The Prison Community

The Prison Community was a landmark study on prison culture and social processes, first published in 1940 (and reissued in 1958). This reissue includes a new introduction by Wildeman and Wakefield to situate the study in a contemporary context, alongside the foreword by Donald R. Cressey. The original book represented one of the first studies to take the cultural, social, and administrative conditions of confinement seriously, providing insight into how incarcerated people make community within a correctional facility, the structural conditions that determine such relationships, and the constraints that prison administration both operates under and imposes. The Prison Community is best known for developing the concept of ‘prisonization’ or the process by which incarcerated people learn and adopt the norms, values, and cultures of prison communities. This book is key for undergraduate and graduate courses on penology and is relevant for a host of contemporary issues of interest including reentry success, network science, and the structural determinants of cultural values and norms.



Donald Clemmer was born in 1903 and died in 1965, serving as Director of Corrections for the District of Columbia and the immediate past President of the American Correctional Association at the time of his death. For most of his life, he worked inside prisons and wrote The Prison Community in the late 1930s.

Christopher Wildeman is Professor of Sociology & Public Policy (by courtesy) at Duke University, where he is also Director of the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect, and Research Professor at the ROCKWOOL Foundation Research Unit.

Sara Wakefield is Professor of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, Newark and a graduate faculty affiliate in the Department of Sociology at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.