We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Social Science Research Council/Open Society Foundations, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge, the Center for International Social Science Research and the Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflict at the University of Chicago, and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Benjamin Lessing received additional support from award W911-NF-1710044 from the U.S. Department of Defense and U.S. Army Research Office/Army Research Laboratory under the Minerva Research Initiative. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to any of these agencies or foundations.

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Legitimacy in criminal governance: Managing a drug empire from behind bars

This paper finds qualified support for the use of Skarbek’s (2011, 2014) governance theory to understand the emergence of prison gang-like groups in Kyrgyzstan, Northern Ireland and Brazil. However, Skarbek’s (2011, 2014) governance theory has little to say about how many prison gangs emerge and how they organise comparatively outside the US context. This paper argues that variation in the number of gangs and their monopolization of informal governance can only be explained by considering importation and deprivation theories alongside governance theories. These theories factor in variation in prison environments and pre-existing societal divisions imported into prison, which affect the costs on information transmission and incentives for gang expansion. In particular, the paper pays attention to the wider role social and political processes play in influencing whether monopoly power by prison gangs is supported and legitimized or not.

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Self-governing prisons: Prison gangs in an international perspective

Analyzing data from a semi-ethnographic study in a Ukrainian medium-security prison for men, I discuss how officers and prisoners negotiate order to produce a manageable, stable, predictable, peaceful and relatively habitable prison environment. Broadening the debate about power and order by introducing a case study from a non-'Western' context, I argue that prisoners and officers, apart from utilitarian compromises, also employ moral reasoning in their power negotiations. I demonstrate that in the context of prison's radical deficit in legitimacy, exacerbated by a corrupt, under-reformed, post-totalitarian state, non-conformity with legal norms might be more legitimate than legal conformity.

Compromised Power and Negotiated Order in a Ukrainian Prison

When reform occurs in prison systems, prisoner insecurity increases. One reason for this is disorganization. The disruption to informal governance structures, distributions of power and mechanisms for establishing trust causes conflicts. This paper argues that a key mechanism linking disorganization to conflict and violence is information flow. Incomplete information in interpersonal interaction marks prison settings. Informal institutions for producing certainty for both staff and prisoners emerge to overcome this. Such institutions are handicapped by reform directed at reducing informal prisoner controls. In such cases, violence becomes an information-generating activity and can substitute for reputation. The paper examines this proposition as it applies to prisoners and staff through a critical case study of radical prison reform in the South Caucasus country of post-Soviet Georgia.

Violence as Information During Prison Reform: Evidence From the Post-Soviet Region

Although the political and economic bankruptcy of the erstwhile Leninist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe has triggered radical societal transformations, the effect on daily prison life remains largely uncharted. This semi-ethnographic study, one of the first of its genre in the region, documents a prisoner hierarchy in post-Soviet Ukraine. Originating in the slums and prisons of the Russian Empire and solidifying in communist gaols and labour camps, the Ukrainian prison underworld continues to evolve. In this article, I argue that the post-independence shifts in penal policies and prison practices, combined with changes in prisoner demographics, have been altering the Ukrainian prisoner power structure. I contend that while functional and deeply institutionalized, the prisoner hierarchy is facing serious challenges, not least a legitimacy deficit, and I discuss the potential repercussions for internal power dynamics and prison order.

Roy D. King

Papers

Power, Control, and Symbiosis in Brazilian Prisons