Convicts that are behind bars form their own hierarchies and even economic systems within the walls of a prison. They successfully formulate a microcosm of the real world, the only clean-cut difference being that their rules and regulations are more tribal and cold-hitting than ours on this "outer" real world.

Many inmates regulate their beings within inner gangs and are thus divided within race sectors in the prison, all of which abide by common moralities within their specific sectors. These commonalities involve shared tattoos, shared principles, and a will to serve and protect the established creed that has arisen from the confinements of both outside life and inner communal life, as its spectacles are united, specific to the creed of their racial community.

It is no coincidence that they are similar to law enforcement upon each other within these roles, and have adjusted their behaviours to match those that have sought to punish them in authoritarian ways. These individuals are infused through authoritarian behaviour that has left marks upon the inmates’ lives, and yet they are neither strictly tied to the confines of the prison’s inner life space, for they roam in the outer space of reality, away from the prison.

These officers, governors, judges, and even their parental figures are reduced to mental stimuli, images that bring with them codes of gestures and feats of imprinted vigour, for they did, during the inmate’s experience, leave an impression on them that has shaped their caricature of themselves without knowing.

As everything, what is singular here?
That the inmate is not only the bearer of metaphor, but the metaphor incarnate. His body is a hieroglyph, his existence a carved scripture of punishment and defiance. He is the prison’s own mythology written back against itself.

The inmates are also accustomed to, and therefore extended as, symbolistic in and of themselves through their developmental phases, often through troubled neighbourhoods, childhood abuse, and drug misuse. Murder and violence also fall hand in hand for them, encountering symbolism through the lifespan of an other than themselves. They may meet the Grim Reaper down in New York in the middle of the night, between a brothel and a subway tunnel. This individual may be known in the small locale as a dangerous person, prone to the characteristics of a life-taker, a thief of soul, and a supplier to the district.

Metaphorically analysing these allocated patterns that surround this individual offers us the chance to bear witness to something that has been logically obtained and indicates why the community of these criminals may suggest this individual to be the bearer of traits identical to the Grim Reaper. But to law enforcement or an average citizen, he may simply be a thug, an empty head riled on vengeance and deceit.

It is also a point of inquiry to assume that the individual who is within this system of governance is, by themselves, a metaphor alone. This system that imposes these individuals to remain shackled at their souls but entirely limitless with their hearts is an oxymoron to begin with, and therefore the a priori function of their life is to assert itself as a metaphor across the multiple realities that surround it, optional survival, which is due to their inability to break free from these templates of interaction and social discourse. The metaphor here serves as an appendage to their scattered image of themselves.

This grants the mirage of metaphors, which I will outline later in their identity and their significance, to be the very virus that expands and develops as they manoeuvre through the prison system and the socio-economic playground. This is due to the very metaphoric and theoretical world becoming more than a sense of reasoning. Rather, it should be noted to be a clear survival mechanism, a tool that is not achieved through submission to logic or rationale itself but a sacrificial motive in response to obtain this dynamic between inmates, legal welfare considered, and gang culture shared.

It is statistically known that those in these environments are often lower on the IQ spectrum. They are more prone to lack of impulse control; furthermore, they are to be considered more stupid regardless of the nature of their crimes. We hold judgement toward those who are doing "time" because we insinuate their behaviour is in correspondence with how we treat society and approach civilisation individually. We are responsible for the height and length of their capacity to scale themselves in and out of prison as we scale the collective individually.

I want to draw your attention to some Western data on this topic for further illustration.

Some General IQ Data On The West

• A study across Louisiana, Pennsylvania, and Washington found the average inmate IQ was one standard deviation below national norms (~85), and 42% displayed learning deficiencies (IQ ≤ 75). Office of Justice Programs
• A University of Liverpool study found the average IQ among prisoners to be around 87, about 13 points below the UK average. BBC News
• An estimated 6,000 inmates in UK prisons have IQs below 70, which represents a vast overrepresentation considering the general population prevalence of intellectual disability (~2%). Prison Reform Trust
• 20-30% of offenders have learning difficulties or learning disabilities that interfere with their ability to cope within the criminal Justice system
• 7% of prisoners have an IQ of less than 70 and a further 25% have an IQ of less than 80 (Mottram, 2007).
• 23% of young prisoners under the age of 18 have an IQ of less than 70 (Harrington and Bailey et al, 2005)
• 20% of the prison population has some form of "hidden disability" that "will affect and undermine their performance in both education and work' settings."
•  Between 20 and 50% of men in prison have a specific learning disability (Disability Rights Commission 2005 memorandum to the Commons Select Committee on prison education).

