9.

Social Relations in
“Hidden Life”

The Model Thesis and the Reality of the Penal Institution

The fundamental principle of the penal institution is control which permeates all aspects of the life of the subordinates. Achieving this kind of control is possible only in isolation from the external world. Its substance is a special mode of organizing the life of the convicts. This pattern, which defines the course of the daily routine of the subordinates, is repeated in endless continua of consecutive days. It also expresses the special position chosen by the designers of totalitarian institutions in relation to the subordinates. By placing themselves above them and the life outlined for them, the designers remain as if creators.

The inmate’s life is supposed to be a duplication of the life enjoyed by free people: each person must work and learn and have leisure time and rest, while food, clothing, and articles of personal use (hygiene) must be guaranteed for him or her. Everyone receives the same things in the same amounts—complete standardization and uniformity.

The behavior of the subordinates is controlled as well. The place and activities of each subordinate are strictly fixed for each day and within the space of a closed area. Consecutive days are copies of the previously established schedule of a previous day. A week, a month, a year, or a decade are like books of various thickness, each with identical pages.

The pattern of social relations is fixed as well. By foreseeing the possibility of unexpected situations, those carrying out prison life—supervisors—are endowed with the competencies of rule maker, judge, and executioner.

Prisons seem to personify a model of righteousness and social order— an adaptation to the rules makes free will useless. The subordinates are ordered to relinquish responsibility, which is taken over by the institution. They are compressed into a “matrix” of life, and this is the primary purpose of the penal system.

So much for the idealized concept of the prison institution. In practice, it turns out that people are unable to find their place in this artificial life, and they deviate from the strictly delineated paths of conduct. Fearing punishment, they conceal their misconduct from the supervisors. The organization of life in prison is the reason why illegal action is often committed in full view of other people. But the others commit offenses as well. Everyone, therefore, witnesses misconduct and can testify against each other. This mutuality serves as a guarantee against disclosure. When everyone can become the accused there is no accuser—this is, already, qualitatively a totally different situation from the planned one. It signifies a threat of compromising the very foundation of the totalitarian institution, the authority of its designers and executors. Therefore, no such disclosure is permitted. But by keeping this type of a secret the supervisors lose their moral purity—it becomes impossible to retain the clear-cut form of conduct in the totalitarian institution, and now they too must conceal the fact that they are aware of this state of affairs. They are no longer the personification of righteousness. This “original sin” deprives them of authority in the eyes of the subordinates. They deceive themselves that in intensifying control they will be able to restore the postulated state of affairs. The system of informing grows and increases uncertainty in mutual contacts. The supervisors count on the fact that the subordinates by themselves will begin to control their own behavior in the presence of others. But by doing so, they recognize their subjectivity. It is in this subjectivity that the subordinates discover a way to reduce doubts about their own solidarity.

The supervisors reach for measures contrary to the rule-of-law proclaimed by them and do so ineffectively. After all, it is enough for them that the subordinates just play the desired roles of behavior in their presence.

Reducing supervisors to the level of lawlessness is a success for the subordinates. Both sides know that they are not acting “within the law,” but the circumstances demand from them that they act according to formal models. Besides these, in situations which they have defined as having never existed, a new life emerges which they regulate themselves in a specific way and which becomes a truly “hidden life” of the prison.

The prison institution no longer dreams about the elimination of “hidden life” but is only left with choosing what attitude to have toward it. The supervisors who were supposed to control the situation became one of its elements. From a position in which it was intended that they watch over processes developing in the prison, they were reduced to one of the elements of this process, and this dissolved the artificiality of institution life.¹

The Economic Organization and Social Structure of the Prison

“Hidden life” in prison is comprised of three types of relationships: among the subordinates, between the subordinates and the supervisors, and among the supervisors. The material I have presented shows that in the three different types of penal institutions, these relationships differ. My research has also changed the picture of these relationships from that which has been noted in correctional institutions until now.

