Ethnicity and Prison Violence: Assessing the Subculture of Violence Thesis

• In Event: 190 - Regular Session. Prisons and Prisoners 1

Abstract

Studies of prison violence in the US have generally found that racial and ethnic minorities have higher rates of violence compared to whites. The prevailing explanation revolves around the importation of a “subculture of violence”: minority inmates are more likely to come from highly segregated and impoverished neighborhoods, which, it is argued, foster a deeply ingrained value system that condones violence. But the understanding of culture as deeply ingrained values has been challenged by scholarship that conceives of culture as providing individuals with a toolkit, and social structure and institutions generate the contexts in which individuals creatively make use of the cultural tools at their disposal. From the toolkit perspective, then, the effect of culture on prison violence should be understood as contingent on context. In this paper, we assess the culture-as-values versus culture-as-toolkit explanations for prison violence by testing them in a different national context: Israel. We compare rates of prison violence between Jewish and Arab Muslim Israelis using comprehensive data on all 37,900 male criminal prisoners in Israel in 2009 and 2010. While the culture-as-values perspective predicts higher rates of violence among Muslim prisoners, the culture-as-toolkit opens the door to competing explanations, in this case the increased salience of solidarity among Muslims in the political context of Israel. We find that Jewish prisoners are more likely to be involved in violent events in prison, which lends support to the less determinative culture-as-toolkit perspective.

Authors

• Kathrine Ben Zvi, Israeli Prison Service

• Josh Guetzkow, Hebrew University