Vernacularising dignity: Prison officers,legality,and the enchantment of carceral humanity

Abstract

Connecting penology and theology, this paper aims to explore how universal prisoners’ legal rights are vernacularised and localised within a specific cultural context. Building on qualitative interviews from Israeli prison officers, we argue that despite being subject to a modern prisoners’ rights paradigm, prison officers vernacularise prisoners’ dignity and humanity through the theological lens of the ‘Image of God’ discourse (in a direct or hybridised way) to (1) re-enchant carceral humanity and (2) humanise carceral legality. The findings illuminate the potential contributions and limitations of vernacularisation work in the carceral context for theorising prison officers’ professional ethics and identity, and the cultural dimensions of the making of prisoners’ rights.

Keywords

vernacularisation dignity professional identity humanity legality human rights prison officers

Introduction

Modern prison systems are usually governed by human rights legal standards that seek, at least formally, to make carceral institutions less harmful and more humane (Kemp and Tomczak, 2024; United Nations, 2015). For years, legal scholars have explored the scope, interpretation, and the normative meaning of prisoners’ legal rights, highlighting their importance for advancing the ‘secular humanist’ vision of prison (Grear, 2007; Snacken, 2021: 306). Accordingly, criminologists are increasingly focusing on prisoners’ human rights and the role of prison officers in constructing and managing these rights (Calavita and Jenness, 2013; Crewe et al., 2015; Morgenstern and Rogan, 2023).

Scholars have suggested that universal human rights, such as the rights to dignity and humanity, are not necessarily implemented in a straightforward way. Rather, there is a complex process of norm translation which scholars label as ‘vernacularisation’, defined as a ‘process of translation within context’ (Merry and Levitt, 2017: 215). In this process when ‘human rights ideas connect with a locality, they take on some of the ideological and social attributes of the place but also retain some of their original formulation’ (Levitt and Merry, 2009: 448). The study of human rights’ vernacularisation seeks, therefore, to understand how human rights concepts ‘are redefined or rejected’ or circulated and resisted across nations and specific settings (Merry and Levitt, 2017: 215).

The dominant scholarly discourses place prisoners’ rights within modern, rational, and universal human rights (Snacken, 2021), applied to the context of the risk management-oriented and bureaucratic modern prisons (Cheliotis, 2006; Simon and Feeley, 2003); however, criminologists have overlooked how these rights are ‘vernacularised’ and what this means for the construction of prison power (Merry and Levitt, 2017). Considering the significance of prisoners’ dignity to all aspects of prison life, it is surprising that relatively little is known about how and through which localised discourses officers understand their duty to protect prisoners’ dignity and humanity (Garrihy, 2022). Thus, there is a need for a fuller understanding of prisoners’ rights ‘on the ground’. This understanding should include the cultural, theological, and sociological forces underlying the application of prisoners’ rights. Specifically, we need a finer understanding of how universal rights to dignity and humanity are localised through prison officers and what this means for their professional identity.

This paper seeks to fill this gap through findings from in-depth interviews conducted with prison officers in Israel, exploring how universal human rights to dignity and humanity, as adopted in prison law, are constructed by officers. Specifically, we will argue that prison officers, when interpreting prisoners’ human rights and constructing their own professional identity, ethics, and culture, appeal to the theological reservoir of the ‘Image of God’ (hereinafter: the image) – a fundamental doctrine and discourse in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, originating from the biblical narrative by which God created all human beings in ‘His own image’ (Gen. 1:26–27). Such vernacularisation work, we argue, allows officers, responsible for actualising the prisoners’ rights to dignity and humanity, to a) re-enchant carceral humanity, recognising that prisoners hold a divine quality that allows them to be elevated from their crimes and from the degradations of prison realities; and b) humanise carceral legality, providing them with a socio-cultural resource that allows them to go beyond the black-letter law of prison rules in order to personalise and humanise their work. The theological localisation of prisoners’ rights complicates the scholarly assumptions about the universal, secular, and bureaucratic nature of prisoners’ rights implementation. This analysis encourages prison scholars to expand their analytical lens beyond the ‘“iron cage” of an over-rationalized criminal justice system’ (Cheliotis, 2006: 314) to understand how prison work is enacted on the ground.

The image of God: Religion, penology, and human rights

Religious themes have always been part of punishment and its legitimacy on the one hand (Clear et al., 2000) and human rights on the other (Waldron, 2010). Indeed, the meaning of the image doctrine has been debated for centuries (Crisp, 2015) by legal scholars (Barak, 2015), philosophers (Waldron, 2010), and by sociologists and anthropologists (Draper, 2017). Throughout history, the image doctrine had profound implications for punishment. In late antiquity, rabbis and the fathers of Eastern Christianity viewed the image as representing the theomorphic quality of humans, and thus abolished de facto capital punishment (Lorberbaum, 2015). In contrast, Western Christian theologians often associated the image with the reasoned soul, and thus supported extinguishing the earthly body for the benefit of the soul (Whitman, 2003). Christianity reintroduced the bodily meaning of the image after the Second World War as a central point of a dignified relationship between human beings (Crisp, 2015). However, the punitiveness of modern prisons, particularly in racialised contexts, has disallowed the full application of this concept and effectively barred prisoners from serving as the embodiment of God's image, that is, as ‘image bearers’, and instead treated them as ‘no more than an animal’ (Jacob et al., 2023: 61).

