University of Nairobi the Society of Captives Essay Please offer a short summary of your reading. Let me know how you are reacting to it. Do you agree/disa

University of Nairobi the Society of Captives Essay Please offer a short summary of your reading. Let me know how you are reacting to it. Do you agree/disagree? Last, but not least what is the policy recommendation to emerged from the article or essay. You must enter an original response of 350 wordsOnly like 3 paragraphs Sykes: The Society of
Captives
VICTOR L. SHAMMAS
University of Oslo, Norway
Few studies have been quite as formative for
the sociology of punishment as Gresham M.
Sykes’s The Society of Captives (1958). In this
observational study of the New Jersey Maximum
Security Prison, a men’s correctional facility that
in the early 1950s housed some 1,200 inmates and
employed around 300 persons, Sykes proposed a
series of weighty premises for the study of imprisonment. Among the key highlights are that, due
to the defects of total power, custodians only have
imperfect control over their charges. Additionally, in response to environmental deprivations
known as the pains of imprisonment, inmates
develop a prison culture populated by persons
who take on prison-specific patterns of behavior
described as argot roles.
Born in Plainfield, New Jersey in 1922, Sykes
enlisted in the US Army during World War II,
fighting in the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium and
rising to the rank of captain over a period of two
years of combating Nazism. His early brush with
a totalitarian counterpart can be discerned in the
later analysis of the limits to absolute authority
in The Society of Captives. After the war, Sykes
pursued studies at Princeton University and completed a doctoral dissertation at Northwestern
University in 1954. Sykes taught at Princeton,
Dartmouth, and Northwestern before becoming
a professor of sociology at the University of
Virginia.
Defects of Total Power
Sykes’s study was published at the peak of the
Cold War contest between market society and
Soviet Communism, with the memories of the
brutality of the Nazi concentration camps fresh in
the public mind. The specter of total power looms
large over the canvas of the study. Reassuringly,
however, Sykes suggests that the human will
to freedom is indomitable. Even in a US maximum security prison, the institution that most
closely resembles the “systems of total power”
(2007/1958: 140) in Nazi Germany and the Soviet
Union, Sykes argues that absolute authority is
largely an illusion. The defects of total power
entail that prison custodians only seem to be fully
in control. The book is littered with qualifications
that total power is only “formal” or “theoretical,”
that prison staff only “appear to be the possessors
of almost infinite power within their realm”
(p. 41).
In reality, the authority of custodians is shared
with a series of other parties. On the one hand,
external society imposes constraints in the form
of norms and laws. The ever-present threat of
outcry and outrage in the press and among
the public, and the possibility of courtroom
challenges to the custodial regime, mean that
custodians are wary of letting conditions grow
too decrepit – or, at the very least, that they are
concerned with the flow of information beyond
the prison walls. On the other hand, custodians
share their power with prisoners. Inmates throw
all kinds of grit into the machinery of custodial
power, so that dominance is “more fiction than
reality” (p. 45), and obedience is a doubtful and
dubious proposition. Inmates swear, exhibit insolence, gamble, smuggle and trade contraband,
manufacture knives, make noise, and generally
behave in an unruly, disorderly fashion. This
means that the custodians are very clearly “not
total despots, able to exercise power at whim” and
therefore they lack the “essential mark of infinite
power, the unchallenged right of being capricious
in their rule” (p. 42). The very real possibility of
resistance imposes constraints on custodial rule.
In recent decades, microsociological studies of
prison culture have taken up this theme almost
obsessively, emphasizing the prominence of
“resistance.” For instance, Crewe (2007: 272)
contends that inmates in an English men’s prison
outwardly appear as docile subjects, all the while
subversively engaging in “backstage resistance of
The Encyclopedia of Corrections. Edited by Kent R. Kerley.
© 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118845387.wbeoc122
2
SYKES: THE SOCIETY
various forms, including illicit activity invested
with anti-institutional meaning (e.g., drug dealing, stealing from kitchens and workshops) and
active subversion (e.g., setting off fire alarms).”
