Racial Tensions in Prisons

Report Outline
Racial Factors in Penitentiary Riots
Trends in the Control of Prisoners
Outlook for Bringing About Reforms
Special Focus

Racial Factors in Penitentiary Riots

Racism as Volatile Ingredient in Prisoner Unrest

The expletives “nigger” and “pig” were heard frequently by reporters at the Attica, N.Y., prison rebellion which ended Sept. 13 with a heavy loss of life. In many prisons, new inmates are inducted quickly either through pressure or preference into racially exclusive groups. Moreover, friction between guards and prisoners is often portrayed as having deep racist undercurrents. Dr. Norval Morris, director of the Center for Studies in Criminal Justice at the University of Chicago, has said: “You have gathered into prison some of the most acute race relations problems and the prison environment intensifies them.”

Whether as a cause of prison upheavals or merely as an attendant disorder, racial tension is a highly visible and ugly aspect of the growing turmoil in the nation's prisons. Penologists talk of an intractable “new breed” of inmate which now makes up a significant portion of the 200,000 prisoners in state and federal penal institutions. Typically, this prisoner sees himself as a political victim of a racist society which deprived him of dignity and drove him to crime in the first place. He sees law enforcement agencies, the courts and particularly the prisons as racist institutions designed to keep him in subjugation.

William Vanden Heuvel, chairman of the New York City Board of Correction, declared recently that the men in charge of prisons in his state were “basically and racially hostile” to the inmates. Kenneth A. Gibson, the Negro mayor of Newark, N.J., said: “When we look at prison conditions and the brutal use of force at Attica, we see the same force of racism which caused and then put down with force civil disturbances in this country's ghettos.”