Later sociologists continued to be concerned with the complexity of particular types of institutions rather than in the more abstract properties of formal organizations. In focusing on the historical evolution of institutions and on their articulation with the structure and culture of the larger society, this genre of studies draws as heavily on political sociology as on sociology of organization.
Among those “institutional analyses”1 which illustrate this perspective, two of the most outstanding are Morris Janowitz’s study of the American military (1960)2 and Phillip Selznick’s of the TVA (1949).3 Janowitz demonstrated how a changing world order, nuclear weapons, professionalization, and changing bases of officer recruitment and socialization led to a transformation in military organization and in the military’s relationship to the larger American society; most important was the military’s more explicitly political role. Selznick’s in-depth study of the TVA in its early years revealed how the original goals of the organization were displaced through the “co-optation” of various TVA departments by powerful national and local interests.
The present book is a case study and institutional analysis of Stateville Penitentiary, Illinois’s largest maximum security prison located approximately thirty miles southwest of Chicago, the metropolis from which the great majority of its inmates have always been drawn. As home over the years to some of Chicago’s most notorious gangsters and murderers and as a fiefdom over a quarter-century for one of the most powerful wardens in prison history, Stateville has enjoyed the notoriety of being one of the country’s best-known penal institutions; like Attica, San Quentin, and Jackson, it is one of perhaps a dozen American megaprisons that informs the public’s image of imprisonment. More important, Stateville’s history reflects all the major societal changes of the last half-century.
In this analysis, I am interested, first, in plotting the changing integration of the prison with the larger society and, second, in showing how the changing relationship of the prison with the larger society is reflected in the changing patterns of authority within the prison. I draw on those studies dealing at the macrosociological level with the relationship between punishment and social structure; among the most outstanding of these are Rusche and Kirchheimer’s Punishment and Social Structure4 (which stresses economic variables) and Rothman’s Discovery of the Asylum5 (which stresses social and philosophical variables). But, more specifically, I build upon a distinguished tradition of sociological studies of the prison community.
None of these earlier studies has surpassed in imagination and sheer comprehensiveness Donald Clemmer’s seminal case study of Illinois’s “southern” maximum security prison at Menard.6 Not since Clemmer has an American sociologist shown such sensitivity for the complex articulation of the prison with its local, regional and national environments. Clemmer hypothesized that “the prison is a microcosm of society.” In the first edition of The Prison Community he emphasized the crucial importance of the social and economic milieu from which the prisoners were drawn. In attempting to explain prison society he pointed out the historically unique patterns of criminality generated by the Depression. Furthermore, Clemmer related the stratification and class divisions among the prisoners to external variables. The elite, Hoosier, and middle classes among the inmates each recruited and attracted criminals from different regions of the state and from different criminal subcultures. That Clemmer did not believe that the structure and form of the prison organization of his day would forever persist is clearly indicated in the preface to the 1958 edition.
The data for The Prison Community were collected in the Depression years of the 1930’s and throughout the book there are references to the fact that the culture of the prison reflected the American culture, for the prison was a culture within the larger one. Since then to employ just a few word symbols, we have seen World War II, urbanization, television, Korea, a peace time draft, rocketry, cold war, automation, sputnik, inflation and so on. It’s a different world, and it is guided by legislators and administrators, operated by employees, and peopled by inmates who have, in varying degrees, been a part of this dynamic environment.7
In the 1950s and early 60s, selected research demonstrated that the relations of the actors within the prison had indeed changed over time as the relationship of the prison with the larger society changed. In particular, in Gresham Sykes’s important study of the New Jersey maximum security prison there was full recognition of the importance of the prison’s articulation with its environment.
The prison is not an autonomous system of power; rather, it is an instrument of the State, shaped by its social environment, and we must keep this simple truth in mind if we are to understand the prison. It reacts to and is acted upon by the free community as various groups struggle to advance their interests. At certain times, as in the case of riots, the inmates can capture the attention of the public; and indeed, disturbances within the walls must often be viewed as highly dramatic efforts to communicate with the outside world; efforts in which confined criminals pass over the heads of their captors to appeal to a new audience. At other times the flow of communications is reversed and the prison authorities find themselves receiving demands raised by a variety of business, political, religious, ethnic, and welfare interest groups. In addition, both the inmates and the custodians are drawn from the free community, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, and they bring with them the attitudes, beliefs and values of this larger world. The prison as a social system, does not exist in isolation any more than the criminal within the prison exists in isolation as an individual; and the institution and its setting are inextricably mixed despite the definite boundary of the wall.8
Sykes makes more than the obvious point that prisoners are never totally isolated. He sensitizes us to the fact that something important had changed since the time that Clemmer gathered his data at a rural southern Illinois Penitentiary in the 1930s. By the mid-1950s, prisoners were being drawn from a social world quite different from either the Coalville or Metro described by Clemmer. Since World War II the material and political expectations of prisoners, along with other marginal groups, had sharply risen. The “new” prisoners were confined at an institution that had become increasingly controversial and politicized. The wave of prison riots around the country in the early 1950s first evidenced the growing disjunction between the expectations of prisoners and a burgeoning reform movement and the “lag” in the prisoners’ material and existential condition.