Such studies have taken their theoretical cues
from poststructuralist scholars like Michel Foucault and Joan Scott, and seek to resuscitate
“agency” at a time when practically all industrialized nations have witnessed a ramping up of the
penal state. However, as Rubin (2015) argues, a
more apt description of what inmates do when
they resist custodial authority is friction, not
resistance, since their acts are rarely intentional
attempts to alter the political economy of punishment. Prison scholars have been prone to project
their fantasies of political transformation onto
subjects that are unlikely to become the kinds
of revolutionary subjects such scholars are more
or less consciously seeking. Even as inmates cast
sand into the machinery, the machine (i.e., the
prison system) persists and remains relatively
unperturbed.
Pains of Imprisonment
Prisons derive their legitimacy in part from
depriving convicts of those things they might
enjoy in liberty. Sykes discovers five frustrations:
the deprivation of liberty, the deprivation of
goods and services, the deprivation of heterosexual relationships, the deprivation of autonomy,
and the deprivation of security. The totality of
deprivations explains why inmates find prison
life undesirable, and it is suggested that the deprivations are an innate, universal characteristic of
imprisonment as such. Inmate society is formed
as a shield to defend against the destructive effects
of the frustrations.
Argot Roles
Sociolinguists define argot as the vocabulary of
a particular social group. Sykes contends that
the vocabulary of criminals serves a particular function, albeit not the function that most
early observers of underground jargon assumed,
namely to keep communications among criminals a secret from the public or police. Instead,
argot is functional because it rearranges reality,
OF
CAPTIVES
“ordering and classifying experience within the
walls in terms which deal specifically with the
major problems of prison life” (p. 85). Criminals
live differently from conventional society, and
argot arises because they live differently, Sykes
claims. It is a brutally simplistic, mechanical
account of linguistic change. But the book is not
a work in linguistics, and one might forgive the
author for making these remarks obiter dicta,
as things said by the way of introduction to the
weightier theory of social roles in prison.
The argot roles Sykes draws out of the prison
consist of a number of colorful categories, such
as “rats,” “center men,” “gorillas,” “merchants,”
“wolves,” “hipsters,” and “toughs.” Rats betray
the trust of inmates by providing information to
the custodians. Center men take on the values
and attitudes of the custodians. Gorillas forcibly
appropriate desirable goods from other inmates.
Merchants are those who violate the gift-exchange
norms of prison culture by selling goods when
they are expected to give them away. Wolves
are inmates who engage in “casual, mechanical”
(p. 97) homosexual acts with other inmates, often
amounting to non-consensual acts that are, essentially, rape, according to Sykes. Hipsters pretend
to be tougher than they are, while toughs love
resorting to violence with anyone willing to fight.
At times, the labels feel more like caricatures
than careful portrayals of complex social dynamics. There is an element of exoticism. What is
more, social action could be seen as a spontaneous process of continuous reordering, as
opposed to the static functionalism of Mertonian
role theory. The categories feel dated due to temporal dislocations in the empirical and theoretical
domains since both 1950s slang and 1950s social
theory are now out of fashion. The argot roles
suggest a stable and readily self-ascribed set of
patterned behaviors. The argot roles may seem
quaint and outmoded today, but they contain one
important implication for present-day studies:
that inmate society is only imperfectly cohesive,
that it can quickly devolve into a distrustful
environment where inmates are prone to resort to
deception, con artistry, and violence – the poor
preying on the poor. Solidarity among inmates
is a crucial counterweight to misery: the greater
the social solidarity among inmates, the greater
their tolerance of the pains of imprisonment,
Sykes suggests (p. 107). In this way, the society
SYKES: THE SOCIETY
of captives provides emotional protection against
the sorrows and suffering of doing time.
The book is written in refreshingly crisp prose
and, unlike many present-day studies, does not
drown in postmodern raptures of reflexivity. But
it is not without its shortcomings. It is steeped
in structural functionalism, perceiving social
action as taking place within systems that are
characterized by recurrent regularities of human
behavior. As noted in the preceding section, the
static nature of role theory may be problematic.
The work solidified Sykes’s reputation as an
early proponent of the deprivation model of
inmate behavior. On this view, stressors in the
prison environment shape prisoner behavior.
Prison culture arises as a functional response to
how the prison is organized. In opposition to the
deprivation model, the importation model contends that individual responses to imprisonment
are the result of pre-prison social characteristics, including educational attainment and class
position. On this view, prison culture reflects
pre-prison lifestyles, folkways, and social mores,
typically those of the “street.” While the importation model underscores the effects of wider
society on prison culture – the prison as continuation of the outside world – the deprivation model
emphasizes the prison as hermetically sealed and
endowed with unique environmental properties
that give rise to distinctive functional adaptations.
