Institutionalizing Violence - the case of prison gangs

Since I'm doing my research one section at a time, the latter parts of my thesis are still subject to change. Right now, this is what I'm thinking.

I was originally going to do violence in general. That seemed too ambitious for such a short amount of time for research and, I'm still young, I can go there later. So, I decided to focus on prison violence. I wanted to look at the general forms of physical violence that have become "standards" in prison - rape and sexual abuse, officer beatings (both directions), etc. I thought I could take these from a general perspective and talk about how they became institutionalized. It's not that I thought this project impossible so much as disingenuous. Each of these has very different histories, serve different functions, and operate on different mechanisms. I still believe I can abstract enough away to encompass them into a single schema; however, this wouldn't really demonstrate the proper role of my theory of institutions. I think, if my theory is workable, that it's main role in explanation would not be for these general practices, but very specific practices with their own narratives. It's really a question of specificity - at what level of focus will my theory really be useful in effecting change. I don't believe that talking about general forms of prison violence will contribute much substantive help to resolving each of them (where they should be resolved).

What I want to do is to look at a more pressing and specific institution of violence in prisons - gang violence. Gang violence has become increasingly predominant in prisons over the past twenty-odd years as gang social structure was transplanted into prisons and gangs themselves became more violent. Applying my theory to this specific problem should produce a very grounded and detailed analysis of gangs and gang violence from which we can hopefully predict the emergence and development of gangs and find ways to prevent and deinstitutionalize their escalation to violence. This is one of the major thrusts that's so far sold me on this approach. I can give a very detailed analysis because I'm looking at something relatively specific and I believe I'll be able to offer germane suggestions for preventing and stopping this violence.

I lose the general analysis and the ability to transpose the analysis to other types of institutionalized violence; however, that's what theory is for. The theory itself should be clear enough that it can be taken from one instance of institutional behavior to the next. I shouldn't need to apply it to a general type of phenomenon to show that it can be applied to a range of cases. The application component, gang violence in this case, should merely show how the theory works empirically.

If I'm right in seeing the situation this way, then I've lost nothing in sharpening my focus.

The everyday

It seems I failed to make a post last week. It's easy to lose track of time when you spend so much of it looking at your watch. Studying for and taking the GRE didn't help either. Anyway...

Day to day, I'm setting a goal: one article or chapter a day minimum (for both the philosophy and IDS versions when the research starts to split). I like to break my research down into chunks and take each one as they come in paper. That's what my timeline says anyway. I'll be finishing my research as I finish the conclusion for the rough draft...then start over. It seems to be working so far though. Tittles!

What Institutions Are

An ambitious title I know...and a bit of a lie. Some of you have wondered what I consider an institution. This post is for you.

It's been the most frustrating thing so far to find that what exactly an institution is by definition is not agreed on. Despite the fact that there are roughly 6 subfields studying institutions, none of them have really come to a general consensus about what institutions really are. It seems that most are content taking the normative use of the term - i.e. whatever I say it is. My big project right now is trying to pick out the agreements and disagreements among the various conceptions of institutions. Currently, there are two essential debates: ontology and extension.

The ontological debate centers on the question of how institutions exist. The best conception I've heard so far is that it is a property. A certain practice, rule, norm, or convention is more or less institutionalized - by virtue of have certain properties such as being taken-for-granted, done with intervention, etc. Some say that institutions are formal organizations. Even marriage can be taken to be formally organized in the sense that there are explicit rules, expectations, structures, etc. which structure and support the actual practice of marriage. Still others say that institutions are social domains or social controls - circumscribed cultural fields wherein what is expected and occurs is determined by behavior, ideas, rituals, myths, etc which enforce or support normativity. In this case, institutions are fields. In the previous case, they are organizations. In the first, they things having a certain property. There are about 4 other theories as well.

