#convict code

Early-twentieth-century observations of sex between prisoners were shaped by a burgeoning sexological literature whose conceptual categories proved useful in understanding and mapping prison sexual culture. But heightened attention to prison sex in the 1920s and 1930s, on the part of penologists, prison administrators, and prisoners themselves, is not explained simply by the availability of a new conceptual template. While sexologists puzzled over the etiology of same-sex practices performed by apparently "normal" people, those practices would have been more easily and readily comprehended in urban working-class communities of the period.

George Chauncey has documented the visibility of queer life in early-twentieth-century New York City and its integration in working-class and immigrant communities. In that world, Chauncey writes, "the fundamental division of male sexual actors... was not between "heterosexual' and 'homosexual' men, but between conventionally masculine males, who were regarded as men, and effeminate males, known as fairies or pansies, who were regarded as virtual women, or, more precisely, as members of a 'third sex' that combined elements of the male and female.

Prisons were enclosed communities that gave rise to and perpetuated their own distinctive cultures, but they were far from hermetically sealed. The attribution of sexual deviance or "queerness" to the gender transgression of "fairies" and the possibility of conventionally masculine men having sex with them without compromising their status as "normal" found an echo in men's prison populations. Prison vernacular, especially the terms used to denote participants in prison sex, overlapped closely with working-class vernacular and the roles and expectations it delineated, no doubt reflecting its importation into prisons by a disproportionately working-class inmate population and perhaps its exportation into working-class communities as well.

Prison sexual vernacular was part of a prison argot that attracted considerable attention more generally, from both prison insiders and outsiders. Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) organizer and prisoner Hi Simons was fascinated by prison language that seemed to him "full of swagger and laughter, because of the vivid if often violent and vile poetry that streaked through it.... To use it," Simons wrote, "made us feel bold and free." Simons acknowledged that "except for a few terms from the I.W.W. vocabulary," incarcerated labor organizers "added nothing" to the specialized vocabulary of prisoners, but he worked to compile a dictionary of "prison lingo" he learned while an inmate of the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth and published it in 1933. Others in this period published glossaries of prison terms as well, testifying to the emergence of a collective consciousness and shared culture among prisoners.

Central to prison argot were the coded terms that delineated sexual types and declared expectations about sexual acts and roles, offering a vernacular analog to sexological taxonomies. Noel Ersine included eighteen terms referring to same-sex sex among the fifteen hundred entries in Underworld and Prison Slang, published in 1933. Simons imagined that "a complete prison dictionary" would constitute "an encyclopedia of all imaginable sexual deviations," rivaling the sexologists' ambitions in cata loging sexual variance."

Prison constituted a unique transfer point between expert and vernacular sexual discourses, the terms of one often inflecting the other. Those men typed by sexologists as "pseudo-homosexuals" or "semi-homosexuals" were known to male prisoners as "wolves" and "punks." Those were men whose participation in same-sex sex was presumed to spring not from their nature but from the exigencies of circumstance. Wolves, sometimes also referred to as "jockers," were typically represented as conventionally, often aggressively masculine men who preserved (and according to some accounts, enhanced) that status by assuming the "active," penetrative role in sex with other men. As Victor Nelson made clear, "The wolf (active sodomist)... is not considered by the average inmate to be 'queer' in the sense that the oral copulist... is so considered. " In contrast to many accounts by penologists and some prison officials who blamed fairies for prison seduction, those most familiar with prison life typically credited wolves with initiating sex behind bars.

That initiation was often aggressive. As their name suggested, wolves were understood to be sexual predators, wooing, bribing, and sometimes forcing other men to have sex with them. Wolves were "always on the lookout for a handsome boy with a weak mind, who had nobody to send them in some food and money," sociologist Clifford Shaw wrote in his 1931 case study of a young juvenile delinquent." Berg described the process by which the wolf secured a sexual partner as "a campaign in which all the luxuries of prison - candy tobacco, sweets, and choice foods - are pressed upon the newcomer." Once the object of the wolf's affection accepted the goods offered, "he is quickly given to understand that he must repay the favor in kind." Sometimes seduction by wolves was described as a deliberate and cold-hearted maneuver of engaging a younger inmate in a relationship of indebtedness, which could be repaid only by sex. Others offered examples of more heartfelt and romantic courtship. Nelson recalled "Dreegan," the "champion "wolf" at Auburn Prison," who

outrageously flattered the objects of his lust; he gave them cigarettes, candy, money, or whatever else he possessed which might serve to break down their powers of resistance; and otherwise courted' them exactly as a normal man 'courts a woman. Once the boy had been seduced, if he proved satisfactory, Dreegan would go the whole hog, like a Wall Street broker with a Broadway chorus-girl mistress, and squander all of his possessions on the boy of the moment.