"While an IQ of less than 70 doesn't equate to a person having a learning disability it does indicate strongly that some additional support, for example in daily living and communication skills, will be required. Similarly, prisoners with IQs of less than 80 are likely to experience difficulties in accessing key elements of the prison regime including conventional offending behaviour programmes. Assuming a prison population of 80,000 the above research suggests that on any given day there will be over 5,500 men, women and children with very low IQs in prison and a further 16-20,000 who will require some additional support."

I have illustrated low IQ functioning as a subjective element to this inquiry, one into which the very topic of intelligence itself can work its way. It is to say the criminal still obtains beauty and richness regardless of his capacity for knowledge or intellectual competence. In some aspects, the usage of metaphors is often objectively easier to maintain during social intercourse, through which both participants must operate within some framework that allows understanding to occur between them. Yet if one does not proceed with the correct understanding of this metaphorical reality, one risks losing their own reality to the metaphor as it dominates the present state of their world.

For the inmates who lack the knowledge of an extended language, such as high school–graded vocabulary or intuition for the cognitive function on the topic of epistemological navigation, it is clearer to resort to metaphor. Even the application of metaphors is combative in these arenas, leading to a rise in status, respect, and power for the individual who prioritises his metaphorical life over the "real" life.

They become his pickaxe to truth. They are, in fact, replaced as commonly understood truth, so much so that he would kill and be killed under the metaphorical underpinnings of such a symbolic reality.

What exactly are these metaphorical usages declaring in this governed system?

• epistemological tools,
• communication codes,
• identity markers,
• psychological shields,
• and status currencies.

This is the criminal’s solution to their self-serving replicated shadow governments. This is their foreign aid, their legislation, their economic value, and their capacity to indoctrinate themselves within the walls of the prison and rationally find meaning in this world void of family. Whereas the knife might become the bridge of order between their features. They are nomadic in spirit because there is no spirit they can pledge their reflections to other than the emptiness at bay.

It is necessary to understand that these statistical readings of inmate IQ are not sterile fragments of data, but a direct indication of why metaphor becomes indispensable in the prison world. When abstract reasoning falters, when vocabulary and the higher faculties of conceptual navigation fail to extend themselves, the inmate does not abandon meaning but reshapes it.

He reaches for the metaphor not as ornament, but as a compensatory weapon. Metaphor here is survival, a common language in a place where abstraction collapses, a visceral imagery that both communicates and commands. The tattoo, the number, the myth, the ancestral sign—they are not mere symbols of identity, they are epistemological tools, legislative codes, and currencies of loyalty. Chiefly, the deficit of intellectual abstraction does not negate richness; rather, it demands the immediacy of image and metaphor as a truer law in the course of prison life.

The inmate who lacks a scholarly grasp of language finds himself nonetheless armed with a weapon of survival through symbol. The tattoo, the number, the mythic figure to which these are not aesthetic indulgences but visceral forms of speech, a grammar carved into flesh and ritual. What is absent in intellectual scaffolding is replaced by a symbolic scaffolding that binds them no less tightly to meaning and order.

It is to be noted here that these statistical readings of inmate IQ are not merely cold numbers; they represent why the metaphor becomes essential. For when the mind is unable to traverse the abstract discourses of epistemology, when vocabulary and conceptual intuition fall short, the metaphor arrives not as decoration but as compensation. It is the bridge between what cannot be intellectually scaled and what must be socially understood.

This is why the low IQ data does not stand outside the inquiry but inside it, as evidence that the metaphorical life is not chosen but necessitated. The deficiency of abstraction demands the immediacy of image. And in this way, the metaphorical reality is not secondary to rational life but primary, for it compensates where rational discourse collapses and becomes the truest law in the social course of prison existence.

Let us look into the inmates’ tattoos and their symbolic meanings. We will explore ethnicity and its role within these confines.

White Inmate Culture

"1488 and 88"

This number can be found on white supremacist/Nazi inmates. The numbers 14 or 88 on their own can also be used, which sometimes creates confusion. Yet, many non nazi or supremacist inmates will also be drawn into the creed of this ideology, yet may not possess any features of this ideology but simply do it from depending on survival needs. This is where we can witness the significance of their metaphorical reality, inmates who had no affiliation with the creed are now branded with radical ideologies out of fear of death just to keep their head afloat in this metaphysical world.

Fourteen represents fourteen words, which are a quote by Nazi leader David Lane: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White Children.”