Modern society has moved away from theological perceptions and, thus, away from the image doctrine. Such secularisation and disenchantment are the by-products of increasing cultural rationalisation, bureaucratisation, and devaluation of religion (Asad, 2003; Endrissat et al., 2015; Grear, 2007). Thus, the divine nature of human rights has become secularised through recognising human beings’ inherent dignity as rational and autonomous agents. This account views the image doctrine as archaic, quasi-mythological, abstract, and illegitimate in a secular society (Waldron, 2011).

The image discourse, however, is still perceived by key legal scholars as ‘a powerful idea, foundational in many comprehensive theories of morality, politics, and law’ (Waldron, 2011: 1), and as ‘enormously attractive’ for grounding the inalienable nature of all human rights (Waldron, 2010: 226). Some legal systems, specifically beyond the Western context, openly recognise this idea, holding that ‘inmates … are human persons created in the image of God like any other persons in the World, except for the fact that they are detained in Jail’ (Nagatangkhui v Nagaland, 1995: par. 11). Criminologists are paying increasing attention to the making of morality within the carceral sphere (Ievins and Williams, 2025), and recognise the image doctrine as a tool for criticising the dehumanising nature of prisons (Bounds, 2022). Nonetheless, how prison officers interpret and exercise the meaning of the image discourse vis-a-vis prisoners’ rights and their own work remains underexplored.

Dignity, prison officers, and professional identity

Dignity has been recognised as a foundation of prisoners’ rights in international legal instruments (United Nations, 2015). Even punitive prison systems, such as those in the United States, have increasingly called for the ‘revitalization of dignity as a value’ in prison law (Simon, 2021: 251). While criminological research on prisoners’ dignity and humanity is ‘only slowly emerging’ (Snacken, 2021: 309), it is increasing. This body of research has suggested that the experience of dignity in prison is fundamental for determining the moral quality of prison and its perceived legitimacy and survivability (Crewe et al., 2015; Liebling et al., 2011; Van der Valk and Rogan, 2021).

Prison officers are an essential element in the formulation of dignity within the application of prisoners’ rights. Officers’ everyday work is wrought with moral tensions; these tensions aim to balance security, equality, fairness, humanity, dignity, and empathy and to make the decisive distinctions that shape prison's moral climate (van Dijk et al., 2023). Maintaining dignity and humanity depends largely on the relationship between officers and prisoners, the officers’ professional culture, and the overall legal regime, cultural expectations, and norms (Higgins et al., 2024). Despite being a place where explicit law governs every aspect of behaviour (Calavita and Jenness, 2013), protecting the human dignity and humanity of prisoners faces three interrelated challenges. First is the difficulty of operationalising prisoners’ rights within a risk-management and punitive carceral sphere, where prisoners are often viewed as ‘undeserving’ (Herzog-Evans and Thomas, 2023), as lacking societal ‘rank’, or even as barely human (Agamben, 1998). Second is the common view among officers that prisoners’ rights are too vague, controversial, in conflict with prison safety, and constrictive for their complex prison work. The third challenge is the informal ‘counter-law’ constructed by officers to mask the real administrative power of prison or to manipulate prisoners’ rights (O’Connell and Rogan, 2023; Sallée, 2022).

Scholars are increasingly interested in the interaction between prison officers, their professional identity, and their sense of humanity. Some studies found that officers perceived their humanity to be ‘contaminated’ through their ‘dirty work’ with stigmatised and ‘polluted’ individuals who had been placed outside the ‘normal’ social system (Douglas, 1966; van Dijk et al., 2023). Other studies observed how officers were required to balance ‘carceral feeling rules’ that emphasised the dehumanisation of prisoners, with ‘humanism feeling rules’ that emphasised a recognition of prisoners’ suffering and need for help (Ricciardelli, 2019). Further studies found that although officers recognised prisoners’ suffering, they felt the need to suppress and constrain their emotions towards those prisoners based on their professional role (Higgins et al., 2024). At the same time, senior officers have been found in some contexts to perceive prisoners as people in need, or even as bearers of rights (Morgenstern and Rogan, 2023). Many findings rest between the extremes of denying prisoners’ humanity and dignity and embracing it (Snacken, 2021).

The process of constructing, negotiating, and implementing universal prison rights, such as the right to dignity and humanity is thus not straightforward. The rights to dignity and humanity are often vernacularised and localised in prison through these officers, who serve as ‘translators’. The process is also influenced by the societal legitimacy, prestige, and power these ‘translators’ hold as well as by the local socio-cultural contexts within which they work (Golan and Orr, 2012; Levitt and Merry, 2009). In addition, this process is impacted by the strength of existing indigenous ideas and norms, the historic role of human rights in the local community, and the socially prevalent attitudes towards ‘outside’ conceptions (Levitt and Merry, 2009). Vernacularisation of human rights has thus sometimes run counter to Western constructs and includes resistance to their neo-liberal, individualistic, Eurocentric, and imperialist characteristics (Doffegnies and Wells, 2022). Scholars who explored the vernacularisation of human rights in Israel found that the advancement of Palestinian rights resulted in the vernacularisation of global norms to local moralities, practices, and policies. The local norms were reached through a mix of adaptation and resistance and were influenced by Israeli society's deeply held religious views or by the legal language commonly employed by the state (Golan and Orr, 2012). While scholars have explored the importance of vernacularisation of human rights in various localised contexts, despite the key role of officers for interpreting prisoners’ rights, no study so far has explored how officers vernacularise these rights, and what this vernacularisation means for their prison work and professional identity.