Richard McCleery, a political scientist, was the most directly concerned with exploring change over time within a maximum security prison.9 His study of Oahu Penitentiary in Hawaii at the beginning and end of a decade (1945–55) during which control passed from the old conservative guards to the new liberal civilian reformers is a very important contribution to our study of the prison from the perspective of political sociology. Many of the trends McCleery documents in Hawaii did not occur in Illinois until fifteen or twenty years later, which indicates that ours is a highly differentiated society in which local and regional systems play a great role in mediating and even neutralizing national trends. McCleery’s fine work demonstrates how competing groups outside the prison (governor, legislature, law enforcement agencies) articulate with factions inside the prison thereby contributing to the transformation of the inmate social system and to a shift in the basis of internal control.
In their effort to assess the impact of different organizational goals on inmate norms, attitudes and behaviors, Street, Vintner, and Perrow conducted a thorough comparative analysis of six midwestern juvenile institutions in the early 1960s.10 Using data drawn from surveys of both inmates and staff, they showed the pervasive significance of treatment and custodial goals for the social organization of the prison community. But they also pointed out that organizational goals themselves are dependent upon: (1) the local community’s acceptance of the institution, (2) the type of agency controlling the institution, and (3) the penal philosophy of the chief administrator himself.
The six juvenile institutions ranged from public institutions (the most custodially-oriented) with no control over their inmate intake to private and parochial institutions (the most treatment-oriented) that were constrained with respect to intake by broad philosophical principles or by professional commitments. The private institution tended to be controlled by an elite which identified with the professional social workers and psychologists and was organized accordingly. The social organization of the prison was thus dependent upon the complex relationship of the institution and its elite to the organizational, political, and social environments.
In the years since the publication of the Street, Vintner, and Perrow work, several studies of maximum security prisons have demonstrated the significance of heightened race consciousness and ethnicity among the prisoners of the middle and late 1960s.11 Most notable is Hacks, Blacks and Cons, in which Leo Carroll explores the hypothesis that, “as a result of humanitarian reforms within prisons and racial-ethnic social movements outside the prison, the structure of social relationships within prisons is increasingly taking on the character of race relations.”12 The proliferation of contacts between the prison and the outside facilitated the erosion of convict solidarity and stimulated the emergence among prisoners of “fragmented social organizations composed of numerous cliques with diverse normative and behavioral orientations.”
The erosion of the barriers between prison and society since World War II needs to be understood historically and in terms of political and structural change. Edward Shils’s interpretation of the dynamics of mass society provides a framework with which to examine the changing position of the prison and prisoner in the larger society.13 Central to Shils’s specialized use of the term “mass society” is the greater political, moral, and economic integration of the masses in the society’s central institutional and value systems. Shils points to a heightened sensitivity on the part of the elite to the dignity and humanity of the masses.
This [social] consensus has not, however, been unilaterally formed, and it is not sustained merely by the affirmation at the periphery of what emanates from the center, in which the mass has come to share the standards and beliefs of the elites. It consists also in the greater attachment of the center to the peripheral sectors of the society . . . the enhanced dignity of the mass—the belief that, in one way or another, vox populi, vox dei—is the source of the mass society. Both elites and the masses have received this into their judgment of themselves and the world; and, although they believe in much else and believe in this quite unequally, the maxim which locates the sacred in the mass of the population is the shaping force of the most recent development of society.14
Shils argues that, with the unfolding of mass society, the “charisma” of the society’s center has diffused much more widely throughout society, touching the working class, women, youth, and ethnic groups “which have heretofore been in a disadvantageous position.”15 Throughout this book I document the progressive integration of the masses into the central institutional and value systems by tracing the movement of the prison’s place in society from the periphery toward the center.
Fundamental to the realization of mass society is the extension of the rights of citizenship to heretofore marginal groups like racial minorities, the poor, and the incarcerated. The 1960s especially was a period of urban crisis, black militancy, student protest and of decade-long turmoil over the legitimacy of the Vietnam war. It is beyond the scope of this book to assess the impact of these societal trends on the daily behavior of the minority populations from which prisoners are disproportionately drawn, but I need only refer to the observations of the Kerner commission, the Eisenhower commission, and recent social commentaries to establish the increased politicization of American blacks and Latinos. Participation in riots, exposure to nationally recognized civil rights leaders, and a widely disseminated vocabulary of political and social protest became part of the life experience of many of those later confined in prison in the large industrial states during the late 1960s and 70s. Often the actors most directly involved in these political movements were themselves committed to prison and continued their struggle from behind the walls. Other prisoners could not remain totally unaffected by the presence in their midst of highly charismatic personalities who redefined their situation as that of “political prisoners.”
