CONTENT WARNING: This article begins with a graphic description of a stabbing in prison and subsequently discusses interpersonal violence, confinement and psychological distress. Names and identifying details have been changed.

In December 2021, while incarcerated at HMP Pentonville in London, I witnessed an incident that has remained difficult for me to explain.

Two prisoners whom I will call Tione and Kay appeared to be among the closest friends on the wing.

Tione was approximately nineteen or twenty years old. He was a first-time prisoner serving a relatively short sentence. Kay was considerably older, in his mid-to-late thirties, had spent substantial periods of his adult life moving in and out of custody, and was facing the possibility of a sentence approaching ten years for a firearms-related offence.

Their friendship was unusually visible.

During free-flow periods they were almost invariably together. They trained at the gym together, worked together on the servery and spent their association time in each other’s company. Kay appeared, at least from the outside, to occupy something resembling a paternal or mentoring role. Tione was the younger newcomer; Kay was the experienced prisoner who understood the rhythms, rules and informal culture of confinement.

To those of us living alongside them, theirs did not look like a fragile alliance.

It looked like friendship.

Then, one afternoon, the relationship appeared to collapse in seconds.

Tione was unexpectedly called from the wing for a bail hearing. Because he was young, a first-time offender and serving a relatively short sentence, there was considerable optimism that he might not return.

I watched from an upper landing as two officers escorted him towards the exit.

When they reached Kay’s cell, Tione asked them to stop.

Kay was standing in his doorway. Tione told him about the hearing and explained that, if everything went well, this might be the last time they saw each other inside. It was effectively a farewell: see you on the other side.

Tione moved towards him for an embrace.

Kay embraced him back.

Then Kay produced an improvised weapon concealed in his clothing. Holding Tione close, he stabbed him repeatedly.

For several seconds even the officers seemed to struggle to comprehend what was happening. They eventually separated the men and Kay was taken away to segregation.

Those watching from the landings were stunned.

The obvious question was also the most difficult one.

Why?

How could somebody apparently occupy the role of closest friend, mentor and almost father figure one moment, and violently attack that same person the next?

The temptation is to search for a single hidden explanation: perhaps drugs, gang politics, an argument nobody knew about, psychopathy or a betrayal that had been concealed from everybody else.

But another possibility is more psychologically interesting.

Perhaps the violence did not demonstrate that the relationship had always been false.

Perhaps it demonstrated how psychologically complicated a relationship can become inside a prison.

Prison changes what relationships are required to do

Classic prison sociology begins with what Gresham Sykes called the “pains of imprisonment”: losses of liberty, autonomy, security, goods and services, and ordinary intimate relationships. Imprisonment does not merely place a person behind a locked door. It removes or severely restricts many of the normal structures through which identity, belonging and emotional regulation are maintained.

Later scholarship has continued to emphasise that prisoner society partly develops in response to these deprivations. Social relationships can become mechanisms through which people defend themselves against loneliness, insecurity, boredom and assaults upon their sense of self.

The circumstances at Pentonville around this period make that context particularly important. The prison had experienced the extreme restrictions associated with the COVID-19 regime. HM Inspectorate of Prisons reported during the pandemic that time outside cells was very limited and that many prisoners felt unsafe. Subsequent inspection material recorded the continuing effects of pandemic restrictions and problems involving purposeful activity and time out of cell.

Research into imprisonment during COVID similarly found that severe restrictions disrupted normal prisoner relationships and reduced meaningful contact, sometimes leaving the relatively few accessible relationships carrying an unusually large emotional burden.

Under these circumstances, friendship is not merely friendship.

A companion may simultaneously become one’s conversation, protection, entertainment, source of information, emotional confidant, training partner, colleague and connection to normal human affection.

A relationship that would occupy one section of someone’s life outside prison can therefore occupy a disproportionately large section of life inside it.

That may help explain why prison friendships can sometimes appear to develop remarkably quickly.

Accelerated intimacy does not necessarily mean superficial intimacy

The speed with which two prisoners become close should not automatically be interpreted as evidence that their relationship is fake.

Human attachment is strongly influenced by proximity, repeated interaction and dependency. Prison intensifies all three.

The same people are encountered repeatedly in a restricted physical environment. Work, recreation, meals and association occur within the same small social population. Outside friendships and family relationships are harder to access. Opportunities to choose companions are dramatically reduced.

At the same time, prison friendships exist within an unusually difficult environment for trust.

Research examining prisoner social networks notes a paradox. Alliances with other prisoners can offer protection and support, yet incarceration makes reliable judgements of another prisoner’s character difficult. Social life is highly public; prisoners are conscious of exploitation, victimisation and informing; and opportunities for private, authentic interaction are constrained.

