6.7: Incorporation of exploitative norms of prison culture
In addition to obeying the formal rules of the institution, there are also informal rules and norms that are part of the unwritten but essential institutional and inmate culture and code that, at some level, must be abided. For some prisoners this means defending against the dangerousness and deprivations of the surrounding environment by embracing all of its informal norms, including some of the most exploitative and extreme values of prison life. Note that prisoners typically are given no alternative culture to which to ascribe or in which to participate. In many institutions the lack of meaningful programming has deprived them of pro-social or positive activities in which to engage while incarcerated. Few prisoners are given access to gainful employment where they can obtain meaningful job skills and earn adequate compensation; those who do work are assigned to menial tasks that they perform for only a few hours a day. With rare exceptions those very few states that permit highly regulated and infrequent conjugal visits they are prohibited from sexual contact of any kind. Attempts to address many of the basic needs and desires that are the focus of normal day-to-day existence in the free world to recreate, to work, to love necessarily draws them closer to an illicit prisoner culture that for many represents the only apparent and meaningful way of being.
However, as I noted earlier, prisoner culture frowns on any sign of weakness and vulnerability and discourages the expression of candid emotions or intimacy. And some prisoners embrace it in a way that promotes a heightened investment in one's reputation for toughness and encourages a stance towards others in which even seemingly insignificant insults, affronts, or physical violations must be responded to quickly and instinctively, sometimes with decisive force. In extreme cases, the failure to exploit weakness is itself a sign of weakness and seen as an invitation for exploitation. In men's prisons it may promote a kind of hypermasculinity in which force and domination are glorified as essential components of personal identity. In an environment characterized by enforced powerlessness and deprivation, men and women prisoners confront distorted norms of sexuality in which dominance and submission become entangled with and mistaken for the basis of intimate relations.
Of course, embracing these values too fully can create enormous barriers to meaningful interpersonal contact in the free world, preclude seeking appropriate help for one's problems, and a generalized unwillingness to trust others out of fear of exploitation. It can also lead to what appears to be impulsive overreaction, striking out at people in response to minimal provocation that occurs particularly with persons who have not been socialized into the norms of inmate culture in which the maintenance of interpersonal respect and personal space are so inviolate. Yet these things are often as much a part of the process of prisonization as adapting to the formal rules that are imposed in the institution, and they are as difficult to relinquish upon release.
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Think about it . . . Stanford Prison Experiment
The Stanford Prison Experiment was a psychological study that tried to measure humans psychological responses to captivity, in particular, to life as a prisoner. It was conducted in 1971 by Philip Zimbardo of Stanford University. Since then other psychological researches have taken issue with the way Zimbardo conducted the experiment and claim that he skewed the conditions of the experiment and the findings. Click the links to do your own research and come to your own conclusion about this controversial study.