THE PRISONER’S CODE AS AN EXCHANGE CAPITAL IN THE FUNSTIONING OF THE CLOSE-TYPE CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTE IN ZENICA, BIH

Abstract

An important functioning aspect of the prison community is its social climate, composed by the interdependencies of the subdimensions such as: deprivation, the prison code (informal aspect of the prison), repression and disorganization (the formal aspect of imprisonment) that defines the direction and movement of this community through a complex environment in an effort to explain or use that for its own purpose. The social climate was measured by a custom inventory of attitudes originally created by R.H. Moos in a closed-type prison in Zenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina. In this paper, we focus on a prison code based on values that the prisoners have in the time-space of the prison. The prison code is a theoretical construct that has its reality in prison experience. In this work, we present the correlation and multiple values of the prison code in relation to other subdimensions of the social climate from 1991, 1993, 1994, 1997 and 2016. In all samples more than 80% of prisoners were included, except for 2016 were approximately 20% of prisoners were included in the sample. All the individual and multiple correlations of the prison code with other subdimensions are statistically significant (I will specifically present them during the presentation) and it seems that has a significant impact on a scenario that takes place in prison; ranging from a riot, to its normal day-to-day functioning.

Keywords

• prison community
• social climate of prison
• informal community
• multiple correlations of the prison code
• exchange theory