British prison research likewise describes friendship, loyalty and affiliation as central elements of prisoner society, while research from a high-security English prison has documented very low levels of interpersonal trust and the importance of violence and insecurity in shaping prisoner relationships.

This produces an important distinction:

emotional closeness and interpersonal security are not necessarily the same thing.

Two prisoners may spend every available hour together and nevertheless understand the relationship differently.

The father-and-son appearance may be particularly significant

The age difference between Kay and Tione makes another interpretation possible.

From the outside, Kay appeared paternal.

For Tione, an older and experienced prisoner might have represented guidance and protection during an unfamiliar first incarceration.

For Kay, however, the relationship could conceivably have served a different psychological function.

Being the experienced mentor may have provided status, purpose and identity.

Imprisonment strips people of ordinary adult roles. A man may cease, practically speaking, to function every day as an employee, neighbour, partner, father or autonomous adult. Prison dictates when he eats, sleeps, moves and communicates.

Under those conditions, becoming somebody’s protector or mentor can restore something valuable: a socially meaningful role.

That does not make the relationship manipulative. Kay could genuinely have cared for Tione while also depending psychologically upon being needed by him.

Research on male imprisonment has increasingly challenged the simplistic idea that prison masculinity consists only of emotional suppression. Ben Crewe, for example, argues that male prison life contains important forms of homosocial intimacy—emotional attachment between men that may be concealed, displaced or expressed indirectly because conventional prison masculinity makes explicit vulnerability difficult.

Other UK research shows that prisoners can construct positive masculine identities through helping, mentoring and supporting other prisoners.

Consequently, Kay’s apparently paternal behaviour does not have to be interpreted as an act.

It might have been profoundly real.

And that is precisely why the impending separation may have mattered.

Then came the bail hearing

Until Tione was called from the wing, the two men’s futures were radically different but psychologically abstract.

Kay potentially faced years of incarceration.

Tione might soon leave.

The bail hearing suddenly converted that difference into an immediate reality.

One man was walking towards the gate.

The other was walking back to his cell.

This is where ordinary language such as jealousy may be insufficient.

Several emotions could conceivably have arrived simultaneously: envy, abandonment, grief, humiliation, anger, fear of loneliness, resentment and perceived rejection.

Importantly, this does not require Tione actually to have rejected Kay.

Psychology distinguishes between an objective event and the meaning a person assigns to it.

From Tione’s perspective, the embrace might have meant:

I care about you. I hope to see you outside.

From Kay’s perspective, the same moment might conceivably have signified:

You are leaving me here.

Those propositions are emotionally very different despite referring to exactly the same event.

Experimental psychology consistently finds that perceived social rejection can increase aggressive responding. A 2022 meta-analysis involving 3,864 participants found a medium overall effect of rejection upon aggression and reduced prosocial behaviour.

Other experimental research suggests that exclusion can also encourage hostile cognition—a greater tendency to interpret ambiguous information as hostile.

None of this means that separation normally produces violence. It overwhelmingly does not.

It means only that rejection or anticipated abandonment is one recognised psychological route through which aggression can become more likely in vulnerable individuals.

Attachment provides another possible lens

Attachment theory may also be relevant, although it must be applied cautiously.

People differ in the way they respond to closeness and threatened separation. Securely attached individuals are generally better able to tolerate temporary distance without interpreting it as catastrophic abandonment. Insecure attachment can involve much greater sensitivity either to dependency or to rejection.

Research involving prisoners has found links between attachment characteristics and particular forms of antisocial or aggressive behaviour. A Norwegian prison study, for example, found considerable avoidant attachment in its incarcerated sample and reported that anxious attachment accounted for substantial variation in aggression within intimate relationships.

That study cannot tell us anything directly about Kay.

But it provides a useful theoretical possibility.

If somebody becomes unusually emotionally dependent upon a relationship while simultaneously lacking healthy ways of communicating vulnerability, impending separation may be experienced not merely as sadness but as threat.

And anger is sometimes easier to express than grief.

In a masculine environment where saying “I am terrified of losing you” may feel impossible, the emotional transformation from attachment to hostility can occur without the attachment ever having been unreal.

“If I cannot keep this relationship, I will destroy it”

There is an uncomfortable psychological principle here.

Love and aggression are not always psychological opposites.

The opposite of attachment may be indifference.

Intense hostility can sometimes occur precisely because another person matters enormously.

This does not romanticise violence. Stabbing another human being remains an act of serious violence for which the attacker is responsible.

But explanation and excuse are different things.

A relationship may become dangerous when another person has acquired so much psychological significance that their independence is experienced as an injury.

In this interpretation, Kay need not suddenly have changed from loving Tione to hating him.

The same attachment could potentially have generated both behaviours.

Before the bail hearing:

“You are my boy. I protect you.”