Method

Context

The current study examined prison officers’ construction of prisoners’ rights and their own professional identity, and how they vernacularised prisoners’ rights to dignity and humanity to their localised cultural context. To do so, the authors analysed qualitative data from semi-structured interviews conducted in 2023 with Israel Prison Service (IPS) officers. The IPS is a national authority overseeing 23 prisons and six detention centres, established by the British mandate in 1921 through prison ordinances and regulations similar to other former British systems (IPS, 2025). In 2022, these facilities incarcerated around 14,300 people (of whom 4300 were ‘security prisoners’ imprisoned as part of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, Ben-Natan, 2024). At the relevant time for this study, the IPS staff included 9050 employees, 70% of them correctional officers. The IPS is culturally embedded in the country's defence forces, and its organisation is characterised by a relatively strong acceptance of power differences, and a somewhat low reliance on participative and caring organisational leadership models (Nelson and Appel, 2022).

As in many other prison services, IPS officers’ work is subject to a range of rules, ordinances, and legislation, and is guided by principles of human rights and public law (Council of Europe, 2020: ss. 18(1)-72(1)). By Israeli Prison Law (1971: s. 11B(b)), ‘a prisoner should be placed in appropriate conditions which will not harm his [or her] health and dignity’. The Prison Ordinance (2000: s. F(3)) determines that ‘officers will treat prisoners … [without] disrespecting his [or her] dignity as a human’. These policies emphasise the importance of maintaining prisoners’ dignity, and officers’ legal responsibility to do so, as part of their legal – rather than any moral or theological – authority. At the same time, theological narrative can be found within Israel's constitutional texts. The Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty (The Knesset, 1992), which states its purpose is ‘to protect human dignity and liberty’ (s.1a), states also: ‘The basic human rights in Israel are based on the recognition of the value of the human being [and] the sanctity of his life’ (s.1). This law is a common basis for dignity and humanity-based Supreme Court prison litigation brought to limit severe overcrowding or prevent the privatisation of prisons (Barak, 2015).

Sample and procedure

Given the narrative and subjective nature of the research questions, a qualitative research design was deemed most appropriate for the current study (Palinkas et al., 2015). Such an approach enables an in-depth exploration of meaning, perceptions, and lived experience as articulated by participants – those who are responsible for implementing prisoners’ rights – rather than imposing predefined categories (Palinkas et al., 2015). This methodological choice is therefore particularly suited to capturing the nuanced, context-dependent ways in which prison officers construct and interpret their experiences (Liebling, 2011; Liebling, 2021).

Accordingly, data for the study were collected from January to July 2023 through in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 21 officers. At the time of the interviews, the officers were employed in prisons across Israel. Ethical approval was obtained from the Hebrew University's institutional review board and the IPS research committee. As is common in exploratory qualitative research, voluntary sampling was employed (Cooksey and McDonald, 2019): first, the IPS research unit issued a call for participants, which included a description of the study, the expected duration of the interview, researchers’ contact details, and an assurance that participation was entirely voluntary. Following this call, 29 officers expressed interest in taking part. A research assistant subsequently contacted all those who had expressed interest, explained the study procedure, and offered possible dates and times for interviews. Of the original sample, eight officers ultimately declined to participate, primarily for practical reasons (e.g. workload), resulting in a final sample of 21 participants. All participants were knowledgeable and able to articulate their experiences in a reflective and considered manner.

The participants’ characteristics were relatively heterogeneous, in terms of age, gender, ethnicity, professional socialisation, and experience (e.g. rehabilitative-oriented versus security-oriented training), allowing diverse narratives regarding the officers’ experiences with prisoners’ rights. The sample included 13 men and eight women; age range was from 22 to 60 years (M = 42.4). While most participants (19) defined themselves as Jewish, two identified as Druze. Four officers identified as religious, while the others described themselves as secular. Ten participants served as prison officers; the rest consisted of unit officers (three), heads of prison infirmaries (two), and rehabilitation workers (six – three social workers, two education officers, and one prison chaplain). While all participants worked with ‘criminal’ prisoners, four of them also worked with ‘security prisoners’ (Palestinian prisoners whose prison category is terror-related); all but two worked with maximum security prisoners, a rate that largely corresponds with the general population of prison officers in Israel (IPS, 2025).

The interviews lasted 90 minutes on average, and were all conducted by both authors. Before each interview began, the participants provided written informed consent, were reminded that they could end the interview at any point, and that the interview would be recorded. All interviews were digitally recorded and transcribed verbatim, and later translated into English by the authors. Field notes were taken during the interviews mainly to document non-verbal responses.

