Traditions of groups of people incarcerated for crimes. The folklore of prisons, like that
of most residential communities determined by both setting and occupation (such as
hospitals for the chronically ill, military bases, and cloistered religious institutions), is
complex and multifaceted. We should probably speak of prison folklores rather than
prison folklore.
All prisoners and staff bring to the prison community folklore from their noncriminal
and noninstitutional lives: stories, toasts, foodways, medicine, speech, religious practices,
and so forth. Some of this finds immediate and direct use and applicability within the
prison situation; some may be adapted to fit; and some is of little or no use and appears
only occasionally, if at all. Prisoners may, for example, maintain ethnic food preferences
while in prison, but most will have far less opportunity to indulge those preferences than
they did in the free world. On the other hand, nothing impedes maintenance and
articulation of folk superstition and belief: Prison walls and fences do not influence the
efficacy of charms or the accuracy of omens.
Some free-world genres exist longer or more vigorously in prison than in the free
world. Because of brutality and maintenance of a 19th-century plantation system, Black
convict worksongs survived in Southern prison farms well into the 1960s, long after they
had disappeared outside. Because of the great amount of enforced free time in prisons
and jails, Black toasts likewise survived behind the walls when they were all but extinct
beyond them.
All prisoners have had experiences with police, courts, and jails (jails are city and
county facilities where people serve short sentences, usually for misdemeanors, and await
felony trials; prisons are where people serve state and federal felony sentences). Many
prisoners have had extensive experience in criminal activity, other prisons, and in the
parole system. Technical discussions of, and personal narratives about, these experiences
are common in prisoner discourse.
Folklore indigenous to the prison itself—folkways and narratives told and learned
within the institution—may exist in both staff and prisoner cultures, but most is specific
to one or the other, and little of either travels to the free world. Both guards and prisoners,
for example, may tell stories about notable prison characters or events, but neither
prisoners nor guards are likely to tell the other stories in which the others’ foolishness or
cupidity is the point of the humor. Likewise, guards don’t initiate prisoners in traditional
methods of crowd control, and prisoners don’t initiate guards in traditional methods of
manufacturing and hiding bootleg alcohol.
Prisoners’ language is rich in slang from the streets, from the world of crime, and from
the prison community. All but the first-timers know most of the argot terms, but not all
prisoners use them, and not all prisoners who use them use them all of the time. A
Midwestern inmate who committed more than 150 armed robberies said, “I don’t use
slang. You want people to think I’m a crook?” Some argot terms carry multiple
meanings; which meaning applies at any moment can only be inferred from the context.
The word “joint,” for example, can mean marijuana cigarette, penis, paraphernalia for
injecting heroin, or the prison itself. To officials, “jacket” means a prisoner’s official
records; to prisoners, it usually means a person’s reputation. If the warden says, “Smith
has a fat jack-et,” he is saying that Smith’s file is thick, hence he has been arrested many
times, in prison many times, or has been in the warden’s prison for a very long time. If a
prisoner says, “Smith’s got a snitch jacket on him,” he is saying that Smith is known as
an informer. “Jacket” is also an article of clothing worn on cool days, just like outside.
Slang is often particular to a prison system or an area, and to a specific point in time.
Texas prisoners forced to do agricultural work had terms like “sideline” (working up one
side of a row of crops), “flatweed” (working with a hoe), “catch up tight” (work closely
together), and “don’t leave a comeback” (get everything out of a row in one pass so that it
is not necessary to come through a second time). Prisoners are aware of their argot and of
its restricted venue, as is indicated by this joke from Texas: A man got out of prison and
went to the barbershop for his first free-world haircut. Well, when he sat down in the
barber’s chair, the barber, after looking this fellow’s head over, asked him if he had been
in prison. This fellow said “No, I haven’t. Why do you ask that?” The barber said, “No
reason in particular. Just wondered.” The barber then asked this fellow how he wanted his
hair cut. The fellow said, “Sideline the sides, flatweed the top, catch up tight, and don’t
leave a comeback.”
