Informal prison hierarchies in the 21 century: subcultures, trends and social control

• In Event: EUROGANG Panel: Gangs Experiences, Appearances and Complexities

Abstract

Dmytro Yagunov
Doctor of Political Science, PhD in Public Administration, Associate Professor
Eberhard and Karl University of Tübingen (Germany)
d.yagunov@gmail.com

Informal prison hierarchies are a matter of relations of power and subordination, power struggles in prisons and a free society, and the use of prisons and subcultural prison symbols to spread political power by powerful actors, including states.

Due to the greater openness of prisons to society and the spread of the influence of prison criminal organizations on free society, the boundaries between the concepts of "criminal subculture" and "prison subculture" are increasingly dissolving. This is especially evident in the United States, Mexico, and South America, where the concept of a "street gang" is automatically a "prison gang" and vice versa. Similar trends are also becoming characteristic of European countries due to the penetration of prison gangs from the New World into the European "market".

In contrast, in post-Soviet states, the relations between the ‘national’ professional criminal worlds and the respective informal prison hierarchies remain those of a Russian prison metropolis and fourteen colonies. The ‘Metropolis’ is making efforts to keep the former "colonies" under its control, using all possible political tools, technologies and levers of influence, as a result of which Russia has acquired the characteristics of not even a police state or even a carceral state, but a prison state. A prison state is not about the number of prisons, the number of prisoners, or the number of prison staff. It is about Russian citizens' approval and internal perception of the idea that the society should be governed by a prison subculture and corresponding informal hierarchies. Consequently, the author argues about the approval of wider use of informal prison hierarchies and prison subculture for the need of social control of the population, following traditions shaped in the Soviet period.

Author

• Dmytro Yagunov, Eberhard and Karl University (Tübingen, Germany)