The Jungle

Quid Pro Quo

Prison culture would be fascinating if it weren’t so deeply disturbing. The shallow stereotypes don’t even begin to explain the complexity. This is not surprising, considering the long list of disincentives for social scientists or cultural anthropologists to engage in the kind of participatory studies necessary to illuminate the minute complexity at work within prison subcultures.

Prison culture is unique because it is completely synthetic. It’s a pre-fab culture, a function of the criminal justice process, its landscape and macrodynamics wholly determined by a centralized authority external to the cultural participants. The culture precedes the people. It is a little bit monastery, a little bit colony, a little bit Soviet central planning, but unique in that its unifying characteristic is what criminologists call antisociality—the cognitive-behavioral departure of the individual from the norms dictated by a given social system, enshrined in it’s code of law.

What this means, among other things, is that prison culture bears on its surface that which most other cultures keep hidden deep beneath the surface. Prison culture is the inside-out boy of cultures. The honesty begins with their formal titles: “Correctional Institutions.” The candor has never ceased to amaze me. It’s everywhere. I remember recently seeing a staff member proudly displaying his favorite California Correctional Peace Officers Association T-shirt to some of the wards under his charge. It boasted a large print on its back depicting a Panther or Cougar with large, blood red eyes, growling behind the bars of a cage. Under the picture a commentary was offered: “It’s a jungle in here.”

We, of course, are the fearsome beasts behind the cages with the blood red eyes living in the “jungle.”

Tocqueville, it will be recalled, came to America to study its prison system. He was perhaps one of the first to draw conclusions from his observations, not merely on the antisociality which is ostensibly the raison det re of the prison, but on characteristics of American society. He definitely saw that studying the prison provides insight not only into the prisoner, but into the jailer as well. Foucault famously tried to do this by defining society through the prison and prison terminology.

“Hey, shoot this next door dawg. Good lookin’ out.”

I take the small scrap of paper from the narrow crack in the electric door and pass it through an identical crack in an identical electrical door immediately to my left. I have just engaged in a vital cultural practice of prison life—which might be called, if anyone cared to study it, the quid pro quo system. This is a curious practice that cannot be accurately defined according to the usual scholastic stereotypes utilized to elucidate prison culture.

Let me summarize the complex dynamics underlying the practice. First of all, the note was passed from a Hispanic to a Black by way of a White ad hoc courier (these color distinctions are absolutely basic in prison). The Hispanic ward initiated the quid pro quo fully aware that his request would commit the White ward to breaking a prison law infraction, although only sporadically enforced and carrying minor repercussions. The White ward was also fully aware of the minor illegality of the favor being requested of him. But, after observing that the object to be passed was innocuous and neutral (a small drawing, probably a tattoo pattern), he calculated that, in this instance, the benefits clearly outweighed the risks. Ordinarily he would not have thought much at all about this simple task, especially had it been a neutral transfer, that is, if he had been asked to pass the object from one Hispanic to another, intra-racially.

What is interesting about the quid pro quo phenomenon is how it resembles, in an inside-out kind of way, the complex race relations that govern society in general. Whereas in prison segregation is an open secret, all but enshrined in the structure itself; in society it is no less a reality, but it is a concealed reality, an unspoken status quo.

We are deeply disturbed when we SEE the overt segregation and accompanying cultural practices in prison culture. But we slumber on in blissful disregard about the covert segregation that defines our own communities, precisely because it remains unseen.

Why? Why are we so chronically unconcerned about the “jungle” that is our own society?