The interviews included three sets of questions: first, participants were asked about their personal and professional backgrounds (e.g. what is your current position? how would you describe your professional experience?). The second set included general questions about prisoners’ right and their application in officers’ work (e.g. what do you think are the prisoners’ basic human rights? what is the meaning of prisoners’ rights to dignity and humanity, if any, to your work?). The last set included questions about various conceptions of prisoners’ rights, both modern and religious-traditional, and, specifically, what the significance of the image discourse is to their work, if any (e.g. what, if anything, does the image discourse mean to your work? how do you understand, if at all, its relation to prisoners’ rights?). Importantly, the authors emphasised their own neutrality about the existence, interpretation, and relevance of the image discourse to participants’ work or professional identity; they followed the participants’ leads, interrupting minimally to enable them to tell their narratives. To ensure participants’ anonymity, and in line with the study's ethical approval, each participant was assigned a numerical code upon completion of the interviews, and all transcripts were stored using these codes only. Any identifying information, including names and prison units, was removed from the data.

Each author independently conducted a thematic qualitative analysis. This approach combined an open inductive-oriented approach to theme generation with a more deductive application of themes derived from the literature (Proudfoot, 2023). The analysis included two stages: First, the authors used a bottom-up inductive approach without predefined conceptions, in which (1) all the interviews were carefully read by each author; (2) any content identified as relevant to the research questions was marked and given a code; and (3) the coded content was categorised into themes. In the second stage of analysis, the authors adopted a deductive, theory-driven (top-down) approach to re-examine the interviews through the theoretical doctrine of the image. Using this framework as an interpretive lens, the data was systematically revisited and re-coded to reflect the officers’ conceptualisation of the image. This process enabled the researchers to assess how officers articulated their understanding of human rights and to evaluate the extent to which these perceptions were reflected in their reported prison practices and decision-making. The deductive analysis therefore served to refine and contextualise the emergent themes from the first stage, linking officers’ perceptions of prisoners’ rights to their interpretation and application of the image in their everyday prison tasks. At this penultimate point in analysis, the themes were reviewed and discussed by the researchers until they reached agreement, and then finalised (Wright et al., 2024). Pseudonyms were used in reporting the findings to increase confidentiality.

Findings

When asked about the meaning of the concepts of prisoners’ humanity and dignity to their work, all participants proactively and naturally incorporated the conceptual lens of the ‘image’ discourse as important for justifying and contextualising their professional identity and ethics and operationalising the prisoners’ rights. All of the participants asserted that they fully understood what the ‘image’ means. They saw the image discourse as relevant to their understanding of the prison as ‘dehumanising’ and connected the image discourse to their conceptions of prison rights as re-enchanting carceral humanity and humanising carceral legality.

Prison as a dehumanising sphere

The image discourse provided the interviewees with a valuable resource for protecting both their own and the prisoners’ humanity, within the dehumanising world of prison. Prison has been characterised as a Hobbesian ‘state of nature’ centred around power, hierarchies, fear, and threat of harm (Hobbes, 1668/1994). Consistent with that characterisation, the interviewees described prison as a parallel normative order: ‘[P]rison is a parallel world to the real world. The rules here are different, the norms are different, the code of conduct is different’ (Ronen). Likewise, one interviewee stated: ‘It is scary to be in prison, physically and mentally. You are afraid to sleep, to be stabbed, afraid that when you walk by, they will burn you with hot water’ (Galit). The meaning of the moral values that support humanity outside prison is distorted within prison. An example was the value of respect:

Respect – not as the civil, moral word, respect – everyone who gets into prison learns this term. Respect is the first thing in prison, because of respect [people in prison are] murdered, spill hot water on each other, harm guards … respect is more important than life in prison. (Daniel)

In such a parallel normative order, prisoners’ humanity and image are at constant risk, whether that risk is in the form of being exposed to ‘humiliation’ or being erased: ‘being treated as nothing’. As Yoram puts it, ‘The more you blur the prisoner's uniqueness as a human, the more you erode their divine image’. The dehumanisation process could be incremental:

All of the prisons’ environment, places, the yard, the overall atmosphere harms a bit of humanity. Humans feel a bit like animals, like a cow in a farm, overcrowded, dirty, smelling bad. … This sends across the message ‘I [as an officer] am better than you, I deserve more, I’m more human than you; you can never feel privacy, you lost your value as a human…’. A human in his mind is free, but when you dominate him daily in an intensive manner this harms his liberty, his image, for sure. (Oriel)

Prison dehumanisation was also linked to acute acts, such as handcuffing, the application of physical power, and body-related humiliation: ‘sometimes they use [restraining measures] in a way that harms the image but there is no alternative’ (Shahar). The prisoners’ image is harmed ‘When they are taken in the Posta [prison bus], without windows, they vomit and pee on themselves and nobody cares’ (Innes).

Two groups of prisoners were described as particularly at risk of dehumanisation: those guilty of severe crimes and those with cognitive impairment. In both these cases, the participants used the image discourse to demarcate the imprisoned as subhuman, that is, lacking an image quality. The first group included prisoners who committed serious crimes (e.g. sex offences, terrorism, or murder), and as such may be viewed as having lost their humanity – excluded from the moral boundaries of community. Having read the prisoners’ legal file (e.g. indictments, sentencing remarks), the participants treated these incarcerated individuals as criminals rather than merely prisoners, and as such, undeserving of compassion for their suffering. In other words, participants viewed these incarcerated individuals as falling outside the boundaries of empathetic response based on their inhumanity: ‘his humanity was lost … in cases of sex offences, murder … I’ve read indictments that made me physically sick … I couldn’t look at this man [anymore]’ (Innes). Similarly, Daniel remarked: ‘The right to be human, to be treated like a human is lost after such [serious] crimes’. The second group included prisoners who suffered from a cognitive disability (e.g. dementia). These prisoners were perceived as having lost their full sense of humanity: ‘A human who suffers from serious psychiatric problems, I don’t think he can understand or feel some compassion for others; they don’t have humanity’ (Neli). Thus, in this isolated and parallel universe, these participants explained that the prisoners’ humanity may be lost because of the nature of their crimes or as the product of a mental limitation. In contrast, for other participants, the image served as a tangible quality even in cases of imprisonment for heinous crimes or those who were cognitively disabled.

