Prison Violence

When we do research on daily prison life, we come across two typical but less than ideal situations: either social imaginaries cloud our judgment or information provided by the prisons themselves hide certain weak or bad aspects that they do not want to make public. We can also find information on TV, but most of the time it either exaggerates or minimizes the facts. In order to obtain more reliable information, we have to have access to people who are working or have worked in this institution, and such will be the sources of this essay. We will be describing and giving examples of prison violence according to three types of violence: sexual, physical and psychological violence.

First of all, one of the types of prison violence - which is currently increasing around the world - is sexual. This type of violence can either be performed by force or paying. The difference between them lies in the fact that the former is performed by hitting, beating, punching, etc the victim -we will stress the difference in treatment that homosexuals and heterosexuals receive- whereas the later by giving the victim some money or other benefits.

As for sexual violence by force there are slight dissimilarities between the violence experimented by homosexual and heterosexual prisoners. It is very common for a gay person that is imprisoned for the first time to be taken by another prisoner as the stable couple. Consequently, the newcomer to the prison has to be -in the strict sense of the word- the other prisoner's servant not to be "everybody meat". He or she has to clean, ironing the clothes, etc. Another typical case is the one where homosexuals are forced to have sex or provide sexual favors to other prisoners under threat of hurting them otherw...

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...ity and as such it is necessary to establish certain categories through which we can understand it better and deeper. This essay was developed taking into account three broad spheres of life through which we analyzed the daily prison's life: sexual, physical and psychological violence. As a complex topic, these categories are not static; they are related to each other and are the causes and consequences of themselves. This essay was done with information provided by people who is working or have worked in the institution and that have made an effort to explain the situation as objectively as they could through their own experience without exaggerating or minimizing the facts. Unluckily, as it was said at the beginning of this essay, prisons are institutions who do not want to show their weaknesses or problems so the names of the interviewees will not be mentioned.