Abstract
The fact that prison officers are called ‘officers’ and that they wear uniforms has helped to obfuscate the question of what they do and what they are, because it has invited us to envisage their mission and organization as police-like, or as resembling the mission and organization of the military. The police analogy has been warmly reinforced over the years – in part because it has resonated with embittered offenders who see themselves as targets of persecution, and in part because it has appealed to alienated prison officers who conceive of police work as an occupation that is more respectable and more impressive than their own.
Policing has been equated with crime fighting, though police do not spend their time engaged in the pursuit of malefactors, and inventories of constabulary life are not redolent with scenarios of miscreants wrestled to the ground. Concurrently, time-and-motion studies in prison can confirm that the average officer’s workday does not provide many opportunities to intercept convicts bearing home-made knives or selling hard drugs. The job of prison officers is not to play cops-and-robbers, to the chagrin of gung-ho individuals who have a psychological investment in pretending that prison crime control is their overarching assignment, no matter what the mission statements of their organizations may have said about care, feeding, compassion and getting along with the customers.
A process of self-deception might also be at play where prison officers (and police officers) describe themselves as operating under militaristic strictures and hands-on supervision while they conscientiously try to go about performing their work, swimming against the supervisory tide. The so-called ‘paramilitary’ attributes of the police/prison officers’ role exist, but they exist largely on paper. Atomistic regulations and minutiae of job specifications are enshrined in bureaucratic documents, which are held in reserve so they can be invoked when there is trouble for which responsibility must be assigned. It is these contingent resuscitations of bureaucratic strictures that make it possible for officers (both police and prison) to complain that they are disproportionately attended to be second-guessed and censured (Toch, 2002).
A careful time-and-motion inventory would demonstrate that most prison officers (and police officers) operate largely on their own and exercise considerable discretion. It is the personal exercise of discretion by individual officers that we must understand if we wish to define the prison officers’ profession. But attaining insights into officers’ motives and assumptions can be a challenging task that only the most sensitive and intrepid researchers – such as the authors of the papers in this special issue – can undertake. The task is complicated, because (1) the world of prison officers is far from monothematic, and prison officers in different assignments in different settings in different facilities in different countries exercise their discretion differently, (2) prison officers do not ordinarily embark on bouts of self-analysis, and introspection may not be encouraged by fellow officers or the prison service, (3) prison officers are likely to believe that people who have never encountered the problems that they have experienced may not be able to understand them. Officers are apt to be unforthcoming to inquisitive outsiders, including denizens of academe and the ‘suits’ who inhabit administration buildings.
There are justifications for the officers’ mistrust, given a long tradition of scholarship that has depicted prison officers through the eyes of prisoners or those of prison administrators, instead of through their own, unfiltered perspectives. One of the lessons we must learn at this stage is that, if the prison officers’ trust is to be earned, we have to begin by abandoning some of our most fondly held and widely disseminated preconceptions. As a case in point, assume that you have administered a questionnaire to a representative sample of officers and have found (as you likely will have) that your respondents agree to a man and a woman with items such as ‘Improving the lives of prisoners facilitates the work of officers’ and ‘Officers tend to be better off where living conditions for prisoners are improved’. As you look at these data, ask yourself why you might have felt surprised by the unanimity of the response, or why you might be hesitating to take the officers’ answers at face value. Then ask yourself whether you expected prison officers to view staff–inmate relations as a zero-sum game, a dogma that was promulgated in a general sociology class that you occasionally attended 30 years ago.
Some general sociology concepts may prove serviceable but have to be somewhat redefined. Times have changed in corrections – in the US considerably for the worse, but in England perhaps for the better. Prison work has been described in the past – and can still be described – as people-tending work that must be conducted between two poles, which we have called ‘care’ and ‘custody’. However, the range within these two poles has expanded over the years – especially in the UK and Scandinavia. Given a wide range of options, the way officers chart their own course through care/custody waters not only defines their role but shapes the profession to which they belong. The sum of individual careers gets to be the collective professionalization of the role. The most professional (care) work that prison officers do can offer them new opportunities for learning and growth and the expanding of their horizons. Conversely, custody work offers few such opportunities and can sometimes be stultifying. The ‘professionalization’ of the custodial role, such as in specialized security assignments and through membership in groups such as extraction teams in super-maximum prisons, is apt to breed paranoia, callousness and an incapacity for empathy.
The cutting-edge research relayed in the pages that follow provides knowledge that contributes to our understanding of the prison officer profession. 1 An important challenge is to help prison officers to arrive at an understanding of their own profession. One way of doing this is to enlist prison officers as participants in our research. 2 Prison officers can contribute to the design of our studies by helping to ensure their authenticity and trustworthiness, can facilitate the collection of our data, and can join us in efforts to make sense of our findings. Most crucially, prison officers can be enlisted in efforts to translate research into action by participating in the planning of responsive and relevant interventions. Through such involvement, officers can cement their status as a profession by enhancing their ability to contribute to the welfare and rehabilitation of the prisoners in their charge. There is much scope for cross-jurisdiction learning. The essays in this volume constitute a rare and fine attempt to embark on this urgently needed and inherently complex task.