An organisational ethnography of junior Prison Officer socialisation

监狱官员的工作在组织研究以及更广泛的社会科学中是一个研究不足的主题。即使在监狱的社会学中，与囚犯相比，负责监狱持续运行的官员也被极大地忽视了(Crawley，2004)。囚犯生活的内在文化：他们的例行公事、融入系统、获取资源、毒品使用和无数其他主题包含了广泛的研究，以帮助我们理解在一个完整的机构中生活意味着什么。然而，对囚犯的过度关注只能提供一个有限的图景，让人了解整个监狱里的生活到底是什么样子。正如霍金斯(1976：85)几十年前所主张的那样：事实上，在关于监狱生活的相当广泛的文献中，对狱警的认真关注是如此之少，这是值得注意的。几乎就像GK·切斯特顿著名侦探小说中的邮递员一样，他们是如此平凡和例行公事，以至于看不见这个场景。尽管有这些言论，但有关英国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、职业倦怠和心理健康问题(Kinman，Clements&Hart，2017)。很少有人对狱警的职业世界进行认真的研究，更没有人从社会学的角度研究新手如何学习做狱警的工作。自1850年以来，J·E·托马斯在1972年出版了一项关于冲突的研究，对英国监狱官员的角色进行了详细的描述。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上。他概述了从1930年的S到1970年的S之间的监狱改革的黄金时代，(第152-180页)越来越重视改造囚犯，而不是惩罚他们。然而，对狱警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他们。托马斯推断，这导致狱警越来越被排除在他们的职业之外：一方面，狱警是控制的保管人，另一方面，在不断进步的逻辑中，他们的控制形式越来越少。他们在安全和康复之间陷入了困惑，这导致他们在一个本应由他们控制的世界中日益疏远。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，因为托马斯认为是向更人道地对待囚犯的转变，作为改造他们的一部分，可能同样被视为对国家权力的日益隐藏，将惩罚的性质从肉体转变为精神。这一点与科恩和泰勒(1972)的观点有些相似，当时内政部在60年代的S和70年代的S时期对监禁的保密导致了对囚犯权利的严格限制。这些限制，如获得医疗的障碍，表现为身体恶化，但其心理影响可能要深得多。托马斯(1972)没有深入探讨这一论点，而是提醒我们理解政策对狱警的相对影响的重要性，尽管在头脑中对权力持怀疑态度。人们想知道监狱结构在多大程度上是政治性的，而不是纯粹的操作性，以及这种结构的有形和无形的后果。此外，还有一项社会学研究，探索监狱管理人员的最佳状态。利布林和普莱斯出版的《狱警》(2001年)对狱警的最佳做法进行了详细的了解。中心命题是，任何监狱的动态最终都取决于囚犯和狱警之间的关系。

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.