Wolves may not have been motivated by "true" homosexuality, in the understanding of contemporaries, but the relationships they forged in prison were often far from casual. Jealous rivalries and violent confrontations among inmates were credited to the passionate feelings of some wolves for their partners. Inmate-author Goat Laven described "brutal fights," some fatal, that arose from sexual jealousies: "It means a kick in the back to steal another man's kid." Louis Berg seconded Laven account. "The unwritten law of the prison forbids any 'wolf" to make approaches to another's 'boy friend' once he is wooed and won," Berg observed. "But it is not to be expected that men who break the laws for lesser urges will hesitate when they are driven by passions that rock them to the roots of their being. Fights occur between 'wolves' over some boy which are sanguinary and even end in murder."

Berg went on to recount the murder of "Mildred," an inmate at Welfare Island, by her jealous ex-lover. "From all accounts, Berg observed, "Mildred' was the victim of jealousy caused by 'her' unfaithfulness. That 'she' paid with 'her' life partner. shows the seriousness with which such prison marriages' are regarded." To some, the jealous violence that prison relationships could spark testified not only to depth of feeling but also to their similarity to heterosexual relationships. In a disturbing comparison, Berg concluded that Mildred's murder "proves how completely such relationships are identified with the normal ones between men and women." Charles Ford described jealousies among female inmates that resulted in fist fights, "hair pullings," and "every other conceivable type of trouble making activity" and that were even more real than husband-wife jealousies."

One theory explaining the existence of prison wolves, enshrined in inmate lore by the early twentieth century, proposed that "a 'wolf' is an ex-punk looking for revenge!" The object of wolves' and jocker attentions were known as "punks" and "kids," often identified as younger inmates, unfamiliar with life behind bars and unable or unwilling to defend themselves physically. A type recognized in prison argot at least the early twentieth century, punks were understood to be "normal" men, vulnerable to sexual coercion by other inmates because of the combination of small physical stature, youth, boyish attractiveness, and lack of institutional savvy. A few accounts suggested that punks were potential homosexuals whose latent desires were nurtured and realized the prison context, but most saw them simply as the unfortunate victims of wolves.

The punk's fate was often attributed to naïveté and, especially, his ignorance of the inmate code and the consequences of indebtedness. Charles Wharton wrote in his 1932 prison account of a fellow inmate, "a mere boy" who "seemed to have come direct from a farm" who had "all the bewilderment of a child thrust into strange, frightening surroundings." The youth soon became the object of "pretended interest and sympathy" from other convicts, who showered  him with presents, "silk hose, fancy underwear, food stolen from the kitchen, and best of all, cigarets [sic], the gold standard of prison barter." In the process, Wharton wrote, the boy "became a wretched victim of the most vicious circle in Leavenworth's convict population.

Punks also suffered as a result of their youthful good looks. Jim Tully, author of the many books on his experiences on the road as a hobo and time in prison, recalled Eddie, a young inmate "with yellow hair and wondering hazel eyes" who was "too beautiful to be a boy." Eddie's life in prison as a result "was made a constant hardship by sex-starved men." Berg wrote that prison populations always include "boys at that uncertain age where they have a good deal of the feminine in them." Such boys, Berg wrote, "are in most prized in jails and prisons as virgins." Berg also attributed the fate of punks to "biologic inadequacy (another name for lack of guts)."

Whether understood to be the victims of their own attractiveness, their youth and small stature, or their cowardice, punks were never depicted as wholly willing participants in sex with other men. Although there was little attention to overt sexual violence in early-twentieth-century prison writing, many acknowledged that some form of coercion was often involved in sex in prison, in men's prisons especially. Like wolves, punks were also understood under the rubric of "acquired" homosexuality - they participated in sex with other men not because of a constitutional condition but because of the unusual circumstances of prison life. "Had they never gone to prison," Berg wrote ruefully, "most of them would today be normal men."

Prison sexual vernacular and the culture it delineated overlapped particularly closely with that of itinerant laborers, tramps, and hoboes who traveled the country's highways, rural byways, and railroad arteries in the early decades of the twentieth century. The association between tramping and homosexuality was strong enough by 1939 for a textbook on prison psychiatry to warn of "the possibility of homosexuality in prisoners of the vagabond type," since "this tendency among them appears to be very widespread." In his 1923 study The Hobo, sociologist Nels Anderson characterized homosexual practices among homeless men as "widespread and described relationships between older men, known as wolves or jockers, with younger men, referred to as punks, kids, or "prushuns." In transient communities, young men partnered with older, more experienced men who promised to protect them and teach them how to survive life on the road in return for domestic and sometimes sexual favors.

