#prison community

It is not surprising, therefore, that prisoners joined together in communities to protect themselves from the unfettered and often inhumane authority of the gaol keepers. The inmates chiefly enforced whatever internal order existed in eighteenth century prisons. Added to the woefully inadequate numbers of staff, the architecture of eighteenth-century prisons, which did not take into account the role of observation and inspection in the ability to control, encouraged the flowering of inmate subcultures.

At Newgate, for example, each new prisoner was made to pay a fee to the other prisoners upon entrance. The prisoners used these membership dues to purchase wood, candles, drink and extra food for the group. Failure to pay meant one had to strip naked and run a gauntlet of kicks and blows. The prisoners then sold the clothes to pay the fee. Gaol keepers tacitly approved this custom, and it lasted until the 1830s in some local gaols. The inmate community might also have a rule enforcer, known as the wardsman, selected by the gaol keeper or the prisoners themselves. The wardsman would sometimes serve as judge in mock trials to settle disputes. He could even dole out punishments such as “the pillory” in which a prisoner was forced to place his head between the legs of a chair while his outstretched arms were tied to the seat for a specified period of time. Other disputes were settled with openly condoned boxing matches. Prison officials as late as the 1820s tolerated a boisterous ritual in which prisoners awaiting transportation tore up their bedding and smashed their furniture on the night before they were shipped out. Ignatieff tells us that the eighteenth-century inmate subculture left observers with the "image of an entrenched inmate netherworld, ruling an institution of the state with its own officers, its own customs, and its own rituals."

….late eighteenth and early-nineteenth century prison reformers targeted this thriving subculture in an effort to reclaim the interior of prisons for the forces of order. The hope was that enforcing routines of work, cleanliness and religious instruction would not only wrest control of the prison from the prisoners but also turn those subjected to it from their criminal ways. Such efforts at prison reform were based upon the belief that crime was the result of individual character defects, particularly the inability to control impulses, which could be corrected by a combination of persistent religious influence, an ascetic life-style, and exposure to a consistent routine of work. These ideas lent support to the prison, and in turn the prison produced a focus for the discussion of criminal punishment that tended to carry forward the simplistic and misguided understanding of criminality at its core."

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.

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.”

In most prison organizations these elites share many of the stability-and-order goals of prison authorities. They are not, of course, motivated by a desire to help the staff per se such an orientation is the province of "rats" and "square Johns." Instead, inmate elites control other prisoners to protect their own statuses, their marketable influence with key prison officials, and their control over the prison economy and rackets. This elite power over the inmate masses is necessarily tentative and informal (Cloward 1960; Sykes 1958). Compliance by the inmates rests largely on the elites' ability to reflect the anti-authority values of the traditional convict code. Even where their actions help maintain peace, elites cannot be overtly pro-administration into do so would undermine their status with the inmate population. Indeed, where collusion between elites and prison authorities does occur in the interests of order maintenance, it tends to be situation-specific or based on particular relationships.

Although most accounts depict prison elites as contributing to prison order in the informal manner described above, there are cases in which prison elites, coopted by prison officials, have maintained more formal control over other prisoners. In such cases, the elites' authority over their fellow prisoners rests not on the defiance of or covert cooperation with officials, but rather on a formal alliance with them. Rarely discussed in the prison literature, this practice is not uncommon. The overt or official use of strong, cooperative inmates has been reported, for example, in the Soviet Union (Solzhenitsyn 1973; 1975) India (Adam n.d.; Bhattacharya 1958), Australia (Shaw 1966), and French Guyana (Charriere 1970). Moreover, several writers have indicated that this form of prisoner control is centuries old (see Shaw 1966; Pendry 1974; Klockars 1974).

Extreme examples in this country are found in the recent history of the plantation prisons in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas (see McWhorter 1981; Mouledous 1962; Murton and Hyams 1969). Although the formal use of elites by prison officials disappeared from these southern prisons a decade ago, the practice continued in some Texas prisons into the 1980s. In this model, the elites' control was sanctioned by the authorities, not by the general population or a convict code.

It is axiomatic that in large maximum security American prisons, some inmates or groups of inmates will dominate others. If that dominance is unquestioned and predictable, then the prison environment can be stable, even safe. Conversely, if one power group falls, then others will move in to fill the vacuum; such power shifts within the informal prisoner world are always disruptive and often dangerous (see Colvin, 1982). Where elites have been coopted into serving as formal agents of institutional regulation, officials can both increase daily control within the cellblocks and maximize general stability by ensuring that there is never a power vacuum.”

