Irwin, John (1929–)

Education

After his release, Irwin began his college studies at San Francisco State College (now University). He soon transferred to University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), to finish his undergraduate degree, before commencing graduate work in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, in the spring of 1963. Here he developed his longstanding association with Herbert Blumer, Erving Goffman, and David Matza.

After Berkeley, Irwin returned to San Francisco State, this time as a professor, where he remained for the next 27 years. Before his retirement in 1994, Irwin developed a research program that critiqued the prison system from a perspective of justice and fairness. Works produced during his teaching career include Scenes (1977), Prisons in Turmoil (1980), and The Jail (1985) as well as numerous articles and presentations.

Prison Culture

While a student at UCLA, Irwin enrolled in a graduate seminar on the sociology of prisons taught by Donald Cressey. During this class, Irwin took issue with the view that prison culture was a functional response to the pains or deprivations of imprisonment. Drawing from his own experience in prison, he suggested that other factors—specifically, preprison identity—created prison culture. Cressey challenged Irwin to develop a statement of his view and, together, they published the primary statement of the importation theory of prison culture in the seminal article “Thieves, Convicts and the Inmate Culture” (1962).

At Berkeley, Irwin completed his dissertation, subsequently published in 1970 as The Felon. This work remains a landmark in the study of prison culture and outlines the basic tenets of prison adaptation from a career perspective. In it, Irwin expands his earlier argument that forms of prison adaptation are closely tied to preprison orientations. He describes various ways prisoners adapt to incarceration depending on their preprison identities and self-definitions. These modes include “doing time” (closely associated with the thief identity); jailing (associated with the state-raised youths and those without any connection to conventional society); and gleaning (chosen by those who attempt to improve their life chances by developing new intellectual, vocational, or social skills while incarcerated). Irwin also describes the emerging importance of race and ethnicity in the convict world and fore-shadows his later articulation of this phenomenon in Prisons in Turmoil (1980).

In Prisons in Turmoil (1980), Irwin continues his investigation of the prison social order. Beginning with sociological description of “The Big House: The Great American Prison,” he reviews the history of American prisons and the evolution of prison [Page 486]social order through 1980. In this book, Irwin also describes the changing nature of male prisoner culture and the specific effects of tips and racial and ethnic membership on prison life.

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