Prison Space and Social Organization Within It

This chapter starts the result section by exploring how the social order of the prisoner community manifests in the prison space. Prisoners’ spatial organization indicates ethnic categories that are collectively understood and consequential in the studied environment. Places like common dining halls and situations that reflect prisoners’ social status provide forums for establishing ethnic categories. Respectively, places that contain physical movement and common activities tend to fade the segregating effect of ethnic and racial categories. I argue that the spatial segregation among prisoners has strong symbolical meaning, but in addition, it has concrete consequences on prisoners’ equality during their incarceration. The principle of an equal prison system bends under the weight of the prison community. This chapter describes the spatial scenery for the interaction that I illustrate more in the following chapters.