At the cell door:

“You are leaving me.”

That transition could be especially destabilising if Kay’s identity within the relationship depended upon being older, needed and in control.

Threatened identity may matter as much as threatened attachment

A related body of psychological research concerns threatened egotism.

Baumeister and colleagues challenged the popular idea that violence simply results from low self-esteem. Their work suggested instead that aggression can emerge when an individual’s favourable conception of himself is contradicted or threatened by another person or situation. Later experimental work found particularly strong aggression following insult among participants high in narcissistic traits.

Again, this is emphatically not evidence that Kay was narcissistic.

The wider concept is useful, however.

Imagine that his internal identity had gradually become:

I am the experienced one.

I look after this young man.

He needs me.

We are doing this sentence together.

Tione’s release could destroy that narrative instantly.

The younger first-time prisoner has a future outside.

The older mentor remains behind facing years.

The goodbye therefore potentially contains an enormous status reversal.

The person who appeared dependent is suddenly free.

The protector is suddenly powerless.

In an ordinary environment that might produce painful envy.

In prison—where autonomy, dignity, status and control are already scarce—the psychological impact could be magnified.

Prison violence is also communication

Prison violence cannot be understood purely as uncontrolled anger.

It can have an interpersonal and symbolic function.

Prison sociology repeatedly emphasises the importance of reputation, recognition, security, masculinity and respect. Recent English research has specifically examined prison violence through prisoners’ struggles for recognition and respect.

Violence can therefore communicate something when emotional vocabulary fails.

It can say:

You cannot humiliate me.

You cannot abandon me.

I am still powerful.

I control how this relationship ends.

This possibility becomes particularly interesting because the assault occurred during the embrace.

The hug and stabbing happening almost simultaneously makes the event psychologically striking.

It combines intimacy and violence rather than simply replacing one with the other.

That does not prove a particular motive.

But phenomenologically it looks less like two established enemies fighting and more like violence erupting at precisely the moment of separation.

Was it spontaneous or planned?

The concealed weapon introduces another complication.

If Kay already possessed the improvised weapon before hearing about Tione’s bail hearing, that tells us relatively little because weapons may be carried in prison for reasons unrelated to a particular intended victim.

If he specifically obtained, positioned or prepared it after learning Tione might leave, however, that would suggest at least some premeditation.

Yet premeditation and emotional violence are not opposites.

A person can form a violent intention minutes or hours beforehand while the underlying motivation remains jealousy, abandonment, humiliation or rage.

Planning does not necessarily mean that Kay had secretly hated Tione for months.

Conversely, apparent spontaneity would not prove that the attack was entirely irrational.

The critical evidential questions would concern when Kay learned about the hearing, when the weapon was obtained, whether he had behaved differently beforehand, whether threats or unusual conversations occurred, and what he subsequently told investigators.

Without those facts, distinguishing a months-long plan from an acute reaction would be speculation.

The prison itself belongs in the explanation

This is why prison violence is poorly explained by theories that locate the cause entirely inside the violent individual.

Criminologists commonly distinguish between deprivation, importation and situational explanations.

Importation theories examine what prisoners bring into custody: personality, previous experiences, criminal affiliations, learned behaviour and coping styles.

Deprivation theories examine what imprisonment does to people: the loss of liberty, autonomy, relationships, security and meaningful activity.

Situational theories examine the immediate environment in which violence occurs.

Research testing these explanations finds evidence for all three, with situational factors sometimes providing particularly strong explanatory power.

General Strain Theory offers one way of combining them. Prison produces significant strains; individuals differ in their vulnerability and coping resources; social support can protect against those strains; and certain environments increase the probability that strain will be expressed through misconduct or violence.

A major Ministry of Justice review reached essentially the same broad conclusion after examining 97 studies of violence among adult male prisoners. Prison violence reflected the interaction between characteristics prisoners brought into custody, features of the institutional environment, daily regimes and interpersonal relationships rather than one simple cause.

Kay therefore cannot meaningfully be separated from Pentonville.

The individual matters.

But so does the cage.

The paradox of the relationship

There is another possibility worth considering.

The friendship may have been helping Kay cope with imprisonment.

General Strain Theory specifically identifies social support and social capital as factors capable of buffering the strains of prison life.

That creates a paradox.

Tione may have been one of the things making Kay’s incarceration psychologically tolerable.

If so, Tione’s release did not merely remove a friend.

It removed a coping mechanism.

The closer their friendship became, the greater the eventual loss potentially became.

Relationships in confinement can consequently contain the seeds of an unusual instability:

the person who protects someone from the pains of imprisonment may, by becoming indispensable, acquire the power to intensify those pains enormously simply by leaving.

This helps explain how attachment in confinement might grow rapidly yet apparently deteriorate with extraordinary speed.

