Duty Among the Detained: Exploring Prisoners’ Duties to Others Inside and Outside of Prison During Incarceration

The carceral environment often promotes isolation and manipulation, however accounts exist of residents finding needed support in others. From prison gangs to the pseudo-families of women’s prisons, research shows that residents find belonging and support within prison and may go to great length for others. Currently though, research on duty to others among this population is absent. To fill in this gap, I am conducting a qualitative mail correspondence study which asks residents about their sense of duty to others within and outside of prison, and how they anticipate those views will be maintained post-release. I anticipate that participants in this study will be able to identify others in the prison environment who they have looked out for during their sentence and be able to speak on its positive impact on themselves. It is my hope that this study will help guide future research on prosocial bonds within prison and better inform practitioners and policy makers in the field of corrections.

Hello everyone! My name is Levi Weaver, and I am a graduating Senior within George Mason’s CLS department. Over the course of this semester, I have been working on my OSCAR funded research project, which is titled Duty Among the Detained: Exploring Prisoners’Duties to Others Inside and Outside of Prison During Incarceration. This study looks at the experiences of carceral residents within the state of Pennsylvania’s prisons and more specifically, how they navigate feelings of duty or responsibility to others, both in their relationships within the prison environment and beyond it.
The prison environment is known to be an extremely unwelcoming place, a place where safety is not assured and uncertainty grows, which can leave residents feeling detached and apathetic. Being tough, insensitive, and manipulating others is also generally encouraged by the unwritten inmate code. Despite the ways these conditions work to pit residents against one another, there exist accounts of residents lending aid to others in desperate need. This support can come from many sources within prison, but prison gangs and pseudo-families, which are social structures unique to women’s prisons, are known to provide emotional support, security, and loyalty to their members. Currently though, there is little research that examines duty to others within prison.
This project fits within Dr. Danielle Rudes and Taylor Hartwell’s ongoing research projects, titled: Together Alone: Organizational Change and Perceptions of Punishment, Risk and Health for Those Living and Working in Solitary Confinement and Changing the Hole Mind: Living & Working in Solitary Confinement During Reform, which are in their third year of data collection. These projects are working to understand what it is like to live and work in prison during reform, both as residents and staff within the Pennsylvania prison system.
My specific project intends to explore how duty to others is felt among residents inside prison, and how this compares with their sense of duty to others outside of prison. In order to gather this data from residents, I asked two questions. The first is: “To whom (cellie, residents, staff, family, or society in general) and to what extent do you feel a sense of duty to others? Do you anticipate maintaining the same sense of duty/responsibility to others post-release?” and the second is: “Do you feel a responsibility to look out for/help certain others in prison? Who specifically do you look out for/help in this prison? When do you prioritize your own needs/desires?”
Past years of data collection have involved loosely structured in-person interviews at several Pennsylvania correctional facilities, but due to Covid-19 precautions, this year involved a different strategy for data collection. A qualitative mail correspondence study was chosen instead, wherein research packets containing a series of questionnaires were sent out to residents living in three prisons. These packets cover a variety of topics, including questions about the prison experience during Covid-19. This project is still in its data collection phase, which has been limited during the pandemic, but it will be coded and analyzed once a sufficient number of responses have been collected.
As I just mentioned, the study is still ongoing, but there have already been a variety of responses to the duty to others questions asked. I’ll share one with you all as a representative quote. One resident wrote: “I was proud to receive a letter from a cellie, hidden where I would find it after he left. The letter thanked me for helping him get through all his hard & low times. Telling me I changed his life was truly a breath of fresh air. I would like to pursue this in my free life hopefully soon to come.”
As the project continues, I anticipate that this study will help inform future research into topics relating to prosocial bonds inside prison, how residents cope during their incarceration, and other related questions.
This concludes my presentation. I want to thank you all for taking the time to listen and I would to thank my mentor, Taylor Hartwell, for all her insight and assistance throughout the semester, both on this project and in my studies more generally. Thank You.