Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Social Problems in Montreal.

articte is based upon his dissertation. At present, he is conducting research on social discrimination in the granting of parole, and on the prison and postprison adjustments of &dquo;lifers.&dquo; RESEARCH INTO HOMOSEXUAL BEHAVIOR within prisons has established that sexual adaptations to confinement cannot be explained solely in terms of the conditions of incarceration. Differences in sexual identity in particular have been found to condition the way in which prisoners adapt collectively to the loss of heterosexual contact (Ward and Kassebaum, 1965; Giallombardo, 1966), and scattered observa-tions have long suggested that cross-racial sexual attraction is an important dimension of the dyadic homosexual relations commonly reported in institutions for women (Otis, 1913; Ford, 1929; Moreno, 1934: 334; Giallombardo, 1966: 177, 183). However, only in recent years has it been suggested that racial hostility may be an important element in the generally more coercive forms of homosexuality found in prisons for men. 1 A report on sexual assaults in the Philadelphia prison system revealed that in 56 % of 129 documented assaults, the at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on May 12, 2016jce.sagepub.comDownloaded from [418] aggressor was black and the victim was white (Davis, 1968: 15). There were no recorded incidents involving white aggressors and black victims. More recently, Irwin (1971: 2) has reached a similar conclusion, based upon 115 interviews with newly released prisoners: &dquo;many of the group rapes... in jails and prisons are as much an artifact of class and racial hostilities as they are an expression of aggressive sexual drives.&dquo; The fact that both of these studies note an interracial component to sexual assaults in prisons, a component no