The 88 is shorthand for the 8^th letter of the alphabet twice, HH, which represents Heil Hitler. Typically, these tattoos can be found anywhere on the body.

A/B stands for the Aryan Brotherhood

In this instance we are dealing with a sophisticated numerological application of metaphor and language combined this is a thought through process,

Black Inmate Culture

The Black inmate does not always lean upon the numerological sequences that have dominated white supremacist gangs, rather his metaphors are drawn from mythic figures, ancestral invocations and the hieroglyphs of the street itself. One may witness the five-pointed star, crowns, the teardrop, or the cryptic lettering of his set, all of which act not merely as ornaments upon flesh but as extensions of a cosmology that predates the prison walls. This is a spiritual economy of signs, rooted in both the urban landscape and an ancestral calling, a memory that is reawakened in the confines of incarceration.

The philosophical difference here is striking yet not oppositional. Whereas the white inmate might inscribe his body with numbers that bind him to a rigid ideology, the Black inmate inscribes his flesh with symbols that are at once mythic and immediate, gesturing both to the streets that raised him and to an older memory of collective struggle. But the undertone remains the same, for these markings, whether numeric or hieroglyphic, are survivalist metaphors. They carve order out of chaos, they extend identity into permanence, they create a shared currency of belonging where the official state denies all currency except the sentence of time itself.

It is here that we see most clearly the metaphorical reality serving the system of social course. The tattoo becomes statute, the myth becomes governance, the figure of the crowned king or the mourning teardrop is no less legislative than the 1488 etched into pale skin. They are metaphors that adjudicate loyalty, resolve conflict, and sustain order, for when the outer world withdraws its law, the inmate’s metaphorical world supplies another, and in its own sophistication, it directs the course of life and death within the prison walls.

The prison seeks to erase identity, to strip the inmate bare of all social residue. Yet through metaphor the inmate produces not erasure but excess, a surplus of identity that multiplies in symbols. The attempt to nullify the self produces instead a symbolic avalanche.

The features of these metaphors are by the inmates calling a sovereign solution to the total lack of order that is internally inside prison walls. The metaphor is not only compensatory, it is insurgent. It resists the void the prison imposes, it refuses the erasure of meaning. Where the prison says “nothing,” the inmate replies with symbol, with tattoo, with myth, with blood. The metaphor is revolt in coded form.

The Final Metaphor

The prison is not a mere architecture of containment but a crucible in which metaphor metastasises into law, governance, and metaphysical sustenance. The inmate becomes less a subject of discipline than an ontological agent of inscription, whose body and imagination resist the carceral erasure of identity by proliferating new codes, new myths, new epistemes. The tattoo, the gang symbol, the numerological cipher, the ancestral invocation, all of these comprise not the ornamentation of criminal life but the very grammar of survival, the scaffolding by which meaning is held against the void.

Here we confront the paradox. What appears to the state as the deficit of abstraction, the statistical poverty of IQ, the collapse of formal reasoning, is transfigured into an excess of symbol. The lack does not denote emptiness but a compulsion toward metaphor as compensatory truth, as insurgent discourse, as sovereign economy. The inmate incarnates the metaphor, becomes its flesh, and in doing so renders the prison itself a stage for the ungovernable proliferation of meaning.

But what does this proliferation disclose to us. If the criminal is condemned to live as metaphor, to translate the absence of rational discourse into the immediacy of symbol, then are we not all in some concealed manner beholden to the same condition. Is not the social itself structured by metaphors so naturalised that we mistake them for reason, for order, for law. The inmate reveals in raw form what society dissimulates in polite disguise, that meaning itself is always tribal, coded, exclusionary, sustained by myths of belonging and threats of annihilation.

In this light the prison ceases to be a margin of civilisation and becomes instead its mirror, darkened, intensified, stripped of polite fictions. To study the inmate’s metaphor is not simply to decode a criminal subculture but to glimpse the primordial economy of symbol that underwrites all governance, all belonging, all civilisation. If the inmate’s tattoo legislates his world, how different is that from the flag, the constitution, the corporate logo, or the digital brand that legislates ours.

And so the inquiry must turn upon itself. The question is not only what metaphors the inmate lives by, but which metaphors we ourselves are imprisoned within, which hieroglyphs govern our obedience, and which ancestral codes continue to bind us under the guise of rational law. The carceral is only the concentrated form of our own symbolic existence. What then remains unexamined in the metaphors by which we govern ourselves.

Written By Bailey Booth

Founder of THELIFTEDVEIL.