Judging from many accounts, those relationships were often predatory and abusive. Jim Tully, whose experiences as a "road-kid," hobo, circus worker, prisoner, and professional prize-fighter provided the material exper for his twenty-six books, characterized the jocker as "a hobo who took a weak boy and made him a sort of slave to beg and run errands and steal for him." Punks, he reported, "were loaned, traded, and even sold to other tramps."  John Good recalled that the "criminal tramps or yeggs" who were his companions on the road in turn-of-the-century Denver "needed a boy to beg and steal for them, and to listen around for information." "These boys are degraded to unnatural uses," Good reported, "as well as trained in the arts of pickpocketing and sneak-thieving." Josiah Flynt, an early participant-observer of transient life, also described relationships between boys and their jockers, in which "abnormally masculine" men take "uncommonly feminine" boys as partners." Those attachments sometimes lasted for years, and boys remained with their jockers until they were "emancipated."

Men who lived on the road and on the economic margins were vulnerable to arrest, and incarceration in jails and prisons was a nearly inevitable experience for hobos, tramps, and transient workers. It is not surprising. then, that the vocabulary of prisoners would borrow closely from that of hobo culture, another nearly uniformly single-sex world populated by working-class men. Some prison terms revealed a direct etymology between hobo and prison terminology. When Jack London was arrested for vagrancy in Niagara Falls in 1894, he was locked up in the "Hobo." "The Hobo," he explained, "is that part of a prison where the minor offenders are confined together in a large iron cage. Since hoboes constitute the principle division of the minor offenders, the aforesaid iron cage is called the Hobo." Hi Simons defined the term "Bo" as both a "hobo" and "boy, catamite" in his dictionary of prison argot. The direction of influence was probably two-way, and some prison terms were no doubt ported into hobo and working-class vernacular as well.

The importation of sexual vernacular, customs, and assumptions about same-sex practices from transient men as well as from a larger ur-working-class world meant that some prisoners were familiar with the sexual culture they found behind bars. Fiction writer Chester Himes, who was sentenced to the Ohio State Penitentiary in 1928, claimed "that nothing happened in prison that I had not already encountered in outside life." Himes grew up in a middle-class African American neighborhood in Cleveland, but youthful desire for excitement drew him to the city's rougher side. In prison, he wrote, "all sex gratification derived sodomy, and I had encountered homosexuals galore around the Matic Hotel and the environs of Fifty-Fifth Street and Central Avenue Cleveland." The many incarcerated men with transient pasts would've been similarly familiar with wolf-punk relationships in prison, which mirrored man-kid relationships on the road.

But while prisons, then as now, were by disproportionately populated by working-class inmates, they drew prisoners from other demographic groups as well, some of whom were unfamiliar with prison sexual terminology and the roles and assumptions it described. The persecution of political radicals under the Espionage and Sedition Acts passed during the First World War and in the wake of the Palmer raids of 1919 resulted in the incarceration of activists in the 1920s, many of whom became vocal and articulate critics of the American prison system while behind bars. These spokespeople for the working class often betrayed their own distance from and naïveté about working-class sexual life in their prison writing, and many were shocked by the sexual life they witnessed behind bars.

Alexander Berkman, for example, was candid in detailing his own prison sexual education in a chapter on an encounter with another prisoner, "Red," a hobo who worked alongside Berkman. When Red announced to Berkman, "you're my kid now, see?" Berkman claimed not to understand him and asked him to explain. Bewildered by Berkman's naiveté, Red exclaimed, "You're twenty-two and don't know what a kid is! Green? Well, sir, it would be hard to find an adequate analogy to your inconsistent maturity of mind." When Red explained to him the practice he termed "moonology," which he defined as "the truly Christian science of loving your neighbor, provided he be a nice little boy," Berkman professed not to "believe in this kid love," and was deeply shocked, protesting that "the panegyrics of boy-love are deeply offensive to my instincts. The very thought of the unnatural practice revolts and disgusts me." The pedagogical question-and-answer structure of this chapter allowed Berkman to tutor his readers in "moonology" while maintaining claims to his own sexual innocence. He may also have intended to contrast Red's perverse sexuality with his own presumably platonic love for another inmate that he described later in the memoir. But Berkman was far from alone among early-twentieth-century inmate narrators in professing innocence of same-sex sexuality before life behind bars.

