Inmate

Inmate culture

The founding of ethnographic prison sociology as a discipline, from which most of the meaningful knowledge of prison life and culture stems, is commonly credited to the publication of two key texts: Donald Clemmer's The Prison Community, which was first published in 1940 and republished in 1958; and Gresham Sykes classic study The Society of Captives, which was also published in 1958. Clemmer's text, based on his study of 2,400 convicts over three years at the Menard Correctional Center where he worked as a clinical sociologist, propagated the notion of the existence of a distinct inmate culture and society with values and norms antithetical to both the prison authority and the wider society.