Prison Culture

Rhonda R. Dobbs & Courtney A. Waid

It has long been recognized that, just as there is a culture among citizens in the free world, a separate culture also exists within prison walls. Beginning with Donald Clemmer's general study of the prison community in 1940, the dynamics of social relationships in the prison have been thoroughly studied and documented. Throughout the second half of the 20th century, studies moved from the general, as in Clemmer's investigation, to the specific, such as Gresham Sykes's (1958) pains of imprisonment and John Irwin and Donald Cressey's (1962) importation model. More recently, efforts at theoretical integration have been proposed. The concept of prisonization was first introduced in 1940 by Clemmer in his book The Prison Community . Clemmer defined prisonization as the assimilation process in prison where inmates take on “in greater or less degree … the folkways, mores, customs, and general culture of the penitentiary” (Clemmer, 1940, p. 299). It ...

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