When attorney and former Illinois state congressman Charles S. Wharton was sentenced to two years in Leavenworth penitentiary in 1928 for conspiracy in armed mail robbery, he acknowledged his own pre-prison innocence.  Prefacing his discussion of "the worst of all phases of prison life," which he attempted to describe "as delicately as possible," Wharton wrote that, "looking back, I felt that I had been everywhere, seen everything, done about all which the average man-about-town is expected to do, and I held that impression until Leavenworth made me feel like a country yokel staring slack-jawed at his first sight of urban sin."

Socialist and anti war activist Kate Richards O'Hare was similarly shocked and appalled by the homosexuality she witnessed as an inmate of the Missouri state penitentiary in Jefferson City in 1919-20. Scoffing at O'Hare's estimate that 75 percent of her fellow inmates were "abnormal" as "entirely too high," Fishman speculated that she was "naturally led into such an exaggeration because, having no previous personal knowledge of prisons, she was swept off her feet to find that such things existed. She was utterly amazed when I told her that homo-sexuality was a real problem in every prison."

Eugene Debs, who was convicted of violating the Espionage Law in 1918 and sentenced to ten years in prison, lamented that "every prison of which I have any knowledge... reeks with sodomy" and wrote with dismay about "this abominable vice to which many young men fall victims soon after they enter the prison." "I shrink from the loathesome [sic] and repellant task of bringing this hidden horror to light," Debs wrote. "It is a subject so incredibly shocking to me that, but for the charge of recreance that might be brought against me were I to omit it, I would prefer to make no reference to it at all."  Debs wrote in near-apocalyptic language about the fate of the boy "schooled in nameless forms of perversions of mind and soul" and prison sexual practices that "wreck the lives of countless thousands and send their wretched victims to premature and dishonored graves."

Whether shocked or inured, prisoners of all stripes acknowledged sex in both men's and women's prison as nearly ubiquitous and its roles and customs elaborated to the point that it constituted a culture unto itself. That culture occupied a curious status in early-twentieth-century prisons. Officially, sex between prisoners was unequivocally forbidden. Prisoners who were found engaging in sex were punished, often by placement in solitary confinement and extension of their sentences. Some prisons took harsh and sometimes draconian measures to distinguish homosexual prisoners from the general population in order to humiliate them and punish their behavior. In the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, inmates were reportedly forced to wear a large yellow letter D (designating them as "degenerate") if they were discovered having sex. 

The superintendent of the Ohio prison at Chillicothe boasted to the director of the Bureau of Prisons, in response to a question about how he handled the problem of "sex perversion" at the institution, that he had found a way to deter such practices through the use of humiliation. "By this I mean that all known perpetrators or anyone anyway connected with sexual perversions be been compelled to sit at a certain table at the mess hall."  A report from Kentucky noted that inmates convicted of sexual offenses had one side of their heads shaved to identify them. These practices of marking prisoners as homosexual were forms of punishment for sexual transgression; they also suggested the need for the production of a legible marker of homosexuality that ran counter to the notion that homosexuals, inside and out, were easily identifiable by their gender transgression.

Homosexual prisoners were also dealt physical punishments. A photograph from a Colorado prison depicted two African American prisoners wearing loose dresses, perhaps as another form of stigmatizing market of sexual deviance, and pushing wheelbarrows filled with heavy rocks as a form of punishment for same-sex sex. Kentucky physician F. E. Wylie proposed sterilization and "emasculation" that would "make it impossible for degenerates to commit sex crimes," adding that "surgery might even be used as a punishment" for homosexuality. The authors of an investigation of the Oregon state penitentiary in 1917 moved further to argue that "in cases of congenital homo-sexuality in the penitentiary," the more radical surgery of castration was necessary, to deprive offenders not only of the ability to procreate but of their libido as well. By the 1920s, more than half of the United States had adopted sterilization laws and some targeted "moral degenerates and perverts" specifically. Those laws were most easily and readily applied to people in prisons, mental asylums, and other carceral institutions.

Sex in prison was officially prohibited and sometimes harshly punished. But because of the difficulty of detection and the belief in its inevitability, prison officers often seemed to take it in stride. Joseph Wilson and Michael Pescor criticized prison officers who "regard homosexual practices as only another kind of dirty joke" and wrote that it was "essential that "this question shall always be considered gravely-never with smiles smirks, and a shrug of the shoulder" in their 1939 text on prison psychiatry, suggesting that this was often precisely how it was treated. Berg confirmed that to officials at Welfare Island, "the 'fairies' were, for the most part, simply the butt for lewd jokes. When they spoke of perverts it was with the kind of indulgence that one uses toward children whose peccadillos are amusing rather than serious." He added that "sex indiscretions" were "rarely detected and still less frequently punished." 