Needless to say, intense homosocial sentiments in prison could evolve into homosexual relations. While there is evidence that prisoners had sex and formed unions with one another in the single-sex communal environment of colonial prisons, observers disagree about the nature and frequency of such practices. As communist writings tend to suppress representations of sexuality in general, the absence of homosexuality from postcolonial northern Vietnamese prison memoirs reflects long-term patterns of censorship and self-censorship. It is also possible that homosexuality does not figure in communist prison memoirs because ascetic and homophobic norms within Vietnamese communist and early nationalist culture discouraged its practice. Indeed, the most candid account of homosexuality in an Indochinese prison, Tran Van Que’s memoir Con-Lon Quan-Dao Truoc ngay 9–3–1945 (The Poulo Condore Archipelago before March 9, 1945), insists that it did not occur among political prisoners.

Whereas few ex-convicts acknowledged the presence of homosexuality in their memoirs, French observers found it wherever they looked. According to Dr. Louis Lorion:

Pederasty is widespread in Cochin China, but it rarely falls under judicial purview. . . . It is above all practiced by Annamites and Chinese; the latter, more vigorous and audacious, seem to play the active role. It is in markets, opium dens, gambling houses, and theaters that this shameful industry is practiced and where one would meet those searching for this genre of debauchery. One also observes pederasty in all agglomerations where individuals of the same sex live communally, such as barracks where populations of workers, coolies, guards, and servants swarm together, and in the penitentiaries, notably Poulo Condore.

Lorion’s comments are echoed in official reports that allude suggestively to the fact that communal architecture encouraged “promiscuity” among inmates. On Poulo Condore, the famous gentleman bandit Thomas Phuoc told Demariaux that he preferred solitary confinement to the “promiscuous obscenity” of the communal dormitories. Another of Demariaux’s informants forthrightly reported that prisoners routinely traded gay sex for opium or cash.

In the writings of prisoners themselves, furtive allusions to homosexual desire most frequently appear in accounts of prison theater. For example, Thu Con Lon (Letters from Poulo Condore), a collection of missives written from prison by Nguyen Duc Chinh and published in 1937, contains a provocative passage linking homoerotic desire in prison to plays in which female roles were performed by young male prisoners in drag:

In the play performed this Tet, there was a brothel and the young girls who work there hug their “guests” and dance with them. If I had known before that Tho was to play a prostitute, I would have volunteered immediately to take the part of the libertine youth [cong tu]. That way, I could have hugged the one to whom everyone’s been writing letters this year—the one about whom we often joke: “If there was a flower garden in the prison, I would risk several days of punishment in the hole to pluck a flower and present it to her.”

The suggestion of homoerotic yearning is implicit in the passage. While “Tho” can occasionally be a woman’s name, it is much more commonly used for men. Moreover, there is no evidence from other accounts that female prisoners were allowed to participate in theatrical productions with male prisoners. Also, women convicts were no longer sent to Con Dao after 1910.

A remarkably similar episode appears in Tran Huy Lieu’s “Tinh Trong Nguc Toi” (Love in the Dark Prison), a posthumously published prison memoir originally written in 1950, which describes Lieu’s loneliness and unrequited longings while incarcerated on Poulo Condore during the early 1930s. In one passage, Lieu admits to a temporary attraction for “brother T,” a fellow prisoner who had performed a female role in a play staged within the ward; 

After viewing the play performed during Tet in Bagne II, Isent a letter over ten pages long to brother T, who, on that day, had played the role of a female courtesan. As the prison regime suppressed family sentiments and petty bourgeois romantic sentiments, we were often forced to seek other outlets.

It is instructive that “Tinh Trong Nguc Toi” was only published in 1991, after the cultural liberalization that accompanied the Communist Party’s Renovation Policy in 1986. This contrasts with roughly a dozen other prison memoirs written by Lieu, all of which were published during the 1950s and 1960s. It is tempting to conclude that the decision to put off the publication of “Tinh Trong Nguc Toi” derived from its candid allusion to homosexual impulses among political prisoners, during a period in which the Party was promoting a distinctly sexless image of the “new socialist man.”