Like other marginal groups in America, imprisoned felons in the post-World War II years have come to make increasing claims to the rights of citizenship. The rise in the material expectations of prisoners (reaching a climax in the prison riots of 1952–53) and the later intensification of rights consciousness (crystallizing in prison uprisings in California and New York in 1970–71) should be seen as consequences of the progressive realization of mass society. Just as blacks demanded social and political equalities in the 1950s, so too did prisoners of that decade and the next press for a redefinition of their situation within society. Most significant was the identification made by prisoners with the social and then political struggle of other marginal groups, e.g., blacks, Chicanos, radicals.
During this same period when the claims of marginal groups spread from the streets into the prisons, there was also increased legitimation of prison reform; public opinion polls began to show that the majority of Americans now accepted rehabilitation as the purpose of imprisonment.16 The prison reform movement gained strength and legitimacy in the late 1960s as middle-class activists and drug users came increasingly into contact with the prison. The same energies that were tapped for the civil rights of blacks and against the Vietnam war were also channeled toward the prisons.
Ties between the prison and the central political institutions of society also proliferated in the mid-60s. The founding of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) in 1968 made millions of dollars available for prison studies and for the development of model programs to deal with the confined. One result was to bring the prison closer to the federal governmental bureaucracy.
Much of what the government has done has been in collaboration with colleges and universities. As more and more LEAA money has become available for research, criminal justice departments and criminology curricula have become institutionalized in junior colleges, colleges, and universities across the country. The number of degree programs multiplied from 50 in 1960 to at least 660 in 1975.17 Professional and academic journals on the subject have also proliferated. New professional and paraprofessional careers like counseling and rehabilitation have been established. Some students and graduates of such programs are teaching courses for college credit to prisoners behind the walls; others are moving into new prison administrative positions.
Prison administrators have become increasingly professionalized. Many of those now entering the field were initiated through academic study rather than having come up through the ranks. In 1965 every warden in Illinois had come up through the system; none had a college degree. By 1974 there was not a single warden who started as a guard, and six of the eight held master’s degrees.
Various interest groups in the society are solely committed to lobbying for the rights of prisoners. While New York’s Fortune Society and Illinois’s John Howard Association are two of the best known, hundreds of ad hoc groups have sprung into existence. The ex-offender movement has even begun to become established. In California, groups of ex-offenders, under the leadership of ex-offender and prison sociologist John Irwin, have formed a prisoners’ union and similar developments have occurred elsewhere.
Prisoners are no longer isolated from developments in the outside community. Daily newspapers make their way into the prison, including many copies of the radical underground press. In addition, inmates have access to the news over the radio and especially over the television. In some prisons, including Stateville since 1975, each inmate can have a television set of his own. In other prisons, TV sets are placed in areas of work assignments and on the galleries.
Media coverage of prison matters has sharply increased in recent years, ref
lecting the fact that the prison has become a central issue of concern in American society. Prisoners are thus provided with limited access to the public through which they can state their grievances. In several instances of prison rebellions, inmates have asked for press conferences and/or press and television coverage. At Pautuxet Institute in Maryland, in 1973, prisoners seized hostages in order to get a press conference. The role of the media at Attica has been a subject of voluminous debate.
The federal courts’ abandonment of the “hands off” doctrine was the most important development in the prison’s environment. Until the mid-1960s the convicted man sent to prison lost all his constitutional and legal rights, experiencing a “civil death” which redefined the convict as “a slave of the state.”18 He might use habeas corpus procedures to complain of irregularities at his trial and the fact of his confinement but not to complain of the manner of his confinement. Courts left prison affairs to the discretion of the administrators. By and large, the prisoner was shut off from the courts and placed outside the protection of the rule of law.
The extension of the rule of law into the prison was a natural outgrowth of the judicial activism of the sixties under the leadership of the Warren Court and of the “legal revolution” that brought fuller rights of citizenship to racial minorities, the poor, the illegitimate, and the criminal defendant. The federal judicial system, which had become increasingly active in protecting the rights of minorities through expansive interpretations of the U.S. Constitution, also became more sensitive to the plight of those behind bars.
An expanded interpretation of the scope of habeas corpus, along with §1983 of the Civil Rights Act, have provided prisoners powerful procedural tools with which they can complain of administrative abuses. In the past few years, federal and state courts have scrutinized every aspect of the prison regime and have issued injunctions and declaratory judgments affecting discipline, good time, living conditions, health care, censorship, restrictions on religion and speech, and access to the courts. In a few spectacular cases, prisons and entire prison systems have been declared unconstitutional, establishing the principle that the constitution, the rule of law, and due process embrace the convict, except in those instances where prison authorities can show compelling reasons to deny basic freedoms.
Stateville- the Penitentiary in Mass Society Page 2
