An organisational ethnography of junior Prison Officer socialisation

监狱官员的工作是组织研究以及更广泛的社会科学中研究不足的主题。即使在监狱的社会学中，与囚犯相比，负责机构持续运行的官员也被大大低估了（Crawley，2004）。囚犯生活的内在文化：他们的日常生活，融入系统，获得资源，吸毒和无数其他主题包含了我们对整个机构中生活的理解的广泛研究。然而，对囚犯的过度关注只提供了一个有限的图片是什么样的生活是真正的一个整体机构。02 The Dog of the Dog（1976）[85]几十年前，他曾这样说过：在关于监狱生活的大量文献中，对监狱官员的认真关注实际上是非常少的。就好像他们是，就像GK切斯特顿著名的侦探小说中的邮递员一样，如此平凡和例行公事，以至于看不见。然而，他们的作用是至关重要的，尽管有这些话，在联合王国，关于监狱官员的文献仍然很少。一些研究探讨了监狱工作的后果，例如监狱官员普遍存在的严重工作压力，倦怠和心理健康问题（Kinman，Clements &哈特，2017）。很少有人对监狱官的职业世界进行过认真的研究，更少有人从社会学的角度研究新手如何学习做监狱官的工作。有一个详细的帐户的作用，英国监狱官员自1850年以来：研究冲突出版的J E托马斯在1972年。托马斯认为，监狱官员越来越多地被推到他们职业世界的边线。他概述了20世纪30年代至70年代监狱改革的“黄金时代”（第152 -180页），越来越强调对囚犯的改造，而不是惩罚他们。然而，对监狱官员的评判是基于他们控制囚犯的能力，而不是他们是否参与帮助囚犯。托马斯认为，这导致监狱官员越来越被排除在他们的职业之外：一方面，官员是控制的监护人，另一方面，他们的控制形式在不断增长的进步逻辑中越来越少。他们在安全和康复之间感到困惑，这导致他们在一个他们应该控制的世界中越来越疏远。更广泛的后结构主义批评（福柯，1977）在这里是一个受欢迎的补充，因为托马斯认为，作为改造囚犯的一部分，更人道地对待囚犯的转变，同样可以被视为国家权力的日益隐蔽，将惩罚的性质从身体转移到精神上。科恩和泰勒（Cohen & Taylor，1972）在某种程度上呼应了这一点，在那里，内政部在60年代和70年代对监禁的保密导致了对囚犯权利的严重限制。这些限制，例如获得医疗的障碍，表现为身体状况的恶化，但心理影响可能更深。托马斯（1972）没有深入研究这一论点，但他提醒我们，尽管对权力持怀疑态度，但理解政策对监狱官员的相对影响非常重要。人们不禁要问，监狱结构在多大程度上是政治性的，而不是纯粹的运作性的，以及由此产生的可见和不可见的后果。也有一个社会学的探索，什么是监狱官员在他们最好的样子。Liebling & Price（2001年）的《监狱官员》采用了赞赏性询问的方法，以详细了解监狱官员的最佳做法。中心论点是，任何监狱的动力最终取决于囚犯与监狱官员之间的关系。

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.