‘I have controlled so much’: Discourse of prison violence

Abstract

Prison violence has been considered a threat to not only the safety of inmates, staff, and visitors but the day-to-day functioning of the prisons, and therefore is strictly forbidden and immediately punished. However, some inmates still turn to violence, which raises doubts about whether these inmates are naturally violent and impossible to change. This paper, based on in-depth interviews with 27 inmates who have committed violence and remained in solitary confinement in prisons in Zhejiang Province, China, examines how the inmates make sense of and describe their violent experiences. It is found that these inmates make efforts to construct their victims as deserving, acts as controlled, and punishment as acceptable through employing discursive strategies such as resorting to traditional values, conditional sentences, and repetition. In so doing, these inmates seek to redefine who they are not, how they should not be treated and what prison life should not be like. This paper could open up ways of better understanding why violence could be reduced but impossible to be eliminated completely in the prison context.