In previous models of relationships within the “hidden life” of the prison, it was said that the exploitation of some of the inmates by others resulted in two distinct groups: the exploiters and the exploited, as well as a normative system which constitutes this division. In this way, a specific organization of inmates emerged which concentrated on controlling the functionaries. The word control should be stressed, since attempts at its elimination failed. I have also shown that as a consequence of processes within the community of institution A, yet another version of the organizational structure of the prisoners has become possible, although its essence remains the same as the one outlined above.

Relations between the functionaries are delineated by their affiliation to a specific type of service (department), each of which fulfills a different function in the prison. A struggle for status in the institution integrates the interests of their own departments and breeds distrust in relations with employees of other departments.

In institution B where there were possibilities for obtaining goods not by the exploitation of another prisoner but in cooperation with him—by means of illicit production and trade—the relations in the prison community were shaped differently than in institution A. Production and trade created an illegal market, and the latter generated and guided processes within that community.

The existence of an illegal market is possible above all because of the participation of the functionaries, who created the demand. They also sell the products cheaply, and profits from passing illegal correspondence, etc. undoubtedly benefit them. An insurance against interference by those functionaries who do not take part in the transactions is the corruption of the latter by colleagues involved in the illegal traffic.

In a semi-open institution, such as institution C, the inmates enjoy a decidedly broader contact with the outside world and are not forced to obtain goods by means of the exploitation of another inmate or cooperation with him—they remain independent. As long as the prisoners are permitted to retain this state of affairs, they generally meet the expectations of the functionaries and, apart from fulfilling their official tasks, allow themselves to be exploited for administration workers’ private deals.

If this arrangement works without serious disturbances, mobilization of the staff is unnecessary; it suffices that they fulfill a minimum of imposed duties. This state of affairs, as well as the fact that workplaces are in scattered locations, contributes to the reason why relations between them are less cohesive than in the other two institutions.

Various models of interpersonal relations in the three institutions examined seem to depend on the specific situation which each one of them creates.

The basic determinant for relations in the institution seems to lie within the community of the prisoners. The structure of the prison community and its functions are conditioned by access to consumer goods and the cooperative or noncooperative way of obtaining them (via exploitation of someone else or independently). The character of those variables is delineated by the degree of isolation (the type of the institution: closed, semiopen) and the type of production in which the prisoners are employed and on which the possibility and scale of the illegal production and trade depend.²

It could be said, therefore, that relations governing the “hidden life” of the prison are a function of its economic organization and that by knowing the elements of this organization one can predict an approximate model of relations in the “hidden life” of a given penitentiary.

It is difficult to say whether the economic organization has such an essential impact on “hidden life” in prisons in other countries as it does in Polish penal institutions. The pauperization of the inmates may not necessarily resemble that prevalent in Polish prisons in all the institutions of this type. The outcome of my study, however, seems to argue that the relations in the “hidden life” of the prison are always considerably influenced by their specific conditions and that the representation of those relations in all types of penal institutions cannot be reduced to a common denominator— just as it is impossible to do so for the prisons in a single country.

The findings of this study accentuate the importance of the active role played by the behavior of individuals in constructing a social reality. The individuals, by seeking and penetrating the situation from the point of view of the measures which best meet their requirements, enter into interactions whose regular patterns constitute a social structure.³ At the same time, it should be stressed that the condition for the existence of such interactions need not be the goals shared by the individuals but the significance they employ and which make an agreement possible. People can unite not necessarily only to achieve common goals; having different aims, they might need each other and cooperate to accomplish their own separate purposes.⁴

The social structure in this interpretation is therefore a configuration of mutually connected events that, by repeating themselves, bring to an end and reset into motion a series of social actions. The social structure is created by events rather than by things and thus the concept of the structure is more dynamic than static.⁵

If we introduce changes into a penal institution that in a substantial way define the range and manner of obtaining consumer goods, then the inmates and the functionaries will strive toward undertaking such interpersonal relations which will make it possible to attain optimum profits in the new situation. They will hold on to certain old models of interaction as long as they remain functional. This appears to explain why in different penal institutions we can come across similar and different elements within the informal structures of the prison communities.