To overcome this harsh prison reality and to work with people who are fundamentally moral-social ‘others’, the participants’ narratives offered two interrelated applications of the image discourse, allowing them to manage humanity within prison by re-enchanting carceral humanity and humanising carceral legality, as detailed below.

Re-enchanting carceral humanity

a) Re-enchanting prisoners’ humanity

The participants used the image discourse to enable them to increase their own and the prisoners’ value. The image, as they described it, supports the ‘re-enchantment’ of humanity. While they did not explicitly describe the doctrine as an ‘image of God’, they still connected it to sacred qualities embedded in the term. By using such rhetoric, they recognised that prisoners hold an ‘image’ that allows them to be ‘lifted up’ from their crimes and the degradations of prison realities, as suggested by Dana. Similarly, other participants described the prisoners as holding a ‘spiritual’ capacity, ‘sacredness that is in every human being’ or ‘something beyond’. Thus, the image was perceived as ‘higher’, granting more divine privileges than the narrow legal perception of rights:

Human image is a value which is hard to describe, it is our supreme value. As a society, human image should not be harmed, the human soul, integrity, all his rights cannot be taken, no matter by which crime. … Dignity is [only] dignity, human image is something higher, something supreme, something divine; the image is a cultural [thing] … we need to accept that we know that humans are equal and human lives are sacred. (Daniel)

The participants described one key feature of the image – its tangible quality – that derives, from religion ('soul’, ‘God’) and its related moral discourses (‘internal moral world’), but also from biological (‘evolution’) and sociological realities (‘culture’, ‘society’). This objective quality was inherent in the prisoners’ presence, unlike the more abstract concept of dignity. Rida distinguished them in the following way: ‘human image is material, it is the face, hand, leg, [while] dignity is more spiritual, something that you can’t feel, touch’. Similarly, Innes explained: ‘[the image] is something much tougher, much stronger than dignity, because it is part of you.’

As tangible, objective, and oft-times sacred, distinct from the prisoners’ crimes, political affiliation, physical or mental capacities, the image discourse protected the prisoner from dehumanisation: ‘[T]he quality of image is unrelated to the quality of the [criminal] act, opinion, gender, or anything else. … The image is an entity by itself’ (Lana). Such objective and embodied protection was important to counter the populist demand to use prison as revenge rather than for rehabilitation and future reentry:

We must preserve the image. This is unrelated to punishment. Why would we weaken the image? To feel good with ourselves? Of course, the victim wants to see the one who offended him behind bars, but punishment must preserve the human image because the person returns to society. (Saul)

In addition, the image discourse was used to resist the deterministic association of prisoners’ core identity with their crime: ‘[The image means] that your crime is not the only thing that represents you, that you are much beyond that’ (Innes). The image, for some, supported a perception that though ever-present, humanity was but ‘masked’ during the act of crime. This was especially important for prisoners who committed more serious crimes:

Even a person who threw his daughter into the sea, I don’t think he lacks an image, at this moment when he loses his image, I define it as the minute of the event, after that moment he puts himself together. At the time of crime, losing the image is like wearing a mask on your face, you become something else. When it is done you come back to yourself, like waking up from a dream. (Dana)

For some participants, the image discourse permitted an understanding of human fallibility and human nature and called for tolerance for failure or lapse. Thus, they recognised social factors as relevant to their view of the prisoner, including childhood trauma, sexual abuse, or poverty. In such cases, the image discourse allowed the participants to view the human behind the act, the person behind the prisoner: ‘I don’t see a prisoner, I’m seeing human beings’ (Hila). Furthermore, this perception of the image highlighted their shared human quality with the prisoners: ‘We are all human beings, we can all make mistakes, for example a fatal car accident and I will become a prisoner, [but] the human image always exists’ (Hatib).

The image was used by participants to demarcate a normative unbreachable threshold, protected by magical rather than human-legal forces. As such, this constructed boundary protected against the imposition of illegitimate pains of imprisonment, even in the face of heinous crime:

[E]very human has an image, every prisoner, even people who are very cruel. Here [in prison] their image is realised in the most evident and tangible way. This is sacred for me. Imprisonment by definition harms human dignity, but the image? Harming their inner soul? No, this is something that you cannot do, no matter how evil the [act] they did, like to let him sleep on the floor, without a shower. (Jacob)

The image thus provided a strong discursive tool to protect prisoners’ humanity against political or sociological forces or illegitimate populist punitive demands.

b) Re-enchanting prison officers’ humanity

Alongside the re-enchantment of prisoners, the image discourse was also used as a powerful tool supporting officers’ own sense of humanity. In this regard, while the participants recognised the prisoners’ inherent and sometimes sacred image, the participants also described the prison sphere as hampering and endangering their own human essence. The endangerment came from several sources – bearing witness to prisoners’ violence and being part of the prison regime – which led them to question their basic belief in humanity:

