ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses rounded off with excerpts from inmate interviews about criminal language and crime. Of all the negative impacts of institutional life, the most damaging from conventional perspectives is criminalization. The girls’ training schools have the highest scores of all institutions, women’s prison score higher than men’s prison, and boy’s training schools are significantly higher than men’s prisons. The situations were chosen to show that solidarity among inmates entails a breach of institutional rules in all cases. An analysis of variance reveals significant differences among types of institutions as well as among the individual institutions of the same type. A solidarity index was constructed from these three questions, on a point scale of 0–3. This fairly high degree of solidarity applies to all types of institutions, and to both men and women. The degree of solidarity is somewhat lower in prisons, precisely the type of institution that American criminologists such as Sykes have described as cohesive.
