Violent Institutions: The Hidden Brutality Within American Prisons

• Author: Christian L. Bolden
• Date: 01 May 2022
• Published date: 01 May 2022
• DOI: 10.1177/10439862221096731

https://doi.org/10.1177/10439862221096731

Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice

2022, Vol. 38(2) 225 –227

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/10439862221096731

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Essay

Violent Institutions: The

Hidden Brutality Within

American Prisons

Christian L. Bolden

Violence and American prisons are intertwined, yet it does not have to be this way.

There are prisons in the world where violence is not endemic. So, what is it about

American prisons that perpetuates the expectation and manifestation of violence? Part

of the answer may be that American prisons, in and of themselves, are violent. If we

use the perspective of Johan Galtung (1969), we can see that violence is more than just

direct physical harm; it is also the composite of cultural fear and structural unfairness.

“Violence is here defined as the cause of the difference between the potential and the

actual, between what could have been and what is” (Galtung, 1969: 168). If harm is

present, though it was avoidable, violence is present. The violence of prisons may

refer to things such as structural and cultural chaos, entrapment, food insecurity, dehu-

manization. These harms extend beyond prison walls with unending alienation for

those that return to society. These things are choices. They are avoidable. They are

violence.

Violence is structural and cultural chaos. People have always attempted to create

some form of order in the face of normlessness. When institutions such as prisons fail

to provide for the basic needs of a population, alternate deviant subcultures, such as

gangs, will organize to impose order and meet those needs. Consider Texas’ unprece-

dented venture into mass incarceration. The state went from less than thirty prisons in

the 1980s to 110 prisons in the 1990s, yet operated them with persistently inadequate

corrections staff. Prisoners were constantly transferred from prison to prison, creating

chaotic instability. Each time they arrived at these new open-space warehouse style

penitentiaries, without even having the walls of a cell to protect them in their sleep,

they had to make immediate decisions to provide for their own safety. It is little won-

der that this ill-conceived attempt at a carceral empire resulted in Texas becoming one

of the top two generators of prison gangs and gang members in the US. Warfare was

all but a foregone conclusion. The prison authority’s use of “legitimized” violence to

respond to prisoners in conflict only emphasized its ineptitude at dealing with the

structural chaos of its own creation. For instance, one response to conflicts between

gangs was ethnic lockdowns, putting all members of a demographic into extended

1096731CCJXXX10.1177/10439862221096731Journal of Contemporary Criminal JusticeBolden

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