Crimes Inside Prison: Causes, Violence, and Reform Failures

The Theory and Purpose of the Prison System

The modern prison system exists for the intended purpose of preventing criminals from continuing to perform harmful or destructive acts. The penal system is meant to bring justice by reducing crime, and ideally ending it altogether. Those criminals who are a menace to society are to be removed from the general population and placed into an environment where they cannot continue to cause harm. Because criminals have been removed from society, prison also prevents new crimes from taking place through two important side effects. First, negative influences are taken out of the lives of impressionable youths and vulnerable adults who might otherwise have been drawn into criminal behavior. Second, an example is made of the criminal — the fear of punishment is supposed to be sufficient to prevent others from following the same path. In the ideal prison system, punishment would be reserved for those who had earned it, and all decisions would be based on the overall best interests of all innocent parties. Ideally, prison would be a way to show criminals the error of their ways while protecting the rights of all parties involved.

Unfortunately, we do not live in an ideal society. The smooth theories behind the structure of the penal system turn out, on closer inspection, to be quite flawed. One must examine the origins of those flaws in order to have hope of improving the system. One may first look at the motivations of the criminals the prisons are built to contain. Every action is taken with the purpose — conscious or subconscious — of either receiving some sort of pleasure or gain, or of avoiding some kind of pain or loss. Crimes committed in order to experience pleasure, such as rape, are called Expressive Crimes. Those done in order to achieve gain, such as robbery, are known as Instrumental Crimes (Haag, 1994). Both types of crime are weighed, in the criminal's mind, against the risks involved — the so-called cost of crime is the risk of punishment. The risks of being caught and sent to prison deter some, but most criminals recognize that the chances of being caught, convicted, and sentenced heavily are actually very low per incident, and therefore continue with their illegal behavior.

Perhaps it is the arrogance of the criminal-minded that keeps the prison system from successfully eradicating undesirable behavior from society. Or perhaps it is the failure of the system for not catching enough criminals and thus keeping the price of crime low. Perhaps the relatively comfortable conditions of some prisons, as frequently depicted in the media, actually make incarceration an attractive alternative to staying within the law. Alternatively, perhaps the problem is far more disturbing than any of these suggestions. Perhaps it is not the fault of the incarcerated individual that the vicious crime cycle continues.

The prison system itself may be the root cause of the continued cycle of delinquent behavior and out-of-control crime rates that plague America — or at least a major perpetrator of this condition. The prison system is designed to dehumanize and demoralize the individuals within it, whether they carry billy clubs or are held behind bars. Corruption appears almost inevitable, based on the vast amounts of research and data collection that exist on this subject. Rather than curbing crime, many argue that prisons are actually encouraging it. "Corrections officers and inmates alike have found themselves victimized by a system intent on housing criminals in huge, military-style facilities, where incidents of rape, assault and battery, intimidation, and abuse of the mentally ill have become accepted daily occurrences" (Foley, 2000). Theoretically, the prison system as it currently stands will never succeed in eradicating crime outside prison walls because it fosters crime within them.

How Prisons Foster Criminal Behavior

According to many reports, inmates are trained to be criminals in prison rather than guided to become model citizens. Criminals are placed into the penal system with the hope that time away from society will reform them, or at least keep them out of trouble. The reality, however, is far from fulfilling that hope, and may be doing quite the opposite. The prison system appears to train criminals and encourage criminal behavior both during incarceration and after release into society. Relatively minor offenses will get even a first-time offender sent into a hostile environment with hardened, serious criminals. Additionally, the dehumanizing manner in which prisoners are treated by prison employees becomes a form of conditioning that encourages criminal responses and behavior patterns among those who might otherwise have learned from their mistakes.

One concerned report of the California penal system reads: "We have thousands and thousands of prisoners who should be socializing, working jobs, going to school, and being rehabilitated. Instead, these people are spending months in isolation, and violence has been accepted as the common fare" (Foley, 2000). The prison system is not taking steps to rehabilitate prisoners — only to punish them. Some would argue this is fair, that once a person has committed a crime he has waived his right to be assisted in areas where he falls short, such as moral reformation. However, the system is not simply failing to provide rehabilitative services. The problem is not mere inaction. Instead, specific actions are taken that actively corrupt prisoners. "Beating, raping, intimidating, enslaving, and infantilizing people produces not caring, nonviolent people, but angry, hostile, often violence-prone ones" (Brigade, 1990). This is the reality for inmates in the prison system.

One of the first ways in which the corruption and failings of the penal system can be observed is through the crimes committed by inmates while serving time behind bars. Far from providing a crime-free environment where inmates can recover from exposure to drugs, violence, and crime on the street, exposure to crime within prison walls is a long-lived historical tradition. Looking back to the nineteenth-century prison system, one can see that problems rampant among inmates today are, in general, not new issues. "Charlestown prisoners labored assiduously at tasks of their own devising — tasks which, though illegitimate, nonetheless required both labor and skill. Such tasks often carried more attractive material incentives than the ones imposed in the prison workshops. They included the practice of purely criminal trades, similar to those for which they had been imprisoned, as well as legitimate trades, in some cases the very same trades they were meant to practice in the workshops, but done clandestinely and for their own private gain" (Goldsmith, 1997).

However, even in these early reports, it can be seen that the prison system may have been treating prisoners unfairly in many ways. The "crimes" attributed to inmates while imprisoned include activities that might more accurately be described as altruistic than immoral. Shared self-teaching and informal education was widespread among prisoners. Some of the reported education did involve illegal trades, such as "counterfeiting bills and coin; teaching the art of picking pockets, and actually picking the pockets of strangers; preparing false keys and other instruments for breaking houses and stores" (Goldsmith, 1997). Even these crimes may not have been entirely unjustified, as the victims were generally tourists who paid a fee to observe the prisoners. Punishment for committing crimes while in prison included loss of food rations, solitary confinement, bondage, and the use of a clog and chain. Yet, looking at the crimes being committed, one has to wonder what underlying conditions drove the misbehavior. Food, blankets, shoes, clothing, and other contraband items — necessary to fulfill the most basic human needs — were taken for personal use or distributed among other prisoners. Further evidence that prisoners cannot be historically blamed entirely for such behavior is the well-documented involvement of prison employees in criminal affairs within the prison. "In the acquisition of liquor more than any other activity, prisoners were aided by alliances with lower-ranking prison staff, and outsiders, particularly delivery men, whose business brought them into the prison... More serious, and more numerous, were the cases in which prison officers themselves supplied the prisoners with liquor" (Goldsmith, 1997). Although these historical reports do not address the full spectrum of factors regarding crimes within the prison, they do establish a long history of corruption within the system that fosters crime.