In prison [you] get into terribly inhumane situations. [The prisoners] just curse you and threaten you, and you say [to yourself], ‘Come on! This [is the same] prisoner that I took to the infirmary four hours ago’. It's an animalistic feeling for me … I think it caused me to lose my trust in people because I understand that people are not who they present themselves to be. (Oriel)

It is precisely because of this disillusionment that participants used the image discourse to perceive themselves and their professional identity as within the boundaries of humanity. By relating to themselves and to the prisoners in image terms, they were able to maintain humanity where it was both challenged and needed:

When you meet cruelty and evil, such as when it's part of a crime or terror organisation, it challenges your simple perception of what is good in humans and what is God's image in humans. It requires from you something deeper, otherwise [your perception] will collapse. … My years in prison have sharpened my understanding of what the image of God is and reinforced my belief that even from very low places, one can rise up. (Yoram)

The image allowed the officers to reclaim prisoner's humanity and hence their own sense of humanity, as ‘when you redefine the image of God you also define yourself anew’ (Yoram).

The threats to the officers’ own humanity extended beyond their prisoner interactions to encompass perceived public legitimacy. The participants referred to their work as lacking social capital and perceived as morally dubious, giving rise to low self-worth, as Rami explained:

Society sees us as guilty [due to perceived ill treatment of prisoners], not the guy that is the thief, the robber, the murderer. They see us as evil. I see every day at the prison entrance, the citizens, lawyers, all of them pass me, and you see their hate towards you. What did I do wrong?

Other officers further described the perceived lack of legitimacy:

Nobody cares about us, we are not firemen who save lives, we are not a philanthropic organisation, a charity, we are dealing with the backyard of society. (Ariel)

The image discourses that countered the challenges to self-value and legitimacy were particularly prevalent among participants working in rehabilitation or prisoners’ health services. For example, one prison rehabilitation worker harnessed his opportunities to promote the prisoners’ image as a special quality of his professional rehabilitative identity: ‘my role … is to embody my image of God and humanity in my environment. I have a unique opportunity that the rest of the people do not have’ (Yoram). Another participant, who was working in the prison infirmary, noted:

My sense of image was improved, for sure, because I believe that if you save one soul you saved the whole world. It is important to preserve this sense, because if you do not preserve it in our work, it is hard, mentally speaking … we are representing the human image. (Ariel)

In such cases, the view of the prisoners as ‘image bearers’ (Jacob et al. 2023) increased the value of the participants’ work, sanctifying the work and protecting their sense of moral and mental integrity.

Humanising carceral legality

The participants viewed prison legality as aiming to prevent ‘chaos’ and ‘anarchy’ (Dana) and to manage the risk-prone sphere of prison through an ‘aggressive legal system’ which focused on ‘order and security’ (Shahar). Against this background, the participants utilised the image, either to counter that harsh approach or to justify it. As a counter-balance to this approach, the participants, particularly those involved in prison rehabilitation or education workers, viewed the image discourse as a resource for personifying and humanising prison legality. For them, the image provides them with extra-legal moral force that dovetails with their human rights’ legal duties. Lana explained it as follow:

Human dignity is our legal duty. We have a duty to preserve human dignity by law. The image is how I see this man not because I must give him these rights [by law] but because my morality and values lead me there.

This perception of image also meant that officers could individualise their actions and ground them using a relational, rather than legal, context. The image allowed Lana to view herself and the prisoners as relational beings:

I need him to see himself as the image, and I need him to see me as the image and vice versa. I am a human who meets him, as human to human, as a social worker, this is my working tool, there is much theoretical knowledge and research, but at the end of the day I’m a human like him. (Lana)

Furthermore, the relational interpretation of the image held for these officers a reason to deviate from formal rules to preserve the prisoners’ humanity:

Everyone has an image, he committed crimes, some are very serious, but he is still a human. I often see people who are handcuffed, after attacking an officer but [when I saw such a person] I sat by him. It is the hardest thing for me to see a human handcuffed to the bed like an animal, and then he starts to talk. (Saul)

These narratives enlighten the significance to the officers of the mutual recognition of humanity. The officers thus view their sense of humanity and their work efficacy as connected – at least to some extent, and especially for prison rehabilitation – to the prisoners’ ability to view the officers as humans.

Several participants, especially those who worked in prison health services, similarly invoked the image in connection to body-related experiences, such as aesthetics or body-related shame. An example given was providing strip search privacy, though such protection is not specified in law: ‘When I conduct strip searches, I try to have the door closed’ (Hatib). Protecting the image, for them, was achieved through ‘helping them to keep themselves clean, their hygiene, toilet paper, that the place will look as pleasant as possible, the image relates to the body’ (Matan). Or as Neli, a prison infirmary officer, described:

There is a treatment bed, the same bed and mattress that was used for at least 10 years, prisoners laid on; it is a small thing, yes, and I was shocked, and just brought bed linen, and ordered the sheets to be changed for each patient. This helps them to preserve their image.

