An organisational ethnography of junior Prison Officer socialisation

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The work of prison officers is an understudied topic in organization studies, as well as the wider social sciences. Even in the sociology of the prison, the officers who are responsible for the on-going running of the institution have been vastly understudied in comparison to the inmates (Crawley, 2004). The inner culture of inmate life: their routines, integration into the system, access to resources, drug use and countless other topics encompass a wide body of research in our understanding of what life in a total institution entails. Yet an over focus on the inmates provides only a limited picture of what life is really like inside a total institution. As Hawkins (1976: 85) argued several decades ago: It is in fact remarkable how little serious attention has been paid to prison officers in the quite extensive literature on prison life. It is almost as though they were, like the postman in GK Chesterton's celebrated detective story, so commonplace and routine a feature of the scene as to be invisible. Yet their role is of critical importance.Despite these remarks, literature on prison officers in the United Kingdom remains sparse. Some studies have explored the consequences of prison work, such as the severe levels of job stress, burnout and mental health issues prevalent in prison officers (Kinman, Clements & Hart, 2017). Few have conducted a serious study into the occupational world of a prison officer, and even less have looked sociologically at how novices learn to do the job of a prison officer. There was a detailed account of the role of The English Prison Officer since 1850: A Study in Conflict published by J E Thomas in 1972. Thomas argued that prison officers had been increasingly pushed to the side lines of their occupational world. He outlined that the 'Golden age' of prison reform between the 1930's and 1970's (p.152-180) placed increasing emphasis on reforming inmates, rather than punishing them. Yet prison officers were judged based on their ability to control inmates, rather than their involvement in helping them. Thomas reasoned that this caused prison officers to become increasingly excluded from their profession: on the one hand, officers were the custodians of control, and on the other, their forms of control increasingly diminished in the midst of an ever increasing progressive logic. They were in a confusion between security and rehabilitation, which led to their increasing alienation in a world they were supposed to control. The wider poststructuralist critique (Foucault, 1977) is a welcome addition here, for what Thomas viewed as a shift to treating prisoners more humanely as part of rehabilitating them, may be equally viewed as an increasing concealment of state power, shifting the nature of punishment from physical to mental. This is a point somewhat echoed by Cohen & Taylor (1972), where the Home Office's secrecy of imprisonment in the 60's and 70's led to a severe restriction of prisoner rights. These restrictions, such as barriers to obtaining medical treatment, manifest as physical deterioration, but the psychological implications may have ran far deeper. Without delving into this argument, Thomas (1972) alerts us to the importance of understanding the relative impact of policy on prison officers, albeit with a scepticism of power in mind. One wonders at the extent to which prison structure is political as opposed to purely operational, and the consequences, both visible and invisible, of this. There has also been a sociological exploration of what prison officers at their best look like. The Prison Officer by Liebling & Price (2001) used appreciative enquiry to generate a detailed understanding of the best practices of prison officers. The central proposition is that the dynamics of any prison ultimately lies in the relations between the prisoners and prison officers.