The extension debate asks what types of things does the word institutions cover. What types of things can we point to and knowingly say "that's an institution." The weirdest one I've found so far is that institutions are "congealed tastes" (from an economist), whatever people have developed a liking for is an institution. Other extension-claims include institutions as regularities in repetitive interactions, government structures, and norms/procedures/rules/conventions embedded in social structure.

Both of these debates really depend on one another. What types of things we want to call institutions depends on what kind of existence these things must have (formally organized, possessing some property, etc.) and vice versa. I take the side of the property argument, but I'm developing my own stance on extension. I intend to argue that institutions are a collection of things with the institutional property, arranged in a way to co-reproduce their defining elements. Institutions are composed of institutionalized structures, discourses, agents, and events which help bring one another into reality.

I'll take domestic (as opposed to say rape in the context of war) rape as an institution to exemplify my theory. The institutionalized structure includes the rapist/victim role, physical and psychological power inequalities, and sequestered (hidden) setting. The institutionalized discourse includes the ideas that women are vulnerable, sexual objects, and a low-level threat ; men are sexually uncontrollable, dominant, and forceful; etc. Institutional agents are particularly those men trained in the role of rapist - to treat women as objects, to be forceful/dominant/uncontrolled, and to ignore or be oblivious to the gravity of rape. The institutional woman is one who is trained as a women to be feminine (sexual), currently, aware of their vulnerability and potentially proactive about it. The institutional event is really a sequence of events in this case which include something like confrontation, play, threat, conflict, genital accessing, and rape. All of these components are, arguably, taken-for-granted parts of domestic rape which require one another to bring about what we consider domestic rape.

Timeline

Sept 27: Finish the first version of “Why an Institutional Approach” section

October 10^th-16: Develop the idea of what exactly institutions are. Put the presentation together

October 18th-31: Violence in Prisons, applying institutional theory to violence in prison.

October 31: First Full Draft Complete

November 1-7: Put it down for one week

November8-10: Re-visioning, taking a critical look at the model and theory of
institutions.

November 10-30: Revise and rewrite

December 1: Final Draft.

New Thesis

As you may notice, my proposal below seems vastly different from what I've been saying I'm going to do for my thesis. And, you're right, I did just change my topic.

This was the original thrust of my philosophy thesis which I've been researching since the summer. I decided to split that topic into two papers so that I could focus on arguing for the benefits of an institutional approach to several persistent problems in philosophy for that thesis. I am so interested in this topic, that I didn't want to just drop my attempt to describe institutions of violence. So, that's what I'll be doing here. I am much further along in the research and more excited about the work, so I think this change is for the best.

I'll be publishing my time line shortly.

Proposal sans timeline

Institutionalizing Violence

This research will look to understand institutional forms of violence – how they are formed and develop. The first part of the research will be aimed at describing of the basic components of the coherent social context, derived from sociological theory, and how institutions are embedded in these contexts. I will argue that the coherent social context is made up of a social structure or field, agents, discourse, events, and an environment. Institutions are regularly reproduced structural relations, explicit in discourse, which agents understand and are able to perform to the point of taking the situation for granted and expect a certain series or sets of events to occur. The second part will be aimed at creating a uniform definition and typology of violence from the currently disjointed understanding of violence. I will limit violence to physical harm and categorize the types of violence according to the group affiliations and intimacy-level between those involved. The final part will attempt to explain how the types of violence become regularized in the social context institutionally and how these institutions of violence change over time. I will argue that institutionalized violence is an event brought about by escalating tensions between in- and out-group agents which reoccur and become taken-for-granted via the institutionalized structures, discourses, and roles embedded in social structure, individual habitus, and common knowledge. These violent events develop as a number of factors change between violent agents including spatial distance, functional distance, and power inequality.

AREAS OF RESEARCH:

Institutional Theory: Economic institutionalism, historical institutionalism, sociological institutionalism

Fligstein, Neil. “Organizations: Theoretical Debates and the Scope of Organizational

Theory.” http://sociology.berkeley.edu/faculty/fligstein/fligstein_pdf/ inter.handbook.paper.pdf. Accessed June 21, 2007.

