Prison violence and the intersectionality of race/ethnicity and gender

Abstract

Objective: to analyze the history, occurrence and development of the problem of prison violence from the viewpoint of the intersectionality of race/ethnicity and gender factors.Methods: dialectical approach to cognition of social phenomena, allowing to analyze them in historical development and functioning in the context of the totality of objective and subjective factors, predetermined the following research methods: formal-logical, comparative-legal, and sociological.Results: Minority men and women are significantly impacted by mass incarceration. Mass incarceration has also resulted in a growth in prison violence, and previous studies in this area have focused on individuals and not their interconnected statuses. This study specifically considers the role of intersectional criminology and the commitment of prison violence in a large western state on female inmates. Intersectional criminology is a theoretical approach that enables a critical look at the impact of individuals' interconnected statuses in relation to crime. The authors do not hypothesize about the reasons for the dependences between race/ethnicity and gender factors and the level of prison violence, but state that minority females commit more violent infractions in prison than White women. Intersectionality allows coming closer to solving the problem of identifying the incarcerated females as members of criminal groups and study the potential impact of this factor on the violence level.Scientific novelty: for the first time, the research proves that intersectionality allows receiving more reliable statistical results when estimating the level of prison violence. It has been proved that minority females commit more violent infractions in prison than White women. Thus, this study builds upon previous arguments that intersectionality should be more widely used in future research, and discusses implications for the findings.Practical significance: the main provisions and conclusions of the article can be used in research and teaching for the consideration of the issues related to prison violence and the intersectionality of race/ethnicity and gender factors.

Keywords

• интерсекциональность
• фактор расы/национальности
• фактор пола
• места лишения свободы
• насилие
• преступность
• статус личности