Inmate Collective Action.

Abstract

Mass inmate disturbances have been the subject of volumes of studies and investigations. Still explanations of these events are fragmented and narrow in perspective. This dissertation develops an integrated framework based on structural dimensions of prisons to account for disturbances where inmates undertake collective action against prison authority. Sociological theories of social conflict and collective action and particularly the resource mobilization perspective provide the underpinnings of the theory developed and tested. Our effort was to identify structural attributes of prison organization, i.e., their control orientation, stability, and adaptability, and forms of inmate social organization, i.e., the differentiated, the monolithic, and the atomistic, which we hypothesized would be associated with different probabilities of inmate collective action occurring and different levels of collective action intensity. Data for this study was collected from a representative sample of 45 U.S. male adult prison through mailed survey questionnaires. Analytic methods used were correlation, regression, and factor analysis. The results of the study indicate that custodial, unstable, and nonadaptive prison structures experienced more collective action than did prisons with ameliorative, stable, and restrictively adaptive structures. We also found that differentiated inmate populations, those with many inmate subgroups and organizations, were more likely to experience collective action, and collective actions with greater intensity than other forms of inmate social organization. In addition, the collective action prone prison structures and forms of inmate social organization tended to occur together in a nonramdom fashion suggesting that to some extent the structural characteristics of each take predictable forms as a consequence of their interaction over control within the organization. The theoretical argument made is that inmate collective action may be understood as the structural consequences of means and opportunities between prison authority and inmate populations. We argue that such a perspective provides a more wholistic and integrated framework in accounting for inmate collective action.