Discuss the issues of race and ethnicity in prisons.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answers will vary. Race plays a major role in prison life, and prison violence is often an outlet for racial tension. As prison populations have changed over the past decades, with African Americans and Latinos becoming the majority in many penal institutions, issues of race and ethnicity have become increasingly important to prison administrators and researchers. As early as the 1950s, researchers were noticing different group structures in inmate life. At that time, for example, prisoners at California's Soledad Prison informally segregated themselves according to geography as well as race: Tejanos (Mexicans raised in Texas), Chicanos, blacks from California, blacks from the South and Southwest, and the majority whites all formed separate social worlds. Leo Carroll, professor of sociology at the University of Rhode Island, has written extensively about how today's prisoners are divided into hostile groups, with race determining nearly every aspect of an inmate's life, including friends, job assignments, and cell location. In many instances, racial and ethnic identification is the primary focus of the prison gang-a clique of inmates who join together in an organizational structure to engage in illegal activity. Gang affiliation is often the cause of inmate-on-inmate violence. For decades, the California prison system has been plagued by feuds involving various gangs such as the Mexican Mafia, composed of U.S.-born inmates of Mexican descent, and their enemies, a spin-off organization called La Nuestra Familia.