---. “Social Skill and the Theory of Fields” In Sociological Theory 19 no. 2 (2001): 105-

125.

Hall, Peter A. and Rosemary C. R. Taylor. “Political Science and the Three New

Institutionalisms.” Political Studies 44 (1996): 936-957.

Powell, Walter W. and Paul J. DiMaggio, editors. The New Institutionalism in

Organizational Analysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Sjöstrand, Sven-Erik, editor. Institutional Change: Theory and Empirical Findings.

Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1993.

Social Context: Functionalist approaches, phenomenology, Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice, Goffman’s Dramaturgy

Berger, Peter L. and Thomas Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality. New York:

Doubleday, 1967.

Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans.

Richard Nice. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1984.

---. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. New York:

Cambridge University Press, 1977;

Goffman, Erving. Frame Analysis. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974.

Luhmann, Niklas. Social Systems. Trans. John Bednarz Jr. with Dirk Baecker. Stanford,

CA: Stanford University Press, 1995.

Categorizations of Violence: Philosophical, sociological, anthropological, political science

Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans.

Richard Nice. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1984.

---. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. New York:

Cambridge University Press, 1977;

Cudd, Anne. Analyzing Oppression. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2006.

Feierabend, Ivo K., Rosalind L. Feierabend and Ted Robert Gurr, editors. Anger,

Violence, and Politics: Theories and Research. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall, 1972.

Nordstrom, Carolyn and JoAnn Martin, editors. The Paths to Domination, Resistance,

and Terror. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

Signorielli, Nancy, editor. Violence in the Media: A Reference Handbook. Santa Barbara,

Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 2005.

Key Resources for Instances of Violence: Case studies and histories of violence

Bart, Pauline B. and Eileen Geil Moran, editors. Violence Against Women: The Bloody

Footprints. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1993.

Björgo, Tore and Rob Witte, editors. Racist Violence in Europe. New York, N.Y.: St.

Martin's Press, 1993.

Gurr, Ted, editor. Peoples versus States: Minorities at Risk in the New Century.

Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2000.

Heitmeyer, Wilhelm and John Hagan, editors. International Handbook of Violence

Research. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003

Institutionalizing Violence Resources: Social psychology, post-structuralism, sociology, political science, peace studies, anthropology.

Brewer, Marilynn B. and Miles Hewstone, editors. Social Cognition. Malden, MA:

Blackwell Publishing, 2004.

Brubaker, Rogers and David D. Laitin, “Ethnic and Nationalist Violence” The Annual

Review of Sociology 24 (1998): 423-452.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan.

New York: Vintage Books, 1977.

----. The History of Sexuality. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.\

Hinton, Alexander Laban, editor Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide.

Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002.

Mann, Michael. The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing. New York:

Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Staub, Ervin “Genocide and Mass Killing: Origins, Prevention, Healing and

Reconciliation” Political Psychology 21 no. 2. (2000): pp. 367-382.

RAP Session

Well, my RAP session really wasn't what I expected. Instead of coming in with books, articles, and other texts; the librarian showed me how to use the library's resources - WorldCat, EconLit, ILliad, etc. I was disappointed. However, I do have a much better grasp of the range and proper use of these resources. It turns out that WorldCat is best used to find books and check them out through ILliad (AKA interlibrary loan). So, I set up an account and I've already requested a book and an article through ILiad. If any of you have questions about interlibrary loan, I can probably answer them now . Also, he gave me an idea of the breadth of databases and told me which one's one would be best for my area. There were some that I didn't really think about or had never used, so that was useful.

He did say that I could come back and he'd help me more if I still needed help. He mentioned other resources (in a shadowy way) that he could access to help me. I think that if I still needed help, he could help me get actual texts.