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36 Fed. Probation 3 (1972)
Collective Behavior at Attica

handle is hein.journals/fedpro36 and id is 173 raw text is: Collective Behavior at Attica' BY ROBERT MARTINSON, PH.D. Associate Professor and Chairman, Department of Sociology, The City College of the City University of New York A N ACCURATE rendering of changes in the profiles of social disturbance in the prison is made difficult when the standard abstrac- tions of collective behavior are mixed with the dominant motif of the total institution. Long before the events at Attica, I had begun to ques- tion versions of inmate behavior tied to the custody-treatment dimension or to Sykes and Messinger's utilitarian notion of the pains of imprisonment, or indeed to any concept of the prison which views it as primarily an autonomous community.' Unfortunately, penological history provides al- most no help. Except for histories of prison re- form movements, there is such a poverty of scholarship that the prison appears as a history- less administrative unit, broken from time to time by riot. History is most at home when it traces processes of social conflict which develop, in which the incipient becomes the full-blown. So the his- torian has left this seemingly dreary landscape to the tender mercies of the sociologist. Thus we are burdened with timeless abstractions about the inmate subculture, the inmate code, and so forth. Types of Prison Disturbance The poverty of penological history is an illusion. There are changes over time in the profile of prison disturbance. To advance the discussion, I will suggest two main historical types and argue that Attica exemplifies a third. Let us call these types: (1) the mass escape; (2) the prison riot; and (3) the expressive mutiny. (1) Mass escape as a mode of prisoner behavior was associated with a prebureaucratic society and in America with the frontier. To escape from a dungeon is a dangerous enterprise. Mass escape required shared ingenuity and motivation, some common hope of taking up a new life, concealing one's past, even leaving one's home territory. In *This article is a slightly edited version of a paper presented to the Eastern Sociological Association meetings, Boston, April 22, 1972. 1 Robert Martinson, Solidarity Under Close Confinement: A Study of the Freedom Riders in Parchman Penitentiary, Psychiatry, May 1967: and, Treatment Ideology and Correctional Bureaucracy: A Study of Organizational Change, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of California (Berkeley), 1968. this early epoch, the prison was unashamedly brutal and was designed for incapacitation and severe punishment. Prison revolt was commonly put down with deadly fury by officials and guards backed up by deputized locals since every dis- turbance implied the real probability of a mass breakout followed by spoilation of areas adjacent to the prison. (2) Prison riot-which dominated the 19th and early 20th centuries-involved a struggle to im- prove conditions within the prison rather than an attempt to escape from it. Within the armed perimeter, power struggles occurred over the mea- ger privileges prison had to offer. Such riots were often nicely timed to provoke the intervention of the prison reform movement and sometimes led to chlnges in paroling practices, better food, less punishment for breaking prison rules or fewer rules. In the 20th century riot increasingly tended to run in cycles. The riot cycle implied swift com- munication and contagion reflecting the creation of state systems of corrections, standard penologi- cal practices, and a nationwide convict subculture. The most recent cycle of riots (1952-1953) be- gan in the disciplinary cellblock of the world's largest prison in Jackson, Michigan, and spread to dozens of prisons in the United States and abroad. One hypothesis maintained that these riots were sparked by inner-prison struggles for control between the custodial and treatment points of view among the staff. These struggles threatened to change the inmate status quo and led to a preventive counterrevolution led by a corrupt inmate priesthood which preached the inmate code as a means of retaining privileges. (3) Unlike the riot, the expressive mutiny is not primarily focussed on winning power, main- taining privileges or improving conditions within the prison. It aims to communicate the inmate's plight to the public so far as he understands it. It is a new form of disturbance not merely a temporary reflection of new left influence among a group of politicized black convicts. The prison is used as an arena in which to stage dramatic

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