The Corruption of the Prison System
as the result of corruption within the prison system (Gossett 1987, 1992, 1995, 1997a, 1998, 2001, 2004a, 2005, 2009a, 2010, 2011b). Most works in this area tend to be treated as a government-brought event or a problem arising from misogyny. A few pieces examine the causes of prison riots specifically, such as NK Venson (2003) and Tic Trade (Carrington 2002a). Some research looks at the cultural influences upon prisoners’ participation in prison rioting (Landry 2009), for example, finding that prisoners’ demographics (younger age) and specific experiences within the prison system (e.g., physical and sexual assault) were associated with higher levels of riot participation. Studies of Texas’s prison riots (Grime and Lyons 2008) suggest that prison authorities did not suppress the rioting immediately but rather tried to contain the situation to Emanuel Women’s Special Housing Unit—an escapee women’s prison—before affecting other Texas prisons. This suggests that prisons would produce rioters who were easier to control. Since many of the study authors support the idea that prisons include a “state within a state,” it yields advantages.
Since “the state is the habitable part”(Lyons and Grime 2002, 47), most prison riots may result from the desperation that many prisoners experience while in prison, as well as by individual sections of prison populations seeking to escape the prison system. The budget and resource constraints that force states to contract with large corporations and prison administrators and staff have led to dramatic changes in the physical structure of prisons, creating additional facilities like parking lots, cell complexes, and research facilities (Carrington and Bell 1991). The advantage to private companies of being able to influence the physical parameters of prisons is well documented. As previously noted, prison authorities (i.e., elected officials and prison administrators) have been involved in the unrest in many states and in retaliation crimes insofar as 20 percent of federal inmates work in private prisons (Kolb and Francis 1991, 1998). Further, privatization has also been valued as an efficient means of cost-saving for ensuring prison services (Straus 1998, Nordoff and Darling 2001, Kolb et al. 1999). Corrections officers are essential to a thriving industrial security system. For containment purposes within a facility, the guards can be maddened and provoked by the prisoners (both for alleged rule violations and in retaliation in prison riots). Prison officials and security professionals have been involved in riot incidents in the past and have sought to control a small uprising escalation.
On the other hand, corrections officers tend to protect prisoners in case of riot breaking, mainly by providing water if the riot breaks out instead of riot control. These conflicts have revealed something about the federation between State and prison, where states acting as custodians of people in prison has led to increased costs, rules, policies, and practices. Thus, while prison administrators and staff may find a way in to control their prisoners, calling them “lesser evil” and a “step toward social order,” prison populations still can find ways to undermine the systems and institutions which force them to submit to authority. And, since they are subject to social order, prison rioters resist attempts to control them. In the modern Western State, prisons’ function and the bureaucracy that controls them are to prevent inmates from infringing on others’ rights or from escaping. As a result, in the modern Western State, the prison is an institution that reflects established cultural and social relations formed by the State itself. Where the State is almost invariably one of conflict and violence, both of which are necessary in politics, prisons are an appropriate institution for control to re-establish the social order. The distinction between prison and jail may also make the police less able to respond to riots and give more political agency to non-individual prison inmates (Lyon 1990).
In the seventeenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, during the “prison societies” in England and France, the decision as to whether or not a prisoner could be committed by the court to punishment (and later, to a longer-term in state institutions) depended on the extent to which the convict showed the national character. If he was an outsider (non-French, non-British, non-Anglo-Saxon), the court, with other possible factors, decided whether or not to commit a prisoner. This was due to the English and French systems of “natural justice,” i.e., this was the first system where the very essence of justice was related to the law (which was, itself, an arbitrary and moral law).