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Convict Conflict, Cohesion In ever-greater numbers, incarcerated Americans are living life at the extremes. America's prisons and jails are full to bursting. At the start of 2008, more than 2,300,000 adults were incarcerated, one in every 99.1 men and women. It's a rate higher than at any other point in our history, and one no other country in the world comes close to matching. These sobering statistics, compiled by the Pew Center on the States' Public Safety Performance Project, have sparked spirited discussion on editorial pages, cable television and internet blogs. For some, higher rates of incarceration are a welcome sign that get-tough enforcement and sentencing guidelines are keeping more criminals off the streets. Others argue that locking up thousands of our fellow citizens does little to ensure long-term public safety. Lost in the policy debate is any discussion of the inmates themselves, those legions of offenders spending days, months and years locked inside razor-wire-topped compounds at close proximity to thousands of other similarly confined human beings. Brian Colwell is an assistant professor of sociology who studies the interpersonal dynamics of prison populations. He says we have much to learn from these ready-made laboratories of human interactions at their most extreme. "Prison is not an alien world; similar things occur outside of prisons such as groups not getting along and having separate social organizations but trying to coexist," says Colwell. "It's like Balkanization, inter-ethnic conflict, the Sunnis and Kurds." In a paper appearing in the December 2007 edition of Social Psychology Quarterly, Colwell explored this dynamic via 130 face-to-face interviews with inmates in 16 facilities run by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. He asked questions designed to elicit insights into how the inmates relate to one another and how these relationships affected issues of discipline and order behind bars. Inmates' answers suggest life in the big house is a bit more complicated than the latest episode of Prison Break. "In prison, marking another person as being of higher or lower status and communicating those evaluations can get you in a lot of trouble," Colwell says. "You don't want to seem subservient, and you also don't want to diminish someone else. You want to maintain a level playing field. For that reason, to avoid conflict, a lot of emphasis is placed on respect." The California system is unique not just for its size -- it ranks second behind Texas in number of prisoners -- but because it is populated with readily identifiable factions of inmates who align themselves by community, ethnicity or gang affiliations. Colwell says these groups are often at odds, struggling to coexist without being subjugated. Maintaining respect, for both groups and individuals, is key to keeping the peace -- something all of us might learn from. "A prison itself is like this ongoing society that is fractured, and one's relations are often characterized by extremes of conflict and cohesion," Colwell says. "It's a microcosm of situations where there's a lot of civil strife. It's an inmate society, but the dynamic is pertinent to how people deal with living in contentious social environments." |
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Published by the Office of Research. ©2009 Curators of the University of Missouri. Click here to contact the editor.
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