The only first-person account to address the presence of homosexuality in Indochinese prisons directly is Tran Van Que’s hybrid memoir/history Con-Lon Quan-Dao Truoc ngay 9–3–1945. Que devotes considerable attention to the em nuoi, an ambiguous term that may be translated as “adopted younger brother,” “adopted younger sister,” or “adopted beloved,” depending on the meaning attributed to the intimate personal pronoun em:

Because members of the weaker sex were absent on Poulo Condore, the common prisoners were plagued by the problem of “em nuoi.” Far from their wives and children for long periods, gang leaders [anh chi] and caplans at different work camps needed a way to share love with others and to chase away their boredom. As a result, they provided protection, money, and clothes for pretty young prisoners known as “em nuoi.”

Que’s account suggests that homosexual relations were integrated into the colonial prison’s formal and subcultural social hierarchies. It is significant that the inmates who “kept” em nuoi—caplans and anh chis—were situated at the apex of the prison’s twin pecking orders. According to Que, control over em nuoi could provoke conflicts between rival members of the prisoner elite. “Sometime before 1940,” he wrote, “competition over an em nuoi led one prisoner to kill his love rival [tinh dich]. Before he was guillotined, the murderer begged to see his em nuoi one last time before he died.” Que’s account implies that just as anh chis struggled to control em uts and caplans competed over patronage networks, so too powerful members of the prisoner elite vied with one another for the affections of the most desirable em nuois.”

In describing the apparently increased sense of solidarity among prisoners, the Ministry of Justice found that:

In the past, prisoners looked on mutual supervision and reporting other prisoners’ illegal or criminal behavior as a way of establishing merit and atoning for their crimes, and as a manifestation of their willingness to draw close to the government and show enthusiasm for reform. Nowadays prisoners believe in caring for themselves, covering up for each other and cultivating good relationships with each other. Many prisoners believe that ‘the more friends, the more opportunities,’ and that the more ‘brothers’ there are in prison, the better they can help supply each other’s needs, share each others cares and burdens, and that after leaving prison, they will have more friends to help them find a way of making a living. Among the prisoners there have developed both the psychological state and the self-aggrandizing behavior of relying on connections, loyalty to friends, and of praising fellow-prisoners’ good behavior but not reporting their transgressions, so that even when criminal behavior occurs among the prisoners, nobody reports it. In a number off serious cases occurring in the system in recent years, others in the offender’s mutual supervision group, even the head of the group, and the prisoners responsible for control of the offender have known the details ahead of time, but pretended not to know, and did not report it to the government’s cadres.

The willingness of prisoners to cooperate with each other, thus undermining the labor reform system’s ability to ‘use prisoners to control prisoners’ was found by the Ministry and by other writers on labor reform to be accompanied by a weakening of the authoritative role of cadres vis-a-vis the prisoner. This was ideally a relationship in which the cadre, representing and carrying out the ‘dictatorship’ of the state, both punished and reformed the prisoner. Incidents like those described in the discussion of resistance to reform and of crime inside the labor reform system did not fit the ideal. Neither did instances of cadres using prisoners to do business outside the prison walls or the presence in areas like Shanghai of prisoners whose families were wealthy enough to keep them supplied with food and spending money. One commentator even questioned the use of production contracts between cadre and prisoner within the labor reform system, because it gave the two, at least symbolically, an equal status.

The Ministry of Justice lamented this change, observing that ‘Nowadays some prisoners consciously or unconsciously place themselves on an equal footing with cadres...Some make an emotional investment in cadres, giving them money and gifts...there have been some cadres whose consciousness of [their role in carrying out] dictatorship has been dampened, and the boundaries between [them and] the prisoners have been obscured.’ Other sources accused cadres of fraternizing with criminals or of being too soft on them due to feelings of sympathy that had a basis in their common working-class background. These changes in human relationships within the walls and fences of the labor reform system were accompanied, the Ministry of Justice and others observed, by changes in the relationship between the prisoner and society outside the camps...rather than draw a clear line between themselves and a family member who had been imprisoned, an increasing number of family members used connections or money to attempt to get the prisoner’s sentence reduced or to have him released on medical furlough. Others continued to support the prisoner with liberal gifts of food and money.

The Ministry of Justice also complained of a growing tendency for families to extend support and concealment to escaped prisoners, and to give released prisoners a warm welcome, rather than ostracize them. At the same time, however, the sources indicate an increasing problem with prejudice against former prisoners in society at large....