If prison guards could not be relied on to maintain a properly vigilant and condemnatory attitude regarding prison homosexuality, the some hoped, prisoners themselves would rise to this role. "Only the co-operation of the decent element will ultimately weed them out," Sing Sing warden Lewis Lawes speculated in 1938. Wilson and Pescor went so far as to suggest that if homosexuals "received a reasonable dose of violence" at the hands of prisoners "known to be aggressively heterosexual," it would "help build up a correct prison community attitude towards this question."

But the community attitude in men's prisons, to the extent that it is possible to generalize, seemed often to be characterized by a rough tolerance, even by those who presumably did not participate in same-sex sex. Samuel Roth, who spent several years in prison for publishing what was considered obscene material, noted that "one thing happened immediately," on his incarceration; "I lost my horrors of [homosexuality] as a vice." He was far from alone. Recalling his experience on a Georgia chain gang in the 1930s, George Harsh had "too many other things to think about to care what two consenting adults do between them." "Under the conditions," Harsh wrote, "I think such a situation was inevitable, and I could understand it and condone it." Indeed, the institutional culture of some prisons recognized the established place of prison fairies. Though fairies were segregated in Welfare Island's South Annex, they were allowed to stage a bawdy Christmas show called the "Fag Follies." In later decades, prisons would sponsor football and baseball games that pitted queens against jockers.

Gradually he began going in with other gangsters for the more remunerative crimes (pay-roll robberies, safe-cracking, hold-ups, and the like); and before he was eighteen Williams was "keeping" a girl in a Broadway apartment and getting initiated into the night life of the city. His mother and sisters remained at the old home on West 49th Street, but Williams did not neglect them. He had long ago dropped even the pretence of legitimate work; but he contributed regularly and generously to the support of his mother and sisters and visited them almost daily.

Before he was twenty, Williams had been arrested a dozen times as a suspect in the various gangster killings and other activities of the city; but never did he serve a day in prison after appearing in court. The usual procedure (which the gangsters themselves preferred to formal arraignment and trial) was as follows: after a killing or robbery, the detectives would arrest and bring to headquarters any gangsters whom they could find, subject them to an intensive third degree (often beating them unmercifully), and then turn them loose when the beatings had failed to elicit evidence connecting them with the crime in question.

This was all a part of the regular routine of Williams's life; and while he took it as a matter of course, he had seen so much of corruption among detectives, district attorneys, and even judges that he came to have a strong hatred for representatives of law and order. Wise to the ways of the under-world, a shrewd and clever criminal who never worked except after laying carefully-thought-out plans, it was not until Williams tried to operate in a strange city, with gangsters he did not know, that he got into serious trouble.

In 1918, at the age of twenty, he was asked to come to Boston with three other gangsters to steal the pay roll of a large corporation. It was to be the Christmas pay roll, estimated at $60,000. Through some carelessness of the local tipsters, the information was inaccurate; so that Williams got only a comparatively small pay roll of $15,000, in the seizing of which he shot an armed guard who attempted to draw his gun. Because of the shooting (although the guard did not die for two years) and because of the prestige of the corporation, there was a great hue and cry about the crime. One of the Boston gangsters was arrested on suspicion.

Fearing a long prison term for himself, he implicated Williams and three other men. In spite of this, it is doubtful that Williams could have been convicted. The books of a New York firm of longshoremen showed that Williams and his pals had been working in New York on the day of the robbery! Thus did Williams plan his crimes before he went to work. But the man who had implicated him was persuaded to turn state's evidence; so, in spite of the efforts of a former district attorney, who had been paid a retainer of $3,000 to "fix" the case, Williams and his pals were given ten to fifteen-year terms in the state prison (the crooked ex-district attorney, by the way, was later disbarred and sent to prison at the time when two other district attorneys were disbarred and removed from office). The informer, as it happens, was killed within a few months.

Williams, as I came to know him in the prison, was in many ways a fine character. He was entirely reliable and honest with his friends, deceitful and treacherous with his enemies, and utterly without fear. He would never steal or harm poor people; he would select his victims solely from among the moneyed classes. From one point of view I have always found certain gangsters to be, on the whole, the very highest type of criminal. Although there are many hangers-on of a much lower grade in gang circles, the real gangster is in many ways a fellow who lives strictly up to a stern though predatory code of his own. I liked Williams, personally, better than any other criminal I have ever known.

