The `Society of Captives' in the Era of Hyper-Incarceration

Forty years after the publication of Gresham Sykes's Society of Captives and the second edition of Donald Clemmer's The Prison Community (1958) the incarcerated population in the US, now over 2 million, has grown to an unprecedented size, but paradoxically attention to and concern with the social order of prisons in US academic and political discourse has declined. Just when the experience of imprisonment is becoming a normal pathway for significant portions of the population, the pathways of knowledge that made the experience of incarceration visible are closing. Clemmer, Sykes, and the golden age of US prison sociology they ushered in, helped make prison social order a seemingly knowable object for prison managers and public discourse more generally. The publication 30 years later of John Dilulio's Governing Prisons (1987) can be seen in retrospect as marking a new model of the relationship between expert knowledge, prison management, and the social order of prison. Dilulio's research strategy addressed fundamental weaknesses in prison sociology that had come to be evident in increasingly ungovernable prisons. It also contributed whereby prison social order falls into a dark zone of knowledge and power, integral neither to the production of scientific expertise or governmental programs within the prison. The conjunction of this shift with an enormous expansion in the size of the US prison population is cause for alarm.