The Changing Social Structure of Prisons Introduction

In one sense, prison is a microcosm of the society outside its walls: an extremely concentrated reflection of the social forces at work in the civilization that has erected it. In another sense, prison is its own world—a unique environment in which social structure is determined by the interplay of forces that outside prison would never find themselves confined together in such close quarters. Their confinement, however, in prison creates the context for a new social structure to emerge—one which today is predominantly organized by gangs. This formation is evidence of the changing social structure of prisons. In 1940, Clemmer described the prison community of the average American penitentiary in these words: “The prisoner’s world is an atomized world. Its people are atoms acting in confusion. It is dominated and it submits. Its own community is without a well-established social structure. Recognized values produce a myriad of conflicting attitudes…” (p. 1). Those words no longer ring so true. Today’s prison community does indeed have an established social structure—thanks to the gangs that perpetually occupy its cells and corridors. There is a way of life in prison that inmates are obliged to accept: it is a way that shares some similarity with the outside, at least for inmates who are familiar with the gangs there. Since 1940, prisons—like much of society—have changed substantially. This paper will explain the changing social structure of prisons, including gangs, racial tensions, contraband, and sex in prison.

Gangs

While gangs may be the custodians of crime on the streets, in today’s prisons they are actually “the unlikely custodians of order behind bars” (Wood, 2014), as many of them have a permanent residence and place in today’s prison system. In Pelican Bay State Prison, for instance, many of those incarcerated are members of one of Californias six big prison gangs: “Nuestra Familia, the Mexican Mafia, the Aryan Brotherhood, the Black Guerrilla Family, the Northern Structure, or the Nazi Lowriders (the last two are offshoots of Nuestra Familia and the Aryan Brotherhood, respectively)” (Wood, 2014). As gangs are major participants in illegal trafficking, they are highly organized and the same goes in prison, where the gangs can be viewed as competing organizations that must be,...

They impose responsibility on everyone, and in some ways the prisons run more smoothly because of them” (Wood, 2014). According to Skarbek (2014), gangs face organizational challenges just like any other governmental structure: they have to always be on the lookout for high-quality recruits; they must “limit behavior that imposes costs on other members,” and they must monitor their own actions (Skarbek, 2014, p. 109). If a gang member is doing business in prison—attacking a rival or a member who requires discipline, or doing a drug trade or moving contraband—gang leaders have to be able to measure the member’s performance to see how well he did, how far he can be trusted, and whether more assignments of that nature can be given to him. The nature of the prison environment is such that criminals are operating within a highly secured facility but essentially allowed to operate to a limited degree according to the rules they live by on the streets. 
As such, it may appear on the outside that wardens and corrections officers provide the social structure that inmates must conform to—but this is not true. Corrections officers know exactly how far they can stretch their authority before they lose control. They know that mixing gang members among one another is a recipe for disaster. They know the precise methods of releasing inmates into the yard to avoid conflicts breaking out in undesirable areas of the prison. As Wood (2014) shows, guards see everything the inmates are doing and understand their own limitations: at a certain point they must let the inmates operate their own social structures—so long as it does not break out into chaos, the system works. Indeed, as Skarbek (2014) indicates, the social structure of the criminal world helps keep order in the prisons.

Racial Tensions

Racial tensions add to the complexity of the social structure in today’s prisons—and this too like much of the social environment of the prison world is largely gang-related. The various gangs consist of their own ethnic or racial backgrounds, so that there is a clear divide between certain groups, and…