Prejudice against the ex-convict began in the labor reform system itself, where it was enshrined in the laws and regulations dealing with the placement of labor reform and labor reeducation prisoners back into society after completion of sentence. The state always retained a number of prisoners for ‘forced job placement’ (liuchang jiuye) at the labor reform camp after completion of their sentences. Such prisoners were given higher pay and more personal freedom than labor reform prisoners, but they continued to be guarded by uniformed cadres and could be forcibly prevented from leaving the vicinity of the labor reform camp. From the mid-1980s onward, however, forced job placement came to be less important and less coercive. Fewer prisoners were subject to retention for labor after completion of their sentences, and restrictions on the personal freedom and freedom of movement of persons ‘retained for labor’ were eased.

When prisoners were returned to society, there were restrictions on where they might live, what sort of job they might have and what level of wages they might be paid. The overall policy in the first half of the 1980s was to return prisoners to the rural areas if at all possible, and to be particularly cautious about returning them to major cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin. Prisoners themselves were reported to be aware not only of these regulations, but also of the prejudice which they could be expected to receive from society as a whole. Analysis of the ‘state of mind’ (xinqing) or of the ‘psychology’ (xinli) of the prisoner repeatedly pointed to his or her fear that there was no future to look forward to, and that discrimination is all that one can expect from society after release. Both prejudice against prisoners shown in the regulations concerning their release and the expectation of discrimination from the outside world indicate the extremely limited faith which the system and the people actually put in the efficacy of reform through labor.

Lack of confidence in the ability of labor reform to transform criminal offenders into useful and reliable workers was evident in the increasing difficulty of labor reform units in placing released regular prisoners in regular, full-time jobs with work units. From the point of view of the labor reform units, one of the changes in their work brought about by the economic reforms of the 1980s was that it was no longer an easy task to place released prisoners in work units by simple administrative order. Prior to the economic reforms, if a criminal had a work unit, he could be returned to it. If he did not, a unit could be told to accept him as a worker. If he were a peasant, he could be returned to his work brigade.

When the economic reform program gave production units more fiscal autonomy and a greater degree of control over the management of their work force, they made it much more difficult for the labor reform system to settle released prisoners back into society. In a study of policies regarding the return of prisoners to society, Wang Yanxin and Zhen Jianping explain that before the economic reforms of the 1980s, a labor reform unit needed only to contact the local labor office, which would arrange assignment of released prisoners to local units. With the reforms, they note, came an increasingly complex labor market, which involved not only the labor offices, but also a number of other government organs: those responsible for industry and commerce, taxation, health and sanitation, management of urban beautification and so on. Because labor reform units did not have any connections with these other government organs, they were at a disadvantage in arranging job assignments in the new labor market.

Another problem was that in the labor market of the 1980s, a work unit might not necessarily have any quota for new workers. If it did, its increased power to manage the work force meant that it could refuse to hire released prisoners, either out of sheer prejudice or because released prisoners - largely poorly educated and unskilled - were not competitive on the labor market. The situation led Wang and Zhen to state bluntly that because of these difficulties, none of China’s various policies concerning the return of released prisoners to society worked very well.

The problem faced by prisoners returning to society were demonstrated in follow-up research done by the Tianjin Labor Reform Bureau on prisoners released from labor reform and reeducation in Tianjin from August 1983 through July 1984. Of the released prisoners surveyed, less than one third of those who where urban residents were able to find a full-time job. About half were either self-employed or temporarily employed, and another 19% were unemployed. Of those who had been employed before arrest, only 19% were taken back by their original work units. By comparison, 81% of former criminals who had been employed had been taken back by their work units in 1980.

This research also points to the difficulty of arranging follow-up ‘help and education’ (bangjiao) for 40% or more of released prisoners, and to the failure of the authorities to bring families actively into the effort to exercise continued supervision and reform of released prisoners. Part of the problem was that a small number of the families of prisoners utterly rejected their criminal offspring. Other families could not afford to support the newly released prisoner. In still more cases, the problem was said to be the same as that which caused the offender to become a criminal in the first place - that he was the product of a dysfunctional family. In such cases, a return to the family was seen as a return to the same environment that was thought to have contributed to the problem of criminality in the first place.

The difficulties associated with the return of prisoners to society might be expected to lead to increased recidivism. In fact, recidivism is described in the literature as being a relatively small (in comparison to the United States and foreign countries) but growing concern. The research on prisoners released from labor reform in Tianjin...found a very low rate of recidivism - 6.73%. At the same time, prisoners who had ‘entered the palace’ two or three times were said to comprise a growing proportion of the prisoner population.