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Related (slightly): Rape in US prisons

Two movies I know of, one I recently watched, suggest that if one is going to prison, the best way to survive is to find someone on the first day and beat the hell out of them. The idea is that if others get the idea that you won't go easily, you'll be more likely to be left alone, less likely to be raped, and less likely future target for attack.

  • 25th hour (YouTube link that opens right to the quote). Update 2018-02: video reported as down, and I cannot locate a replacement. Per Wikiquote, here is the statement from Uncle Nikolai:

This is my advice to you: When you get there, figure it out who's who. Find the man nobody's protecting. A man without friends. And beat him until his eyes bleed. Let them think you are little bit crazy, but respectful, too. Respectful of the right men.

  • Office space (LINK to imdb list of quotes):

Rob Newhouse: Conjugal visits? Mmmm. Not that I know of. Y'know, minimum-security prison is no picnic. I have a client in there right now. He says the trick is: kick someone's ass the first day, or become someone's bitch. Then everything will be all right.

So, does this approach give one an advantage in terms of survival and/or not being a target of future assault/rape (I realize that rape apparently isn't that common, or as common as it's made out to be, per the related question above)?

Update 2018-05-25: Ben Barden does not believe movie claims count as specific enough. I don't know what that means, but to populate this with other examples that this is a sufficiently notable claim:

His advice is that yes, it is absolutely critical you fight as hard and viciously as you can the first time you get into a confrontation. It is prison.

also is it true that u are supposed to try to kick someones ass the first day so that no one fucks with you? thats wat every1 has been sayin but honestly i dont know ok thanks

That said, coming from the biggest, meanest-looking guy in the prison yard, please, don’t walk up and punch me in the face.

I think that these show the claim is well known enough to exist on this site. It may not be answerable, but it's a claim people make that could be answered with the right data (which may or may not exist).

Hendy
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    Reporting violence (such as rape) while in prison can be fatal because "rat finks" are strongly disliked (it's a matter of street smarts), so I suspect that many incidents probably don't get reported at all. Additionally, a famous study from the 1970s known as "**The Stanford Prison Experiment**" (http://www.prisonexp.org/), which had to be terminated prematurely because of the violence, only _scratches the surface_ of how terrible a prison environment can be. – Randolf Richardson Jul 11 '11 at 08:41
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    It would seem to me that beating up the wrong person would make you *more* likely to run into problems. The only real hope you'd have of making this work would be if you found someone who had no friends within the prison, which would be very hard to determine on the first day. Otherwise, you'd simply be inviting retaliation. – Beofett Jul 11 '11 at 15:37
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    @Beofett: intuitively, that makes sense to me as well. Note that the 25th hour quote includes advice to beat up the "*right*" person (no friends, not protected), but it's unclear how one would determine this. – Hendy Jul 11 '11 at 16:43
  • This is going to vary by prison, what sort of charge you have, and your ability, or inability to stay away from gambling, drugs, or anything that puts you "in debt". I'm not sure where you'd even find sources to answer this question though, most of it boils down to 'common sense'. – Jack Of All Trades 234 Feb 06 '18 at 16:55
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    Even if this technique worked, classifying it as 'the best' is opinion based. – Oddthinking Feb 07 '18 at 12:21
  • Maybe the time to debate that was 6 yrs ago? I only edited it (which likely brought it on the radar) due to a broken link report. In any case, I changed the title based on your comment. – Hendy Feb 07 '18 at 21:08
  • Is an answer that meets this site's standards even possible? I doubt there are any longitudinal studies that examine people's prison experiences in relation to what they did on their first day there. – user2752467 Feb 09 '18 at 19:43
  • @JustinLardinois you may be right. That said, I do not believe this site limits questions to only those believed to have answers. It is a notable claim that I'm skeptical about... so I asked about it. – Hendy Feb 10 '18 at 22:34
  • First of all, I'm not sure that movie character quotes count as notable. (They might?) More pertinently, they're not making *specific* claims. They're saying things like "the trick is" and "my advice to you". You seem to be trying to derive adjacent claims from those, but those aren't claims they were *specifically* making. – Ben Barden May 24 '18 at 16:53
  • @BenBarden I don't know how to respond to this. Can you give an example of what a "specific" claim would be? Can you let me know if the [highest rated questions](https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=votes) on this site also meet your criteria for specificity? – Hendy May 25 '18 at 17:31
  • Ideally, it should be identifying a specific (notable) person, group, or entity, who is making a specific verifiable claim of fact, which you are challenging or questioning directly. Partially, this is to ensure that we're not just casing rumors. Partially, it is to give something specific to respond to. General vague advice of "this is a good idea" isn't really verifiable because the assertion isn't well-defined. – Ben Barden May 25 '18 at 17:39
  • If they'd said something like "If you want to see the end of your term, then..." or "if you want to avoid rape, then" that's a lot closer to a specific, verifiable claim... and yes, a lot of the highest-voted are of this format. You could at least make your final question much more specific - make it either about rape *or* survival, and make ti more specific (chance to survive the first year? Chance to survive per year? Chance to survive until release? – Ben Barden May 25 '18 at 17:43
  • At that point it's still largely unanswerable, because it's talking about a *very* specific technique, and that's information that no one's likely to have tracked much, but it's at least closer. – Ben Barden May 25 '18 at 17:44
  • The research article "Surviving Prison: Exploring prison social life as a determinant of health" does not list this claim as one of the established methods of prison survival and instead states "emotional and psychological wellbeing were closely linked with the ability to cope with the social environment of the prison". – pericles316 May 26 '18 at 06:36
  • For UK prisons "Generally speaking if you adhere to the following simple rules prison is safer than your average provincial high street on a Friday night: don’t be wet, but at the same time don’t walk around like Buzz Lightyear, never ever grass anyone up, don’t steal from people, don’t start taking smack and don’t start ‘ticking’ (borrowing things on advance)." is the advise given by Carl Cattermole, author of HMP: A Survival Guide who served his time in five of the 140 prisons across the UK. – pericles316 May 26 '18 at 06:45

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