Abstract
Dev Maitra presents data collected from serving prisoners, the majority of whom were prison gang members. He found that most gang members he interviewed had ‘re-joined’ or re-formed their street gang upon entering custody. And that many gangs were being effectively ‘imported’ into prisons from the streets in the neighbourhoods serviced by the prisons. This illustrated the interconnectedness between the internal carceral space and its surrounding regions. Through conducting qualitative interviews, the study found these prisoners to have been affected by the conditions of their confinement and that violence, hyper-masculinity and conflict were amplified by imprisonment. He observes that violence learnt on the streets and in street gangs were often ‘imported’ into the penal complex.
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Maitra, D. (2023). Gangs in Prisons. In: Andell, P., Pitts, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Youth Gangs in the UK . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99658-1_20
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99658-1_20
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