Much folklore specific to prison has to do with ways of doing things or material for
doing or making things provided for by other means in the community outside prison,
which is to say, much prison folklore is adaptive and transient, done or used only when
the free-world alternatives are not available. At one time, for example, Indiana inmates
were permitted to purchase jars of instant coffee from the commissary but not allowed to
own devices with which to heat the water. Tap water was tepid at best, so they fashioned
a device they called a hotstick out of a foot or two of lamp wire with a male plug at one
end and a short stripped loop of wire at the other. It would boil a cup-water in a few
seconds, but there was a problem: The hotstick produced so much heat it would boil the
water completely away in a few minutes, so if one were left untended it would blow the
cellblock’s fuses or start a fire. When commercial water heaters were made available in
the prison commissary, the hotsticks disappeared. Other adaptations are more complex.
Staff can get alcoholic beverages in liquor stores; the only aspect of alcohol manufacture
in staff folklore has to do with stories about inmates making it, getting caught having it,
or behaving egregiously while intoxicated with it. Prisoners cannot get alcohol in liquor
stores; their folklore consists not only of stories, but techniques: obtaining the makings
(yeast, fruit), finding places for safe fermentation (it’s not just a matter of finding unused
tubs, toilet bowls, or rubber boots for fermenting, but having those operations take place
where guards won’t detect the pungent odor), and finding places to hide the product and
drink it in safety.
Many prisoners have long experience with possessing and sometimes using weapons;
being in prison changes the kinds of weapons used, but not the perceived need for them.
Commercial knives are rarely found in prison, but substitutes can be made from many
easily found objects. A 6-inch piece of stiff wire can pierce an eye or a throat. Knives are
fashioned differently depending on the intended use. An all-purpose knife can be made
from a hammered and filed spoon. Knives for slashing can be made in metal shops by
shearing sheet steel at a diagonal; in prisons where license plates are made, this is particularly easy. A double-edged razor blade with one edge melted into a toothbrush
handle is good for slashing a face or cutting a throat. Knives for inflicting puncture
wounds can be made from pitchfork tines or rattail files. Knives are shaped and sized
differently if they are to be hidden in jacket linings, taped to a leg, carried in a pocket or
up a sleeve.
There may be different ethnic and regional patterns in use of knives. ATexas warden
said: “In my experience, Black convicts want knives that slash; the Latin convicts knives
that puncture; and Whites go either way, depending where they grew up. The Blacks
want to hurt or scare somebody so they use slashers; the Latins, they aren’t interested in
scaring. When they use a knife they want to kill you so they go after these long thin
things that get between the ribs.” A man who had done a good deal of felony time in New
York prisons read that statement and said: “When that warden says ‘Latins’ he means
Mexican Americans. Up here in the East, the Latins are Puerto Ricans and they’re not
stabbers, they’re slashers. Blacks are the stabbers. And Whites—well, up here, Whites
aren’t into knives.”
Prison folklore is rich in stories about local characters, escapes, stupid guards and
clever convicts, and how it was in the old days. These tales are rarely migratory. Inmates
in Texas told of “Bullin Jack O’Diamonds,” the meanest guard on Central Farm, a man
so mean he had to be chained down to die. “If he catch you,” one inmate said, “a dark
cloud would go over.” One story has him telling Satan, “Stand aside, I’m gonna rule old
Hell myselfl” Massachusetts inmates told of a stupid deputy warden nicknamed
“Alligator” who “looked like a retired hit man.” He decided inmates were abusing the
pharmacy so he stopped all medication, no matter what the illness. One inmate had been
receiving Doriden, a narcotic. He said he had to have his medication. The deputy refused.
“But I’Ve been getting heart palpitations,” the inmate said. “Keep on taking those,”
Alligator said, “they’re better for you than Doridens, believe me.”