Other participants, however, rather than using the image to intersect with and humanise their duties under prison law, used the image to demarcate boundaries between prisoners’ humanity. Those participants used image-related rhetoric to ground and justify their non-empathic approach towards prisoners convicted of serious crimes, such as sex offenders, or those suffering from mental issues, viewed as ‘psychopaths’. According to the rules, ‘Everyone gets more or less the same [treatment], equally, without regard to punishment considerations’ (Ronen). So, although the formal rules did not allow such division, they rationalised this distinction on their perception of the image. They used their ‘professionalism’ to justify their non-empathic approach for those who have ‘less human image’:

[I]f someone did a horrific thing I will approach them with the minimum [attitude] possible. I would say ‘hi, what do you need?’, without anything [else], very practical, and that's all. A man who took another life has less human image. It's easier for me to speak to a tax offender. With someone who killed many people, I speak without too many sentiments, 100% work, no laughs. (Elihu)

Finally, those participants who adopted the strict religious meaning of the image used it not only to create rights but also as grounds for constructing duties which are hard to integrate with liberal human rights. Such duties included limiting prisoners’ rights, by, for example, enforcing rehabilitation, to promote the officers’ sense of the prisoners’ image:

The image of God is not reflected in [the prisoner's] ability to demand all the time from the environment. It is also shown through restraint, for example, drug addicts, we all know, they don’t really manage their lives, and the image of God is also about restraint, not only fulfilling every individual right. (Yoram)

Such a view, while uncommon in participants’ narratives, exposes the potential of the image to promote disciplinary power in the guise of ostensibly humanitarian care. It shows how the image could be used in opposite ways.

Discussion

The findings challenge common scholarly assumptions about the universal, secular, and legal nature of prisoners’ rights as constructed within carceral reality. They push prison scholars to expand their analytical lens beyond legal-rational-bureaucratic frameworks to understand how prison work is enacted on the ground. Despite the rational and secular nature of prisoners’ rights (Snacken, 2021), and the overall bureaucratic and managerial logic of modern prisons (Cheliotis, 2006; Simon and Feeley, 2003), we found that prison officers engage in reflective and conceptual thinking about the nature of their tasks. They incorporate the image discourse as a lens through which they construct their prison work and professional identity, serving as an existential force in places where suffering and misery are inherent (Liebling, 2021).

As the findings suggest, the participants vernacularised dignity and humanity into ‘human image’, offering a less theological version of the term. However, by using the term ‘image,’ they preserved, at least to some degree, the powerful religious symbolism inherent to this term, and thus connected it to sacred qualities (Keane, 1997). The officers ′use of the image discourse demonstrates the importance of studying how prisoners’ rights are made beyond the control of legal institutions (Levitt and Merry, 2009). Specifically, the findings reflect the hybrid localisation of human rights, combining secularised and local-theological discourses, as found in other human rights contexts (Doffegnies and Wells, 2022).

Furthermore, the findings suggest that while officers use an image discourse to construct their work and professional identity, they do so without committing to the full religious depth that this discourse may entail. The term ‘Image of God’ is loaded with densely layered religious values and assumptions (Waldron, 2010). Prison officers, however, mostly vernacularise dignity into ‘human image’ rather than ‘God's image’. In doing so, they create a hybrid terminology that goes beyond the legal right to dignity, preserving, at least partly, the implicit sacredness of prisoners’ humanity and dignity (Keane, 1997).

In the first theme, participants use the image discourse for re-enchanting carceral humanity. While prisoners may be viewed as ‘impure’ (Douglas, 1966) by the officers because of their crime, mental status, risk of violence or the humiliating prison conditions, the image creates a powerful dialectical counterpart through appealing to ‘its opposite, the sacred’ (Garfinkel, 1956: 423). The multiple benefits of the image rhetoric explain the interest of incorporating the image into officers’ ideological professional framework. Language has been found to be an effective tool for enchantment, magic, and initiating and legitimising actions in other contexts (Suddaby et al., 2017). The use of the image here seems to entail an attempt to elevate the value of prisoners, functioning as a performative ritual pronouncement or a form of ‘speech act’ that assumes a pragmatic meaning. By saying that prisoners have the image, the participants are doing something – performing the prisoners’ and their own uniqueness and humanity (Austin, 1975).

The image discourse as a re-enchanting tool helps officers humanise prisoners, particularly those who are often perceived as lacking moral, cognitive, or social status, and are therefore subject to public resistance to their rights (Snacken, 2021). It provides prison officers with an external and objective quality which they view as stronger than modern rights, serving even those prisoners who seem to be morally undeserving of rights because they deviate so powerfully from the boundaries of the social contract. The officers view the image as providing them an inalienable source of rights which does not depend on the particular law or the public's opinion (Grimsrud and Zehr, 2002). It allows them to overcome ‘character essentialism’ (Lacey, 2011) which labels such prisoners as evil and to cross the binary distinction between prison and society, by appealing to a shared capacity of all humans, thus justifying the expression of compassion, humanity, and empathy towards prisoners (Higgins et al., 2024).

The re-enchantment practiced by the officers is also self-directed. As found in previous studies (Crawley, 2004; Garrihy, 2022; Higgins et al., 2024), prison officers face low professional self-image and to the lack of public recognition and device strategies to increase the capital of their profession. As the findings suggest, the image discourse allows officers to redefine their work as a ‘sacred task’ rather than ‘dirty work,’ appealing to the prestige that is commonly associated with spiritual work (Crawley, 2004). In addition, this use of the image discourse could be viewed as ritualistic. They ‘wash away’ the taint of their contaminated work not through distancing themselves from the ‘sinners,’ but rather through re-enchanting their work and increasing their own sense of humanity and legitimacy; both they and the prisoners are ‘image bearers’ (Douglas, 1966; Jacob et al., 2023). By defining their work as sacred, they can mitigate their sense of immorality for being exposed to or even implementing acts of dehumanisation towards prisoners (Garrihy, 2022).

