Ethnic Groups and Coping Practices

The last chapter on results continues exploring the experiences and accounts of ethnic minorities by taking ethnic groups into focus. Until now, the previous chapters have pointed out how ethnic categories are formed in the prison space and how these categories are given contextual ethnic stereotypes and thus kept in their places in the prisoner hierarchy. Hence, what remains unstudied until the last chapter is what kind of groups are formed under the found ethnic categories. This chapter is dedicated to the approach of ethnic minorities and the individual and collective ways they cope in the prison’s social world. I argue that the collective coping practices can be understood as separate prisoner cultures and that their development highlights both importation and indigenous models of prisoner culture. I state that these distinct prisoner cultures are reactions to the challenges encountered within the prisoner community rather than institutional discrimination. Moreover, I argue that although it is compelling to provide functionalist explanations for prisoner cultures, their analysis should consider, as observed also in Chapter 4 , how human behaviour is always both creative and fallible and how the outcomes of social situations cannot be understood with ‘mind-first explanations’.