But he was definitely antisocial in his attitude toward law and order and reformation. While he would admit the theoretical necessity of laws and policemen, he had seen so much of corruption in the ranks of law-enforcement officials that he knew himself to be no worse than many of these, and far better than some. He took the cynical attitude. "What the hell," he would say. "Everybody's out for the money. Get it, long as you don't have to take it from some poor bastard that can't afford to lose it. But get it. Once you've got it, nobody cares ---- where you got it."

When he left prison, after serving a little more than nine years, he merely became more cautious, going in for the bootleg and night-club racketeering which had developed during his years in prison. I met him in New York in the autumn of 1931. We were discussing the state of affairs in regard to unemployment and the slackness in racketeering profits. "It's pretty tough," said Williams. "I've got my apartment and my mother's home to keep up. My two sisters are married and their husbands haven't had work for months. There's not much money in the rackets, the way things are nowadays." I asked him, in view of this, how he was able to keep up his own establishment and his mother's and also help his sisters keep alive during the current depression.

"There's only one thing to do," said Williams. "I'm doing it, and so is almost every one I know. Grab a gun and go out and steal!" In his various attitudes and general character, Williams was typical of his kind of criminal.

Prisoners have a mania for doing things that are punishable if discovered, and spend hours scheming to do them by force or cunning. Mostly they are ridiculously trivial, such as having a nail or a piece of glass either in one’s cell or upon one’s person. It is not that the nail or glass is of any use, but that its possession is forbidden that constitutes the attraction ... The convict who possesses an object forbidden flatters his vanity by the reflection that, despite the cleverness and vigilance of the warders, he must be cleverer than they because he can circumvent them. And in the prison, which otherwise would crush him, he saves his ego from entire defeat by the secret possession of a nail or a pin or a pencil, anything so long as it is forbidden. The mania for doing wrong things simply because they are prohibited and involve punishment if discovered arises from this craving of the convict to delude himself as to his own powers and freedom. ‘I am too sharp, too clever for the warders and the Governor,’ is a reflection that soothes his incarcerated vanity, and he will cheerfully bear pain and discomfort to maintain this good opinion of himself ...

One thing above all, the criminals are democratic and generous. They will share food with a man under punishment, or even steal some for him; and they will share any forbidden plunder, such as a raw onion or a carrot, although in procuring it they have risked three days’ bread and water. I shall never forget having a piece of raw onion given me one morning. I took it from a convict who sidled up to me and whispered: ‘’Ere’s a bit treat for ’e, lad.’ I took the object and thanked him without knowing what it was, grateful not so much for the gift as for the generosity and regard of which it was the sign. I put the onion in my only pocket, which happened to be just above the heart, and consequently only a few inches from the eyes and nose. As my body warmed the onion, its effluvium increased, and my eyes began to water furiously. I dared not offend my generous friend by throwing his gift away, moreover that would have been sacrilege, seeing the spirit in which it was made, and yet I could not eat the wretched thing to save my life. I endured tortures until I could throw away the onion out of sight of the donor, who, by the way, would have been punished with three days’ bread and water had his theft been discovered. Was it not noble of him to risk so much for a lad of whom he knew nothing?"

At one point our data give us a clue. Judging from observations and interviews, inmates not infrequently react with nonconformity to decisions that appear unpredictable. We discussed this in some detail earlier in this chapter, as well as in Chapter 4. Owing to the feeling that decisions about matters vital to inmates are unpredictable, the inmate does not know what standards to comply with. 

Inmates also seem to react with nonconformity to unpredictability as a more conscious protest'against such distribution of rewards and punishments. When the decision-makers seem (as one inmate expressed it) to ‘flip a coin’, or when decisions are interpreted as based on ‘antipathies and sympathies’, inmates seem to protest by disorderly behaviour. Such ‘revolt’ is not likely to be a permanent adjustment on the part of the individual. Yet it seems to happen often enough to create'great problems for staff members. 

In short, a predictable world and system of distribution - not to the point of dullness but to the point of security - seems to be an important condition for conformity among inmates. Perhaps it is a condition general to many types of social system.”

