Every man for himself and all for one: Crime, prison culture and marginality in Lisbon, Portugal

Abstract

Doing time in prison is a common experience for many young people from Portugal’s economically disadvantaged urban peripheries. Prison conditions are harsh and sentences are long, particularly for drug and property offences. This article discusses the simultaneously individual and collective nature of prison life, and how inmates cope with a hostile environment that threatens their emotional and physical integrity. Traditional models of prison culture are inadequate to describe Portuguese prison society: it is only to a limited extent the result of prisoners adapting to the deprivations experienced inside, and it has little to do with supposed criminal subcultures imported from the outside. Instead, prison in Portugal has become just another venue for the ongoing struggle of marginalised citizens who seek to maintain a modicum of personal agency under adverse circumstances. The article argues that inmate culture in Portugal converges with a generalised culture of marginality, spawned by the late-liberal segregation of undesirable identities in suburban socioscapes spurned by dominant society.