ABSTRACT
It is hardly surprising that prisons have attracted so much sociological attention. Both as an institution within society, and one with its own social world, the prison illustrates many of the discipline’s primary concerns: power, inequality, order, conflict and socialization. Imprisonment is the ultimate sanction of most Western societies, and prisons are a potent symbol of the state’s power to punish and its failure to integrate all its citizens into its system of norms. Prisons are generally populated by people whose social profiles are a catalogue of disadvantage and exclusion. They are unique social and moral environments whose characters and practices reflect broader social patterns and have significant consequences for those detained in them, those who work in them and the society that sanctions their terms. It is because of the prison’s social role that studies of its interior life always hold more than abstract interest. At the same time, the prison’s distinctive qualities – pain, deprivation, inequality of power, social compression – are such that its inner world provides particularly striking illustrations of a range of social phenomena, from resistance and adaptation to exploitation and collective organization. There are few other environments in which the relationship between constraint and agency can be so clearly observed, in which the consequences of power and powerlessness are so vividly manifested, and in which groups with such divergent values and interests are put into such close proximity. Few other social contexts expose so barely the terms of friendship, conflict, loyalty and alienation, make questions of order and stability so germane, or bring into such sharp relief the qualities and capacities of humanity.