Perhaps too much has been made of this theoretical couplet. Logically speaking, the central
claims of both the deprivation and importation
models can be simultaneously true: that prisons
bear the imprimatur of external society, that
inmates are bearers of the values and norms they
bring with them from the outside world, and that
inmates adopt special behaviors and hierarchies
that are a reaction to the peculiar constraints of
incarceration. A close reading of Sykes’s work
should make us question the ease with which
it has been slotted into the deprivation side of
the debate, and perhaps the effortlessness with
which the theoretical distinction between the
importation and deprivation models has been
drawn in the first place. Sykes carefully notes
that the “prison wall is far more permeable
than it appears … in terms of the relationships
between the prison social system and the larger
society in which it rests” (p. 8), underscoring
that the “prison is not an autonomous system of
OF
CAPTIVES
3
power,” and thereby rejecting the hermetic take
on prisons. The distinctiveness of the importation and deprivation models can be rescued by
noting that they emphasize external or internal
factors differently while failing to exclude either.
However one might salvage the dichotomy, Sykes
is certainly open to the idea that the prison can
be viewed as a continuation of the outside world.
There is also a problematic universalization
from the particular. Sykes refers throughout to
“the prison,” but it is frequently unclear whether
that is in reference to a particular instantiation of
temporal-spatially anchored practice or a universal category. Are the mechanisms uncovered valid
for the abstract domain of imprisonment, or are
they limited to the concrete empirical site of New
Jersey Maximum Security Prison in 1954? All
students of the case study must grapple with this
problem, but Sykes glosses over the problem of
generalization. Writing on the problem of prison
riots, Sykes contends that “the prison appears to
move in a cyclical rhythm from order to disorder
to order,” and riots are a “logical step in a pattern
of repeated social change” (p. 110). But prison
riots have grown far less common in recent
decades, at least in the industrialized societies,
suggesting that there is nothing inevitable about
the regular ebb and flow of conflict. Riots can
simply vanish.
Similarly, not all institutions induce an equal
amount or form of pain. England has experimented with Category D “open” prisons. The
Nordic countries channel up to one-third of
the prisoner population into minimum security facilities (Shammas 2014). Meanwhile, the
United States operates prisons that are frequently
overcrowded, underfunded, and marred by lethal
violence. This would suggest that the imprisonment experience varies not merely because
individual prisoners differ in their perception
of punishment but because penal regimes vary.
Sykes constructs a precise anatomy of a concrete
institution but in places the phenomena uncovered are seemingly translated into a Weberian
ideal type, which is an ideal type of one prison.
That is surely unhelpful for scholars of punishment today. As a historical document, however,
The Society of Captives remains powerfully
evocative of postwar American incarceration, a
comparatively blissful era prior to the ascendancy
of the latter-day Leviathan of hyperincarceration.
4
SYKES: THE SOCIETY
SEE ALSO: Pains of Imprisonment; Recidivism;
Sykes, Gresham
References
Crewe, B. 2007. “Power, Adaptation and Resistance in a
Late-Modern Men’s Prison.” British Journal of Criminology, 47 (2): 256–275.
Rubin, A. T. 2015. “Resistance or Friction: Understanding the Significance of Prisoners’ Secondary Adjustments.” Theoretical Criminology, 19 (1): 23–42.
Shammas, V. L. 2014. “The Pains of Freedom: Assessing
the Ambiguity of Scandinavian Penal Exceptionalism
on Norway’s Prison Island.” Punishment & Society 16
(1): 104–123.
OF
CAPTIVES
Sykes, G. 2007/1958. The Society of Captives: A Study of
a Maximum Security Prison. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Further Reading
Irwin, J. 1985. The Jail: Managing the Underclass in
American Society. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA:
University of California Press.
Rhodes, L. A. 2004. Total Confinement: Madness and
Reason in the Maximum Security Prison. Berkeley
and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.
Wacquant, L. 2009. Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal
Government of Social Insecurity. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Sykes: The Society of
Captives
VICTOR L. SHAMMAS
University of Oslo, Norway
Few studies have been quite as formative for
the sociology of punishment as Gresham M.