The deterioration may sometimes be less complete than it appears.

What changes instantly is not necessarily affection.

It is the perceived meaning of the relationship.

So why did Kay stab Tione?

The academically responsible answer is that we cannot know.

Perhaps information unknown to other prisoners existed.

Perhaps the motive involved debt, contraband, intimidation or an earlier grievance.

Perhaps Kay had contemplated the attack for days.

Perhaps it was initiated within seconds of learning that Tione might leave.

But if those conventional explanations are absent, psychological and sociological research permits another coherent possibility.

Kay may have developed a genuinely meaningful attachment to Tione inside an environment characterised by deprivation, insecurity and limited emotional resources.

Being the older mentor may have restored a sense of purpose and status.

Tione may simultaneously have become companionship, emotional support and part of Kay’s strategy for enduring a potentially long sentence.

Then an unexpected bail hearing abruptly exposed the asymmetry between them.

Tione could leave.

Kay could not.

What Tione experienced as liberation could therefore have been experienced by Kay as abandonment, envy, loss of status, loss of control and the destruction of an emotionally important relationship.

For most people those emotions produce sadness, resentment or withdrawal.

For someone with particular vulnerabilities, learned attitudes towards violence, poor emotional regulation, intense rejection sensitivity or a prison-adapted understanding of status and control, the same emotional shock could potentially be translated into aggression.

In that interpretation, Kay did not necessarily transform instantaneously from “best friend” into “mortal enemy.”

Something more disturbing may have occurred.

The violence may have emerged from the same relationship that had previously produced the closeness.

The friendship was potentially both protective and dangerous because confinement had increased what the relationship meant.

That may ultimately be one of the most important things prison teaches us about human attachment.

Confinement does not abolish people’s need for intimacy.

It can magnify it.

It places human beings in conditions of dependency while simultaneously making trust difficult; it restricts the ordinary relationships through which emotion is regulated while demanding performances of toughness and independence; it creates intense proximity while continually threatening involuntary separation through transfers, release, court appearances, segregation and sentence differences.

The resulting relationships can therefore be sincere without being stable, intimate without being secure, and protective without being harmless.

From the landing that afternoon, what we saw looked like a friendship disappearing in seconds.

Psychologically, something more complicated may have been happening.

We may have been watching what occurs when, inside an environment built around involuntary separation, one prisoner’s freedom becomes another prisoner’s loss.

References and suggested literature

Baumeister, R. F., Smart, L., & Boden, J. M. (1996). Relation of threatened egotism to violence and aggression: The dark side of high self-esteem. Psychological Review, 103(1), 5–33.

Bushman, B. J., & Baumeister, R. F. (1998). Threatened egotism, narcissism, self-esteem, and direct and displaced aggression. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75(1), 219–229.

Blevins, K. R., Listwan, S. J., Cullen, F. T., & Jonson, C. L. (2010). A General Strain Theory of prison violence and misconduct: An integrated model of inmate behavior. Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, 26(2).

Crewe, B. (2009). The Prisoner Society: Power, Adaptation and Social Life in an English Prison. Oxford University Press. Particularly Chapter 7, “Friendship and Social Relations.”

Crewe, B. (2014). Not Looking Hard Enough: Masculinity, Emotion, and Prison Research. Qualitative Inquiry, 20(4), 392–403.

Hansen, A. L., Waage, L., Eid, J., Johnsen, B. H., & Hart, S. (2011). The relationship between attachment, personality and antisocial tendencies in a prison sample. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 52, 268–276.

Jiang, S., & Fisher-Giorlando, M. (2002). Inmate Misconduct: A Test of the Deprivation, Importation, and Situational Models. The Prison Journal, 82(3), 335–358.

Liebling, A., & Arnold, H. (2012). Social relationships between prisoners in a maximum security prison: Violence, faith, and the declining nature of trust. Journal of Criminal Justice, 40(5), 413–424.

Ministry of Justice. (2018). Understanding prison violence: A rapid evidence assessment. Review of 97 studies concerning violence among adult male prisoners.

Nixon, S. (2023). The dynamics of peer support work in a UK adult male prison: A way of performing positive masculinities?

Sykes, G. M. (1958). The Society of Captives: A Study of a Maximum Security Prison. Princeton University Press. The “pains of imprisonment” framework is discussed and developed in later scholarship.

Testing Effects of Social Rejection on Aggressive and Prosocial Behavior: A Meta-Analysis (2022). The meta-analysis included 3,864 participants and found that experimentally induced social rejection increased aggressive behaviour.

HM Inspectorate of Prisons. HMP Pentonville scrutiny visit and subsequent inspection material, documenting the severe restrictions and institutional conditions surrounding the COVID-19 period.