Prison Violence

When people think of prison violence, more often than not they think of a prison riot. Yet these events are relatively rare occurrences. More common are the day-to-day confrontations among inmates and between correctional officers and inmates. Many correctional administrators find this latter type of violence difficult to address.

American prisons currently are bulging with inmates, and predictions are that, if the trends that began in the mid-1980s continue, by the mid-twenty-first century over two million individuals will be incarcerated in correctional institutions across the United States. In the mid-1990s, there were more offenders incarcerated per capita in the United States than in any other industrialized nation in the world. Historically, this crowding has caused prisons to be extremely dangerous and often inhumane places. As a response to the looming problem of crowding, federal and state governments have responded with an unprecedented rate of construction of new prison facilities. This effort would seem limited, however, as the anticipated level of the inmate population currently is beyond the scope that the construction of new prisons can address.

This exponential rate of growth is the result of the increased regulations that have been demanded by the American public since the early 1990s. Anticrime legislation (including, but not limited to, the enhancement of drug and weapons laws) has activated a chain of “get tough” policies that have had a drastic impact on the American prison population. Other examples of this publicly held ideology include the “three strikes and you're out” and the “truth in sentencing” acts of the last decade of the twentieth century. These types of laws, while attempting to protect the moral fiber of society, tend to fill jails and prisons with a high number of nonviolent offenders. Perhaps modification of these policies regarding nonviolent offenders represents a place to begin in the search for a relief valve in a system that is waiting to explode. This entry presents an overview of prison violence, which is often the “ticking” of the bomb that is waiting to explode.