As in the free world, a good deal of prison folklore has to do with sexual roles and
activities. Staffcan leave the prison after their shift and engage in ordinary sexual
activities. Prisoners are limited in partners, in opportunity, and they often suffer
institutional punishments (isolation, loss of privileges, loss of good time) when officials
catch them doing it. Prison sex parodies sex in the free world. In men’s prisons, there are
three primary roles, often designated by the argot terms “punks,” “queens,” and “studs.”
Studs are men who occupy the inserter role; punks and queens are insertees, but punks
occupy that role only in prison while queens occupy that role wherever they are. Queens
generally have much higher social status in the prison community than punks because
punks are seen as accepting their sexual roles out of weakness while queens are “man
enough to admit what they are.” Sex in women’s prison seems primarily grounded in
continuing relation ships; sex in men’s prisons seems primarily focused on genital acts.
There are many jokes and anecdotes in prisons about prison sex roles, few of which
travel outside. There is no point telling jokes about punks and queens and studs to people
with no prison experience because those people don’t know the difference between a
punk and a queen, and by the time it is explained to them the momentum of the joke is
gone. These are two typical sex-role jokes:
Jesse James was robbin’ a passenger train. Jesse James taken up all the
money. He say, “I’m gonna rob this train. I’m gonna fuck all the men.”
This lady got up, said, “Mister Jesse James: you mean all the women.”
And there’s this punk on there, and he got up and said, “Hey, lady, who
robbin’ this train, you or Mister Jesse James?” There was another captain,
over on the Central [prison farm], every time you asked for a lay-in [time
off because of sickness], you know, say ‘My head hurts,” he said, “I do,
too. Mine, too; me, too,” you know. “I got a…my arm hurts, my leg hurts,
my stomach hurts, I got a stomach ache,” and he’ll say, “Me, too.” So one
day a guy says, “I’m gonna get me a lay-in.” So he said, “Captain, I want
to lay-in.” “What’s wrong with you?” He said, “I got the claps in the ass.”
He start to say—he said, “Lay in!”
Some Black prisoners in all of the Southern agricultural prison systems sang worksongs
during the years the prisons were segregated and the work routines brutal. Worksongs
were used to cut and chop trees, work fields, and pick cotton. Some songs were like
blues—individual and private. Others were communal. White and Latin inmates did not
sing these songs, nor did they have any body of metrically functional songs of their own
used in similar fashion. By mid-20th century, the only place in North America the songs
could be found were Southern plantation-type prison farms. The songs and the style of
utilizing them were the property of Black inmates exclusively, and they were in a clear
tradition going back beyond the importation of the first slaves to the Virginia Colony in
1631. Some of those songs could be found in prisons across the Deep South; others were
found only in one prison or one prison system. The Texas convict songs “Midnight
Special,” about a train near Darrington prison farm, and “Grizzly Bear,” reportedly about
a warden, didn’t travel to prisons in Louisiana or Mississippi. Indeed, none of the
agricultural folklore common in Southern prisons traveled to prisons in the industrial
North and Far West, where that kind of work and those work conditions did not exist.
As in any large institution, members of the prison community form subcommunities
that provide their primary social identification. In states with extensive free-world gang
culture, such as Texas and California, gangs often become the basis for subcommunities
within the prison community. Gang folkways—including rivalries—are maintained
within the institution. Sometimes the subcommunities are based on origin. New York
prisons, for example, have “courts,” areas in the yard maintained by people from a certain
neighborhood or part of the state. Men will hang around the court, cook food, tell stories,
share resources, and protect one another from men in other courts. One man who had
lived much of his life in Manhattan and then in Buffalo was a member of two courts until
a group from one of the courts said to him, “You got to choose. You’re either upstate or
downstate. You can’t be both.”
Brucejackson
References
Burke, Carole. 1992. Vision Narratives of Women in Prison. Knoxville: University of Tennessee
Press.
Jackson, Bruce. 1965. Prison Folklore. Journal of American Folklore 78:317-325.
——. 1972a. In the Life: Versions of the Criminal Experience. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and
Winston.
——. 1972b. Wake up Dead Man: Afro-American Worksongs from Texas Prisons. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press.