather than conflict, restraint rather than license, an ability to endure hardship rather than a readiness to resort to individualistic striving—the requisites of group survival in a threatening environment. Yet it is a role in the inmate social system which is filled by relatively few prisoners, partly, we suspect, because of the ambivalence of the prestige system, partly because prestige and material rewards do not coincide, and partly because criminals in prison are peculiarly unfitted both by previous experience and inclination to adapt themselves to the need of the collectivity.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

In describing the reactions of men to imprisonment, we may be describing four basic patterns of adjustment to any situation which involves some degree of goal frustration. It is not surprising, therefore, that Parsons’ "directions of deviant orientation" bears a close resemblance to these patterns: the active, aggressive use of other people as a means, both by the manipulation of verbal symbols and by violence; the use of one or the other of these methods of exploitation but not both; and the more passive, withdrawn, and conforming mode.

The maximum security prison, however, is unique in the extent of the frustrations imposed, the enforced intimacy among those who are frustrated, and the prior training in deviance possessed by inmates. The result would seem to be a social group marked by a high degree of internal exploitation where fellow sufferers are scorned as powerless victims even more than the custodians are despised as symbols of oppression. Far from being a prison community, men in prison tend to react as individuals and refuse to suspend their intra-mural conflict when confronting the enemy, the prison officials. Those who dominate others are viewed with a mingled fear, hatred, and envy; and the few who manage to retreat into solidarity may well be penalized in the struggle to evade the poverty-stricken existence—both material and immaterial—prescribed by the institution.

If we are correct in assuming that the more exploitative roles of the inmate social system provide practice in deception and violence, the problem of changing the custodial institution into a therapeutic community becomes in part the problem of decreasing the number of individuals who play the part of merchant or tough. Since these roles seem to be rooted in a major problem of the inmate group—the frustrations or threats of the prison environment—it might be argued that we could reduce the number of prisoners playing these roles by lessening the frustrations. Unfortunately, attempts in this direction have often failed because the patterns of exploitation have reappeared at a higher or more complex level; increases in freedom of movement, inmate responsibility, and material possessions have set the stage for more bitter struggles with higher stakes. Indeed, there seems to be some reason to doubt whether the rigors of prison life can ever be lessened sufficiently to solve the problem. There are many good arguments for improving the lot of the prisoner, but a proven increase in the number of reformed criminals is not one of them.

An alternative (and at present theoretically unpopular) solution lies in strict control by prison officials. Inmates are in effect to be forced out of exploitative roles by making it impossible or extremely difficult for prisoners to follow such patterns of adjustment. This position has many difficulties. For one thing, it opens the door to brutality or simple indifference to inmates’ legitimate needs—but a serious reconsideration of its place in programs of therapy is called for.

In any event, it is evident that the inmate social system is marked by strong centrifugal forces which hamper the task of rehabilitation in that they spring from the widespread existence of force and guile in interpersonal relationships. At the same time, the fact that the inmate population does not form a closely allied group of criminals united in their conflict with the prison officials offers some hope of constructing a situation which moves the individual in the direction of reform.

¹ From , 1956, 4:130–138. By permission.

² See Table 2.