Prison Subcultures - Subcultural Theory

Prison subcultures describe the distinct normative systems, argot, status hierarchies, and codes of conduct that develop among incarcerated populations, shaping how prisoners adapt to confinement, relate to one another and to correctional staff, and, in many cases, carry criminal identities and networks forward into life after release. Building on Donald Clemmer’s foundational concept of “prisonization” and Gresham Sykes’s account of the “pains of imprisonment,” prison subculture research has developed into a substantial body of scholarship examining both the internal dynamics of the inmate social system and the competing theoretical accounts of where that system originates. This article surveys the origins, structure, and contemporary transformation of prison subcultures within the broader Subcultural Theory tradition.

Introduction

Donald Clemmer’s 1940 study, The Prison Community, introduced the concept of prisonization to describe the process by which new inmates gradually absorb the customs, values, and general culture of the penitentiary, a process Clemmer argued intensified with length of incarceration and produced measurable changes in attitude, identity, and orientation toward both staff and fellow prisoners. Clemmer’s work established the foundational premise of prison subculture research: that confinement does not simply suspend social life but generates a distinct, internally coherent social world with its own norms and socialization process, comparable in structure though not in content to subcultures studied in free society.

Gresham Sykes extended this foundation in his 1958 study of a maximum-security prison, arguing that the inmate social system functioned substantially as a collective adaptation to what he termed the “pains of imprisonment,” a set of deprivations including loss of liberty, loss of goods and services, loss of heterosexual relationships, loss of autonomy, and loss of personal security, that confinement imposed regardless of an individual prisoner’s pre-incarceration background or criminal history. Sykes’s “deprivation model” thus located the origin of prison subculture within the prison itself, treating it as a situational response to confinement’s structural conditions rather than as an importation of values prisoners already held before incarceration.

This article traces prison subculture research from Clemmer’s and Sykes’s foundational deprivation-model accounts through the competing importation model, examines the specific normative content and status systems of the inmate code, and considers how contemporary prison subcultures, reshaped substantially by the rise of racially and ethnically organized prison gangs, have transformed the classical inmate social system documented by mid-twentieth-century researchers.

The Deprivation Model and the Inmate Code

Sykes and, in subsequent collaborative work with Sheldon Messinger, formalized the specific normative content of the inmate subculture into what became known as the “inmate code,” a set of informal rules governing appropriate conduct among prisoners that emphasized several core principles: not informing on or interfering with fellow inmates’ interests in dealings with staff, maintaining a calm, non-emotional demeanor and avoiding displays of weakness or open conflict where possible, exploiting the prison’s resources and opportunities to one’s own advantage wherever available, refusing to be exploited or victimized by other inmates, and maintaining a stance of solidarity against and mistrust of correctional staff and the institution generally (Sykes & Messinger, 1960).

This code, Sykes and Messinger argued, functioned adaptively for the inmate population as a whole by providing a shared normative framework that partially mitigated the isolation, insecurity, and loss of autonomy that confinement otherwise imposed, offering prisoners an alternative status system, organized around toughness, reliability, and resistance to institutional authority, through which self-respect and social standing could be maintained despite the formal degradation of the prisoner role itself. The code’s emphasis on non-cooperation with staff and its correspondingly severe sanctions for informing directly paralleled the solidarity norms documented within gang subcultures in free society, extending a recognizable status logic into the confined institutional setting.

The deprivation model’s core prediction, that prisonization and adherence to the inmate code should intensify with time served and should be relatively uniform across the inmate population regardless of prior criminal background, since it was theorized as a response to confinement itself rather than to values imported from outside, generated a substantial body of subsequent empirical testing, much of which found the predicted relationship to be considerably weaker and less uniform than Sykes and Clemmer’s original formulation anticipated (Wheeler, 1961; Thomas, 1977).

