The Subcultures Ruling the Prison as an Impediment to the Access Route of Victimized Prisoners to Justice

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 Ph.D., Criminal Law and Criminology, Faculty of law, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran.

2 Assistant Professor, Department of Criminal Law and Criminology, Faculty of Law, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran.

3 Associate Professor, Department of Criminal Law and Criminology, Faculty of Law, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran.

Abstract

In the dominant discourse of the criminal justice systems officials, at least it is feigned that they don`t see violence as the central core of punishment, especially imprisonment anymore. denormalization of living conditions inside the prison is removed from the agenda of prisons and normalization of prison conditions is taken. One of the most important strategies is to minimize the distance between prisoners and law-abiding citizens by improving conditions of prisoners to access to justice. To answer the question, qualitative methods and specifically in-depth interviews with 25 male prisoners and prison officers of three prisons located in the northern provinces of the country have been used. The findings of the research show that prison subcultures, which are the result of continuous interactions between prisoners and prison officers, play an important role in the quality and extent of access to justice .As such, it should be said that the prisoners' lack of trust of their complaints process being effective and their belief in the existence of the culture of silence among the prison staff against mistakes of their colleagues, the fear of repeating the unfortunate consequences experienced by other petitioning prisoners, the vengeful subculture based on the concept of "Us and Others", the condemnation of seeking help from any outsider and finally the unwritten agreement between the prisoners and the prison officers on conforming to the "Gagged" model of the prisoner can be considered as one of the cultural impediment that makes the prisoners access to justice much more harder.

Keywords

References

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