“Who’s Your Rep’”: Social Order in Jail

• In Event: Prison Adjustment and Social Order

Abstract

Deputies managing inmate populations in jails do not exercise total dominance over inmate behavior, so how is order maintained? In this study, order was established and inmate-on-inmate violence was kept to a minimum by inmate leaders called “reps’.” The more effective the “rep'” was at his role, the less likely the jail was to experience social disorder. The data for this report is based upon 135 days of ethnographic fieldwork in a Southern California county jail system from the fall of 2006 through the spring of 2008. As a function of the social structure of the jail system, “reps’” provided a sense of ontological security from which order could be established amongst inmate groups. “Reps’” were ascribed an authoritarian level of legitimacy amongst inmates because they gained their position with the support of inmates, but in serving as extensions of administrative control for jail managers, they were effectively transmuted into control agents within inmate society. The results presented here suggest that inmate leadership can be fundamental to managing inmate populations.

Author

• Michael Lawrence Walker, University of Nebraska at Omaha