The "fish," or new prisoner, undergoes an experience analogous to that of the new guard. He, too, meets the deputy warden and is advised: "Keep your nose clean and you won't have trouble." In his conversation with other officers of the classification committee, lip service may be given to the ideal of reformation. The prisoner does not live with the officers, however, but with his fellow convicts. They tell him very definitely what he is supposed to do as a con. Since they are the people with whom he eats, works, sleeps, and talks, he will naturally try to adjust by "getting along." As Riemer has pointed out: "If an inmate desires favorable status in the opinions of his fellows, he must adopt patterns of behavior in line with their culture." Riemer, a voluntary prisoner, by swearing at an officer and being ordered into solitary confinement as a punishment, won wholehearted inmate approval. In perhaps no other social world do men "watch each other and study every gesture and action" as they do in prison. The first-timer is tested and rated in a variety of ways. If he happens to draw a "rat," or informer, as a cell-mate, this will not help his reputation. He probably knows nothing about conniving when he first comes, but he soon learns. Inmate "politicians" play a role in prison similar to that of their prototypes in a corrupt city government. As in the outside community, they must grant favors in order to hold their position and yet they are frequently hated for their self-seeking attitude. The "right guys," on the contrary, can always be trusted to remain loyal to their fellow cons. Clemmer found that "being right" was the essential and most admired trait of prison leaders. A prison mythology, Riemer reports, plays a role in defining the mores for the newcomer. Remarkable escapes, great strikes and riots, and tales of outstanding men are included in these stories.

The chronic hostility between cons and screws to some extent an extension of the progressive conflict between criminals and police on the outside-may lead to superficial and temporary forms of accommodation, but rarely to assimilation. Deciding to "make the best of it," the new prisoner usually undertakes some form of self-culture. As he adjusts to the dull monotony of prison life, however, there is likely to be a "decline of profitable reflection" and a weakening of the attempts at self-improvement. Daydreaming becomes more frequent. "Prison stupor" or becoming "stir simple" are common end results. As the prisoner grows "con-wise," however, he learns that things denied him by the prison administration may be available through conniving. These sub rosa activities provide variety, help break the deteriorating monotony, and constitute another type of accommodation.”

Even more impressive is the almost universal delicacy when it comes to inquiring into another man's misdeeds, and the refusal to determine one's relations with another convict on the basis of his record. This does not mean that to a criminal all crimes look alike. On the contrary. There are categories of crime rigidly defined though somewhat different from those recognized by the "law-abiding citizens" outside.

The occasional political bigwig like Nocky Johnson, of course, is regarded with awe and the wistful hope that the great man will remember his friends when he comes once again into his kingdom.

Men who attempt armed robbery of banks or post ofiices or the like, are highly respected for their courage. They "put it on the line." They take the big chance when they go outfor crime.

Bootleggers, like my friend Tony, regard themselves and are regarded as respectable business men who have suffered a temporary reverse. Absconding bankers, who usually were the pillars of church and community, are looked on with a mixture of awe for their former positions and a human delight at their collapse. At the bottom of the list are white-slavers (the professional, not the amateur "one-woman" operator), rapists, kidnapers, dope smugglers.

But these are still all categories, and most of the time do not affect an individual's actual standing in the prison community. That is determined by the man himself—his personality, attitudes, and so on.

This morning I ate breakfast with two men whose crimes were atrocious and are generally known. One, a Greek boy in his twenties, an Army prisoner, killed a taxi driver by bludgeoning him to death with a tire iron rather than pay a fifty-cent fare. He is a cheerful, handsome, fairly stupid boy who seems to be troubled neither by a bad conscience over his crime nor by worry about his life sentence. Before his brief life in the Army he worked as a pimp for a New York bawdy house, and frequently regales us with stories of that unbelievably sordid life. (Dirty jokes are frequently uproariously funny; their counterparts in real life are profoundly pathetic and frequently nauseating...) But though Benny's crimes and character are widely known and deplored, Benny himself is moderately popular—a friendly, cheerful, "good guy."

Next to Benny today sat a twenty-year-old boy with a seventy-seven-year sentence. For sheer, cold-blooded brutality, his offense ranks with Benny's. He hitched a ride with a motorist, knocked him out, beat him very badly, and stuffed him into his own trunk, from which he was rescued two days later by a suspicious state cop. The victim lived, though minus the sight of one eye and badly crippled. Tom, then only eighteen, drew a sentence of seventy-five years, subsequently increased by two years when he attempted to escape. He is sullen and uncommunicative; around him there eddies an aura of sudden violence. The other prisoners detest and avoid him, but only because of his present attitude, not because of his violent crimes.

There were four other dudes in the hole cell they put him in when he first got there, all of them young, what Tank called gangbangers. He didn’t like or understand the youngsters but the joint was full of them now and he couldn’t avoid them. They were like a herd of animals, he thought. They wolf-packed people and were nothing as individuals.