Later researchers also questioned whether the inmate code, as originally specified by Sykes and Messinger, applied uniformly across different types of correctional facilities, noting that maximum-security penitentiaries of the kind Sykes studied differed substantially in population, physical design, and staff-inmate ratio from minimum-security and community-based facilities, and that the intensity of prisonization and code adherence documented in classical studies may have reflected the specific institutional conditions of mid-century maximum-security confinement more than any general property of imprisonment as such (Jacobs, 1977).

The Importation Model and Its Empirical Challenge

John Irwin and Donald Cressey advanced a direct theoretical alternative, the importation model, arguing that the values, roles, and criminal identities constituting prison subculture were substantially carried into the institution from prisoners’ pre-incarceration lives rather than generated fresh by the deprivations of confinement itself, drawing an explicit parallel to differential association theory’s emphasis on values and criminal techniques learned prior to and independent of any specific institutional setting (Irwin & Cressey, 1962).

Irwin and Cressey identified several distinct subcultural orientations among prisoners rather than a single uniform inmate code, including the “thief” subculture, associated with career property offenders who brought a pre-existing criminal argot, status system, and code of professional conduct into the institution; the “convict” subculture, associated with individuals substantially socialized within the correctional system itself across repeated periods of confinement and juvenile institutionalization; and various “square” or conventionally oriented prisoners whose orientation remained closer to mainstream values throughout their incarceration and who participated in the inmate subculture only minimally (Irwin & Cressey, 1962).

Empirical research testing the deprivation and importation models against one another generally found support for elements of both, with Stanton Wheeler’s classic study documenting the expected curvilinear relationship between length of confinement and prisonization predicted by the deprivation model, while other research found substantial evidence that pre-incarceration criminal identity and orientation continued to shape inmate behavior and status well into confinement, consistent with importation, leading most contemporary researchers to treat the two models as complementary rather than strictly competing explanations of prison subcultural formation (Wheeler, 1961; Thomas, 1977).

The Transformation of Prison Subculture and the Rise of Prison Gangs

The classical inmate code documented by Sykes, Clemmer, and Irwin and Cressey described a prisoner social system that, while stratified by status and criminal specialization, remained substantially unified around a shared code of conduct oriented against staff and institutional authority; subsequent decades of prison population growth, driven substantially by mass incarceration policies beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, coincided with a well-documented fragmentation of this unified inmate code into racially and ethnically organized, often highly structured prison gangs exercising far more centralized control over prison economies, violence, and social relations than the looser, more individualized inmate code of the mid-twentieth century had involved (Skarbek, 2014).

David Skarbek’s economic analysis of contemporary prison gangs, including organizations such as the Mexican Mafia and Aryan Brotherhood, argued that these organizations emerged substantially to solve governance problems created by prison overcrowding, specifically the breakdown of the informal, reputation-based mechanisms that had regulated exchange and dispute resolution within the smaller, more stable inmate populations of earlier decades, with racially organized gangs providing a scalable substitute mechanism for enforcing agreements and extending credit among inmates who could no longer rely on direct personal reputation within a much larger, more transient population (Skarbek, 2014).

Contemporary prison gangs frequently maintain organizational continuity extending beyond the institution itself, coordinating criminal activity, including drug distribution, both within prison walls and in affiliated street gangs operating in free society, a development that has substantially blurred the boundary between prison subculture and street gang subculture and has generated significant policy concern regarding the role of incarceration in strengthening rather than disrupting organized criminal networks (Fleisher & Decker, 2001).

Gender and Prison Subcultures

Research on women’s prisons has documented a distinct pattern of subcultural organization, with Rose Giallombardo’s and later Barbara Owen’s ethnographic studies finding that women’s facilities frequently developed pseudo-family structures, informal kinship networks organized around roles such as “mother,” “father,” and “sister,” that provided emotional support and mutual protection in ways that differed markedly from the individualistic, toughness-oriented status competition documented in men’s prisons by Sykes and Irwin and Cressey (Giallombardo, 1966; Owen, 1998).

