Hierarchical Social Order Occupying Meanings of Ethnicity

This chapter elaborates the questions of ethnic categories, prisoner culture, and hierarchy. First, this chapter describes the main factors influencing prisoners’ ranking in the community and studies how masculinity and ethnicity intertwine in the hierarchy. I then explain how ethnic stereotypes from free society merged with prisoner culture, producing prison-specific ethnic stereotypes. These contextual stereotypes were used to justify ethnic hierarchy. Furthermore, I divide factors that influenced prisoners’ positions in the hierarchy into ‘definite characteristics’ that determined one’s position in the hierarchy and ‘flexible characteristics’ that were negotiable. I show how this division is useful in analysing prisoner hierarchy and its change. The last part of the chapter compares the hierarchies in two studied prisons and suggests reasons for the differences.