Most of these early lowriders were young juvenile-prison graduates and young “fuck-ups” (unskilled, lower- and working-class criminals) who were disrespected by older, “solid” criminals and regular convicts. They were a constant threat to the other prisoners, who were trying to maintain peace. For most of the 1950s and 1960s, other prisoners disparaged, ignored, and avoided the lowriders, whose activities were kept in check by the consensus against them and the belief (accepted by lowriders and most other prisoners) that if the lowriders went too far, the older prison regulars would use force to control them.

Lowriders steadily increased in numbers. In the states with large cities, whose ghettos bulged during the 1950s and 1960s, the youth prison systems expanded to accommodate the increase in youth crime. The adult prisons began to receive growing numbers of youth prison graduates and criminally unskilled, more openly aggressive young urban “thugs.” They could no longer be controlled. These tough youths entered the growing racial melee and stepped up their attacks and robberies on other prisoners. When there were no successful countermoves against them, they took over the convict world and particularly one of its most important activities: the sub-rosa economic enterprises.

In different states, the young hoodlums arrived at the adultprisons with different backgrounds and consequently formed different types of groups in the prisons.

...

The activities of these violent groups [in 1970s American prisons] who, in the pursuit of loot, sex, respect, or revenge, would attack any outsider completely unraveled any remnants of the old codes of honor and tip networks that formerly helped to maintain order. In a limited, closed space such as a prison, threats of attacks like those posed by these groups could not be ignored. Prisoners felt compelled to prepare to protect themselves or get out of the way. Those who chose to continue to circulate in public, with few exceptions, formed or joined a clique or gang for their own protection. Consequently, violence-oriented groups dominated many, if not most, large men’s prisons.

The emergence of the gangs produced a new prisoner leader— the “tough convict” or “hog” who replaced the “right guy.” The upsurge of rapacious and murderous groups all but eliminated the right guy and drastically altered the identity of the convict, the remaining hero of the prison world. Most of all, toughness pushed out most other attributes, particularly the norms of tolerance, mutual aid, and loyalty to a large number of other regulars. Stiff and divisive administrative opposition weakened convict unity, and the attacks of violent racial groups obliterated it. When the lowrider or “gangbanger” cliques turned on the remaining convict leaders (many of whom had been removed from the prison mainline because of their political activities) and the elders were not able to drive the lowriders back into a position of subordination or otherwise to control them, the ancient regime fell, and with it, the old convict identity.

Toughness in the violent men’s prisons meant several things. First, it meant being able to take care of oneself in the prison world, where people would attack others with little or no provocation. Second, it meant having the guts to take from the weak. Leo Carroll described the view of manhood shared by a clique of young “wise guys” who formed one of the most powerful groups in the prison that he studied and who preyed on other unorganized prisoners:

Prison, in their eyes, is the ultimate test of manhood. A man in prison is able to secure what he wants and protect what he had: “Inhere, a man gets what he can,” “nobody can force a man to do something he don’t want to,” are key elements of their belief system. Any prisoner who does not meet these standards is not a man, “has no respect for himself” and is therefore not entitled to respect from others.”

Loyalty to other prisoners shrank to loyalty to one’s clique or gang. In Illinois, James Jacobs found that gang members simply see nothing wrong with “ripping off” independents. The fact that they occupy adjoining cells does not seem to offer a basis for solidarity. While at one time inmates may have endorsed the principle of “doing your own time,” the gangs endorsed the morality of “doing gang time." In addition to threats of robbery, assaults, and murder, the threat of being raped and physically forced into the role of the insertee (punk or kid) increased in the violent prison:

Fuck it. It’s none of my business. If a sucker is weak, he’s got to fall around here. I came when I was eighteen and nobody turned me out. I didn’t even smile for two years.

After the appearance of the gangs and the development of the new convict orientation, prisoners in most of the medium and higher custody prisons in California and other eastern, midwestern, and western states had to orient themselves to new forms of violence. They either joined or affiliated with one of the gangs, formed their own clique or gang for protection, or did as most prisoners had done—withdrew from prison public life. They disassociated themselves from the violent cliques and gangs, spent as little time as possible in the yard and other public places where gangs hung out, and avoided gang members, even though they may have been friends with some of them in earlier years. They stuck to a few friends whom they would meet in the cell blocks, at work, through shared interests, in other prisons, or on the outside (home boys). With their friends they ate, worked, attended meetings of the various clubs and formal organizations that abounded in the prison, and participated in leisure-time activities together. Collectively, they withdrew from the convict world and left it to the rapacious younger prisoners."