Looking at violence in prison from a sociological perspective, Sykes's Society of Captives remains a classic in penology. Influenced by structural-functionalism, he describes the great influence of the prison structure on its inmates and emphasises the importance of violence for the stabilisation of the prison social order. This article will re-examine Sykes's assumptions about the relationship between structure and action, referring to Bourdieu and a biographical approach using a case example from a qualitative longitudinal study with male inmates in young offenders' institutions in Germany. It concludes by asking how the meaning of violence in prison changes, looked at from these different theoretical perspectives.

No abstract

No abstract

The aim of this article is to approach the single case study The JackRoller from a conflict-oriented perspective. The article examines the different meanings of 'home' in the biographical narration and the ambivalence of 'home-sickness'. By tracing the latent meaning of this category, a deeper level of conflict that is hidden in the narrative can be revealed. It will be argued that in the concept of 'home-sickness', an underlying conflict of attachment and autonomy becomes apparent. The central argument of the article is that in order to analyze and comprehend biographical processes in depth, it is vital to hermeneutically reconstruct the central biographical conflicts. From this perspective, the subjective meaning of delinquency in the individual biography can be disclosed.

No abstract