Prisoner society in the era of hard drugs

Abstract

A telling indication of the decline of ethnographic prison sociology is the paucity of research on drugs and their influence on the prisoner social world. Based on long-term fieldwork in a medium-security English prison, this article argues that the key components of prisoner social life are deeply imprinted by the presence and prevalence of hard drugs in and around the penal estate. After outlining the appeal of heroin to prisoners, and the terms of the prison drugs economy, the article shows how heroin restructures status and social relations in prison in a number of ways. First, users are stigmatized, particularly when their consumption has consequences that violate established codes of inmate behaviour. Second, heroin grants considerable power to those prisoners who deal it within prison, although this power is not necessarily equivalent to respect. Third, heroin transforms the terms of affiliation that exist when drugs are scarce. Meanwhile, for those prisoners whose lives prior to incarceration have been dominated by drug addiction, the experience of incarceration has a number of distinctive qualities.