The Tobacco Ban: A Crisis in Social Control

During the early 1990s, prison managers across the United States began to implement and enforce a ban against the use of tobacco products by prisoners. Today, every state in the U.S either has a full or partial ban on tobacco products. This dissertation examines how the tobacco ban altered the structure and culture of the prison community in ways that produced detrimental effects on the health of prisoners and levels of institutional security, and reshaped the prison informal social organization and the black market economy. Indeed, the tobacco ban fundamentally altered structural and cultural elements of the prison community that dated back more than 150 years. First-hand observations, in-depth interviews with former prisoners and IDOC staff, and other expert witnesses were triangulated with official data from the IDOC and other state agencies to produce the findings for this study. The new black market economy dominating the informal organization of the prison community is now controlled from within the ranks of the formal organization of the prison system itself, namely, the prison staff. The findings strongly suggest that the tobacco ban imposed upon prisoners confined at IDOC facilities did not achieve their desired goals, but rather, resulted in a variety of unintended consequences, including new threats to prisoner health and institutional security. The ban resulted in prison staff occupying a crucial position within the informal social organization and the black market economy, producing a new shift in how discussions about the prison community will need to be framed, and in how researchers conducting an empirical investigation into the informal organization of the prison community will have to develop their research design.