Enforcing the Convict Code: Violence and Prison Culture

Trammell, Rebecca, Enforcing the Convict Code: Violence and Prison Culture. 2012. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publish- ers, Inc., 157 pp. $49.95 hardcover (978-1-58826-80802).

Rebecca Trammell's book Enforcing the Convict Code is an insightful and valuable contribution to literature on violence, culture, gender and race in American prisons. Drawing on interviews with ex-inmates, Tram- mell's work speaks eloquently to the nuances of prison culture while ren- dering the complexities of inmate-on-inmate violence comprehensible to the reader. Though the focus of the book is on ex-inmates in California, many of the book's themes are relevant to the prison experience in Can- ada. In particular for the Canadian audience, Trammell's contribution to the qualitative literature on prison violence fills a research gap by comparing the experience of men and women incarcerates. This comple- ments Cooley's (1992) report on victimization in male federal prisons in Canada. Enforcing the Convict Code will be of specific interest to crim- inologists and sociologists who research or teach courses on qualitative methodologies, penology or gender and violence; yet, the accessibility of Trammell's text suggests a wider currency.

Enforcing the Convict Code presents the results of Trammell's quali- tative study of "how former inmates understand violence as a social process" (p. 11). The book pays particular attention to the relationship between violence, norms, and culture as former inmates perceive it and highlights issues of racial segregation, gangs, prison sex and rape, and interpersonal conflict among inmates more generally. The thick descrip- tions of violence and prison norms are generated from seventy-three open-ended interviews that Trammell conducted with parolees in Cali- fornia State. These accounts challenge a common stereotype that vio- lence in prison is arbitrary and irrational; rather, Trammell's rich ethno- graphic data illuminates violence as a strategic response to problems that arise in an environmental context in which people's lives are rigidly con- trolled and there are limited resources for conflict resolution.

The book describes both male and female inmates as active...