SOCIAL ROLES IN A PRISON FOR WOMEN.

In the present paper, inmate social roles and social organization in a women's prison will be described in some detail, comparisons of this is informal social structure will be made with relevant literature on the social roles assumed by male prisoners and the social structure inside the prison setting will be viewed in relation to the external environment. The study of deviance in the prison setting has typically been concerned with male forms of deviation. Indeed, with the exception of analysis of the "fringer" role and the recently reported study of a women's prison which describes the homosexual adaptation of female inmates, scientific description and analysis of the informal organization of the adult female prison have been overlooked. This formulation derives from case studies of single institutions and therefore, it is extremely difficult to ascertain the validity of conclusions drawn as previous writers have not explored systematically the interaction of the external culture with the conditions for survival faced by the prison aggregate.