Sykes’s The Society of Captives (1958). In this
observational study of the New Jersey Maximum
Security Prison, a men’s correctional facility that
in the early 1950s housed some 1,200 inmates and
employed around 300 persons, Sykes proposed a
series of weighty premises for the study of imprisonment. Among the key highlights are that, due
to the defects of total power, custodians only have
imperfect control over their charges. Additionally, in response to environmental deprivations
known as the pains of imprisonment, inmates
develop a prison culture populated by persons
who take on prison-specific patterns of behavior
described as argot roles.
Born in Plainfield, New Jersey in 1922, Sykes
enlisted in the US Army during World War II,
fighting in the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium and
rising to the rank of captain over a period of two
years of combating Nazism. His early brush with
a totalitarian counterpart can be discerned in the
later analysis of the limits to absolute authority
in The Society of Captives. After the war, Sykes
pursued studies at Princeton University and completed a doctoral dissertation at Northwestern
University in 1954. Sykes taught at Princeton,
Dartmouth, and Northwestern before becoming
a professor of sociology at the University of
Virginia.
Defects of Total Power
Sykes’s study was published at the peak of the
Cold War contest between market society and
Soviet Communism, with the memories of the
brutality of the Nazi concentration camps fresh in
the public mind. The specter of total power looms
large over the canvas of the study. Reassuringly,
however, Sykes suggests that the human will
to freedom is indomitable. Even in a US maximum security prison, the institution that most
closely resembles the “systems of total power”
(2007/1958: 140) in Nazi Germany and the Soviet
Union, Sykes argues that absolute authority is
largely an illusion. The defects of total power
entail that prison custodians only seem to be fully
in control. The book is littered with qualifications
that total power is only “formal” or “theoretical,”
that prison staff only “appear to be the possessors
of almost infinite power within their realm”
(p. 41).
In reality, the authority of custodians is shared
with a series of other parties. On the one hand,
external society imposes constraints in the form
of norms and laws. The ever-present threat of
outcry and outrage in the press and among
the public, and the possibility of courtroom
challenges to the custodial regime, mean that
custodians are wary of letting conditions grow
too decrepit – or, at the very least, that they are
concerned with the flow of information beyond
the prison walls. On the other hand, custodians
share their power with prisoners. Inmates throw
all kinds of grit into the machinery of custodial
power, so that dominance is “more fiction than
reality” (p. 45), and obedience is a doubtful and
dubious proposition. Inmates swear, exhibit insolence, gamble, smuggle and trade contraband,
manufacture knives, make noise, and generally
behave in an unruly, disorderly fashion. This
means that the custodians are very clearly “not
total despots, able to exercise power at whim” and
therefore they lack the “essential mark of infinite
power, the unchallenged right of being capricious
in their rule” (p. 42). The very real possibility of
resistance imposes constraints on custodial rule.
In recent decades, microsociological studies of
prison culture have taken up this theme almost
obsessively, emphasizing the prominence of
“resistance.” For instance, Crewe (2007: 272)
contends that inmates in an English men’s prison
outwardly appear as docile subjects, all the while
subversively engaging in “backstage resistance of
The Encyclopedia of Corrections. Edited by Kent R. Kerley.
© 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118845387.wbeoc122
2
SYKES: THE SOCIETY
various forms, including illicit activity invested
with anti-institutional meaning (e.g., drug dealing, stealing from kitchens and workshops) and
active subversion (e.g., setting off fire alarms).”
Such studies have taken their theoretical cues
from poststructuralist scholars like Michel Foucault and Joan Scott, and seek to resuscitate
“agency” at a time when practically all industrialized nations have witnessed a ramping up of the
penal state. However, as Rubin (2015) argues, a
more apt description of what inmates do when
they resist custodial authority is friction, not
resistance, since their acts are rarely intentional
attempts to alter the political economy of punishment. Prison scholars have been prone to project
their fantasies of political transformation onto
subjects that are unlikely to become the kinds
of revolutionary subjects such scholars are more
or less consciously seeking. Even as inmates cast
sand into the machinery, the machine (i.e., the
prison system) persists and remains relatively
unperturbed.
Pains of Imprisonment
Prisons derive their legitimacy in part from
depriving convicts of those things they …
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