The Concept of "Less Eligibility" and the Social Function of Prison Violence in Class Society

Prison violence, including rape, beatings, and assaults, is not merely deviant conduct but integral to modern punishment's social function in contemporary class society. White draws on the Nineteenth Century concept of "less eligibility" developed by Jeremy Bentham and Georg Rusche to argue that prison violence serves to maintain prisoners' conditions below those of free people, deterring criminality as a livelihood. As lower-class social conditions deteriorated through deindustrialization, welfare retrenchment, and economic restructuring, prisons increased their reliance on violence to maintain this less-eligibility function. Prison violence defines the prison experience for its predominantly poor, unemployed, and underemployed inhabitants. White contends that understanding prison violence requires examining its social meaning and relationship to life outside prison. Prison violence sustains the prison's punitive function amid broader conditions of lower-class deprivation and insecurity. Law formally renounces violence as legitimate punishment while tacitly permitting its occurrence, enabling the state to maintain prison violence's deterrent function without surrendering legal legitimacy.

Topics: Criminal Procedure · Civil Rights

Keywords: prison violence · less eligibility · punishment · mass incarceration · class society · deterrence