This week my blog post on social and moral order is a
response to Ashley.
This is the link to her post.
Weider detected a code which was operative at a halfway
house. This code was a set of activities that they should and should not engage
in, showing loyalty to the other residents and avoiding spending time with the
staff. Part of the code states that a resident must not trust staff. This is
mentioned in Ashley’s post. Ashley works at a youth refuge in the Illawarra and
sometimes feels uncomfortable confronting residents. This is probably because
the residents display a strong sense of loyalty to one another and it may be
intimidating to a staff member who is on the “outside”.
I stumbled across another article by Einat and Einat (2000)
that touches on the inmate subculture in Israeli prisons. The behavioural and
moral code may be seen as a collective and functional stand for coping with the
prison environment. It alleviates the suffering caused by deprivation,
inhospitable conditions, social heterogeneity of peers, confusion between two
worlds, lack of stability, relative inactivity, boredom, and an unclear future.
Punishments for breaching the code are severe and strong negative sanctions are
applied in the form of verbal and physical violence, social isolation, withholding
food, and withdrawal of commodities such as cigarettes and drugs.
“A prisoner who becomes a snitch will be ambushed, knifed, his face
will be cut… So everybody will know who he is, and that they should never act
like him.”
Another example of this inmate code is seen in the film The
Longest Yard, where a group of inmates forms a gridiron team to play against a
well-drilled team of prison guards. Throughout the film the inmates are
determined to show the guards who is boss on the sporting field.
I totally agree with Ashley, there is an element of apprehension
when dealing with criminals, big or small! Even when you have the “authority”.
References
Einat, T & Einat, H 2000, ‘Inmate argot as an expression
of prison subculture: The Israeli case’, The
Prison Journal, vol.80, no.3, pp309-325.
Weider, DL 1974, ‘Telling the code’, in R Turner (ed.), Ethnomethodology: Selected Readings, Penguin
Education, Harmondsworth, pp144-172.
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