This gendered divergence in prison subcultural form has been explained by researchers as reflecting both differing pre-incarceration socialization and gender-role expectations that women bring into confinement and the distinct pains of imprisonment women experience, including separation from children and family caregiving roles, which the mid-century male-centered deprivation model of Sykes had not directly anticipated (Owen, 1998; Sabo, Kupers, & London, 2001).

Research on masculinity within men’s prisons has, conversely, emphasized how the deprivation of autonomy and the constant threat of victimization intensify performances of toughness and dominance among male prisoners, extending the masculinity-centered subcultural analysis developed in free-society gang and street contexts directly into the correctional setting and connecting prison violence to the same honor-and-respect dynamics documented by Anderson and by Wolfgang and Ferracuti (Sabo, Kupers, & London, 2001; Anderson, 1999).

Conclusion

Prison subculture research, beginning with Clemmer’s concept of prisonization and Sykes’s deprivation-model account of the inmate code, established confinement as generating a distinct, internally coherent social world with its own status hierarchy and normative system, oriented substantially around solidarity against institutional authority and mutual toughness among prisoners. Irwin and Cressey’s importation model complicated this picture by demonstrating that prisoners carried pre-existing criminal identities and orientations into the institution, with contemporary research generally treating deprivation and importation as complementary mechanisms.

The classical, relatively unified inmate code documented by mid-twentieth-century researchers has substantially fragmented in contemporary prisons into racially and ethnically organized prison gangs, a transformation Skarbek’s economic analysis links directly to the governance challenges created by mass incarceration and prison overcrowding, and this transformation has extended prison subcultural dynamics well beyond institutional walls through continuing gang affiliation between incarcerated and street populations.

References and Further Reading

Anderson, E. (1999). Code of the street: Decency, violence, and the moral life of the inner city. W. W. Norton.
Clemmer, D. (1940). The prison community. Christopher Publishing House.
Colvin, M. (1992). The penitentiary in crisis: From accommodation to riot in New Mexico. State University of New York Press.
Cressey, D. R. (1961). The prison: Studies in institutional organization and change. Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Fleisher, M. S., & Decker, S. H. (2001). An overview of the challenge of prison gangs. Corrections Management Quarterly, 5(1), 1-9.
Giallombardo, R. (1966). Society of women: A study of a women’s prison. Wiley.
Goffman, E. (1961). Asylums: Essays on the social situation of mental patients and other inmates. Anchor Books.
Irwin, J. (1970). The felon. Prentice-Hall.
Irwin, J., & Cressey, D. R. (1962). Thieves, convicts and the inmate culture. Social Problems, 10(2), 142-155.
Jacobs, J. B. (1977). Stateville: The penitentiary in mass society. University of Chicago Press.
Owen, B. (1998). In the mix: Struggle and survival in a women’s prison. State University of New York Press.
Sabo, D., Kupers, T. A., & London, W. (2001). Prison masculinities. Temple University Press.
Skarbek, D. (2014). The social order of the underworld: How prison gangs govern the American penal system. Oxford University Press.
Sykes, G. M. (1958). The society of captives: A study of a maximum security prison. Princeton University Press.
Sykes, G. M., & Messinger, S. L. (1960). The inmate social system. In R. A. Cloward et al. (Eds.), Theoretical studies in social organization of the prison (pp. 5-19). Social Science Research Council.
Thomas, C. W. (1977). Theoretical perspectives on prisonization: A comparison of the importation and deprivation models. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 68(1), 135-145.
Toch, H. (1977). Living in prison: The ecology of survival. Free Press.
Useem, B., & Kimball, P. (1989). States of siege: U.S. prison riots, 1971-1986. Oxford University Press.
Wheeler, S. (1961). Socialization in correctional communities. American Sociological Review, 26(5), 697-712.
Wolfgang, M. E., & Ferracuti, F. (1967). The subculture of violence: Towards an integrated theory in criminology. Tavistock.
Zamble, E., & Porporino, F. J. (1988). Coping, behavior, and adaptation in prison inmates. Springer-Verlag.