Prisons are closed communities and use the language of closed communities: a subculture jargon that defines the speaker, rather literally, as an “insider.” The verbs abziehen and abkacken describe two modes of being behind bars: the former what we might call an “identity mode” (which gives a sense of self embedded in a context, like a football fan at a match), the latter an unbearable sense of loss of self. Abkacken can be loosely translated as “to be totally at a loss”; as a state of being it is too harmlessly defined in one glossary as “auf der Zelle sitzen und unzufrieden sein, ohne Tabak, Radio oder Fernseher und keinen Einkauf haben. Langeweile haben.” In prison discourse, Abkacken describes hopelessness and loneliness as well as boredom; a state of feeling utterly alone, where the individual is not only struggling for personhood in the odd situation of captivity but doing so without access to radio, television, or consumer goods: familiar distractions from the problem of who we are in the contemporary world. Abziehen (in prison usage, “to acquire something by force”; glossed as “anderen, meist Schwächeren, gegen deren Willen etwas wegnehmen”) may in part be another distraction activity; but it is also, I shall argue, more than that. Where Abkacken occurs in isolation, Abziehen relies on a social context: impelling another prisoner to give up cigarettes or other desirable goods is a form of self-positioning in a prison hierarchy that both replaces and replicates social systems “outside.” Abkacken is known to lead to despair and sometimes suicide, particularly in young new arrivals in prison; Abziehen on the other hand — whether one is the taker or the person taken from — posits the prisoner's self in a familiar, hierarchical social matrix. That supports a sense of identity (whether I am perpetrator or victim, at least I am something), and so helps avert despair and the suicidal impulse.

In this essay, I shall use the phrase “society outside” to describe the non-prison environment; that is generalizing but necessary, and is not a denial that other closed or semiclosed male-dominated environments exist (parts of the military, boys’ boarding schools, and closed male psychiatric units are other possible examples).

Two different ways of representing the prison experience of young men in Germany are currently enjoying a certain popularity.