The second theme exposes another dimension of the image discourse as a tool for expanding and challenging the limits of carceral legality. The officers feel that the risk-oriented nature of prison rules is enough to fully address their professional responsibilities. Despite the ‘hyper legal’ (Calavita and Jenness, 2013) nature of prison, covered by a dense web of rules, there are still broad areas of personal engagement that remain unaddressed. Moral life is not reducible to socio-legal norms (Ievins and Williams, 2025). Possibly, by being in a parallel ‘state of nature’ (Hobbes, 1994 [1668]), officers transform their ‘law’ back into ‘narrative’ through the image discourse (Cover, 1983). Put differently, officers turn to ‘the depths of the pre-political and pre-social foundation of the being’ (Waldron, 2010: 226) to find a normative resource for managing the shortcomings of carceral legality.

Scholars found that prison officers situate their discussions of what constitutes decent and fair procedures within the parameters of legal regulation (Morgenstern and Rogan, 2023). The image discourse allows the officers to extend the boundaries of prison legality. Prison law may tell officers what to do but not how to be in relationship with prisoners, specifically for relational contexts of rehabilitation or medicine. Thus, legal compliance alone feels insufficient – even dehumanising – for officers whose work requires daily human connection. Our findings suggest that officers use the image as a fluid standard that allows them to go beyond the black-letter law of prison rules in order to personalise and humanise their work. The image discourse, even in secularised form, provides what legal language cannot: a framework for viewing prisoners as persons rather than merely rights-bearers and allowing them to navigate existential questions about human worth, deservingness, and their own complicity in suffering. This includes offering a framework for addressing issues that current prison rules do not – and possibly could not – cover, such as ‘humanism feeling rules’ (Higgins et al., 2024) that focus on helping, caring for, and reducing the suffering of prisoners. For these officers, the image is particularly useful for managing body-related shame, such as preserving the prisoners’ hygiene in the prison infirmary or toilet, or protecting the prisoners’ dignity when they undergo strip searches. Especially for those involved in relational, therapeutic, and emotional work, such as social or health workers, the image offers an important framing that allows for intersubjective relations between similar humans rather than the officer-prisoner hierarchy dictated by law (Grimsrud and Zehr, 2002). The image allows such an encounter to be transformed into a ‘meeting’ based on a ‘horizontal’ relationship between two moral agents rather than merely an instrumental ‘vertical’ encounter (Buber, 1923/1984). This holds importance for understanding professional identity of officers, particularly the rehabilitation-oriented, as emerges from the ability of prisoners to ‘mirror’ to officers their shared humanity. Without this mutual recognition, officers’ own professional identity and wellbeing are at risk of collapsing into a feeling of being merely ‘dirty’ instruments of the degradation of others (Garrihy, 2022).

However, the image discourse is not only benevolent; it may also be used selectively to legitimise and establish distinctions, hierarchies, and power in two main ways. First, for some participants, the image was used as a powerful boundary-maker that was selectively used to demarcate human from non-human prisoners (those who lost all or some of their image after committing heinous crimes). It allows officers to neutralise their sense of empathy and to justify their indifferent approach during their prison work for those who they viewed as falling outside the boundaries for their crimes or mental state. Second, the image discourse allows officers to justify a paternalistic coercive rehabilitation towards prisoners for promoting their image (e.g. to enforce rehabilitation), despite the legal demands for equal treatment, a finding that integrates with previous research that supports the selective use of prisoners’ rights (Herzog-Evans and Thomas, 2023). These findings support studies showing how prisoners’ rights can legitimise further prison punitivism rather than human rights, as recognised in other contexts (Kemp and Tomczak, 2024; Van der Valk and Rogan, 2021). The findings also bolster the notion that the vernacularisation discourse by local actors is strongly imbued with notions of worthiness, not aimed at protecting rights generally, but only for certain individuals who deserve them (Doffegnies and Wells, 2022).

Finally, these findings should be interpreted in light of several limitations. Some of these limitations are inherent to the nature of the study (e.g. other possible interpretations, specific context). Furthermore, although the participants reflect a range of prison facilities, they were all employed by the same prison service. Future studies should examine similar questions in different prisons, and specifically those with different religious and socio-legal contexts or prisoners’ rights themes. Finally, while one should be cautious in expressing generalisations, this study seems to be among the very few empirical efforts to explore the complex issues surrounding theological concepts and prisoners’ rights and the complex process of vernacularisation that may involve the translation of prisoners’ rights from legal, religious, and philosophical narrative to cultural-local narrative. Future research, with other incarceration agencies, especially outside the Western context, will help clarify whether these results are unique, and what this means for criminology.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We thank Shmuel Baron, Benny Porat, Iris Ballas, and Adiel Zimran for their helpful suggestions and comments on earlier drafts, and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions. We are also grateful to the study participants, Yigael Laloum, and the Israeli Prison Service's Research Unit for their cooperation and support.

ORCID iD

Netanel Dagan

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

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