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Article Excerpt
Those critical of the prison system and its brutalities sometimes condemn COs [Corrections Officers] whole-cloth, forgetting that the prison is often a replacement for the closed, local factory, and that if the workers, through lack of other choices, were on an assembly line instead of a cellblock, some of those who are so quick to label them all as sadists would be standing up for them as the little guys (Dow, 2006: 12).
A GROWING BODY OF CRITICAL WORK IS GRAPPLING WITH THE ADVANCE OF LAW-AND-ORDER politics, and with related trends toward "mass imprisonment"--particularly in the United States (Garland, 2001). This literature describes a strategic shift toward the "penal management of poverty" that has occurred at the expense of more welfare-oriented Keynesian approaches over the last 30 years (Hallett, 2002; Platt, 2001). As public policy, the punitive model relies much more heavily on criminal law, and thus extends the class biases and racially specific effects of criminalization. Among its supporters is a network of vested interests, now widely described as the "prison-industrial complex" (Parenti, 2000; Schlosser, 1998).
But as public policy--or corporate practice--the punitive model still relies on organizations composed of human beings. As implied in the quotation above, the critical perspective has yet to deal adequately with those on the front lines of an expanded carceral regime, and too often falls back on stereotypes about the people involved. This is unfortunate because workers in this field are subject to the same forces that are now degrading working conditions across the economy. Yet they are also strategically placed at the forefront of the burgeoning coercive apparatus, one purpose of which is to support that general degradation of work (McElligott, 2007).
Using evidence from the existing literature, and illustrations from an ongoing investigation of Canada's first privately run adult prison, this article argues that (1) COs are best seen as frontline workers, currently pressured by management initiatives that intensify and deskill their work; and (2) COs occupy an exposed part of an increasingly coercive regime. Neoconservative efforts to boost the deterrent power of the state rely heavily on market forces and privatization. Such efforts are degrading CO work and endangering those who do it.
Guards As Frontline Workers
Although they are intimately connected with the exercise of state coercion, frontline corrections officers are workers, by all the traditional measures of this term. Drawn from largely working-class backgrounds, they work like other employees in hierarchical organizations that are designed to exclude them from key decisions. Like other public employees, their connection to profit making tends to be indirect, but palpable. (If schools instill the work ethic, prisons and police have always had a role in regulating idleness, its notional opposite.) Like service workers, their daily routine involves a great deal of face-to-face interaction with "clients," which demands some proficiency in "people skills."
The latter is a somewhat amorphous term, but it overlaps substantially with what Arlie Hochschild (1983: 137-161) calls "emotional labor." Those engaged in emotional labor manage the emotions of other people, while also modulating their own responses to fit the needs of the job. For example, many COs adjust their composure to establish a certain "presence" that they feel contributes to order on the cellblock.
Emotional labor is one aspect of frontline state work. But regulating interactions between the state and its client/subject populations also involves managing the flow of its resources downward. Acting as gatekeepers, COs administer the mixture of service and coercion that constitutes most state policy. In prison, this means distributing a pared-down list of necessities such as food, clothes, and showers. Service quality is seldom so consequential as it is inside the closed and intimate confines of the prison community. Enforced dependency and deprivation concentrate inmates' attention on the distribution of these basics, and this work can stoke potentially explosive tensions if mishandled.
Beyond the necessities, guards can provide access to institutional resources, contacts with the outside world, various sorts of "favors," conversation, counseling, and even help in filing grievances. All of these are delivered, of course, in a larger context of custody and control that infantilizes inmates and skews the distribution of such "extras" to encourage "good behavior" (Conover, 2001: 236). COs generally have some capacity to influence inmates through gatekeeping, but the repertoire available to them has long been judged "pathetic," given what Sykes (1999: 61; 40-62) called the "defects of total power" in prisons. As a result:
Far from being omnipotent rulers who have crushed all signs of rebellion against their regime, the custodians are engaged in a continuous struggle to maintain order--and it is a struggle in which the custodians frequently fail (Ibid.: 42).
Like other frontline workers, COs take the flak for such failures--although in this case the consequences of disorder fall heavily on "clients" too, in the form of inmate-on-inmate violence. Not all prisons are as dangerous as the maximum-security facility Sykes studied in the 1950s. A more elaborate set of inducements, and a more fearsome set of punishments, has been constructed since that time. Despite efforts to professionalize the frontline workforce (into "Correction Officers" rather than "guards") through better training, codes of conduct, and so on, the power to access this broader range of rewards and sanctions has generally not filtered down to COs. Guards may be the human face of a fundamentally oppressive structure, but in this position their formal powers are limited, and their professional status truncated--a situation familiar to other frontline occupations such as nursing and teaching, and one that has spurred unionization in all these groups (Macdonald, 1995: 133-138).
COs do have powers related to discipline and control that set them apart from other workers, but formal sanctions tend to depend on management follow-through, and bring very little in the way of status and respect. Unless connected to inmate work programs, this sort of control and discipline does not reflect power in the labor process. In fact, as Maeve McMahon (1999: 63) observes, "most of the actual tasks [male corrections officers] undertake parallel those traditionally undertaken by women in the home." COs shepherd their charges through meals and chores, and "devote much energy to preventing petty squabbles from developing and escalating." So while COs gain a measure of privilege through their "managerial" duties, their powers tend to be restricted and custodial in nature.
Inmate Power and Guard Insecurity
It may be objected that prisons deliver a unique sort of control, and that helping to administer what Sykes calls the "pains of imprisonment" (1999: 63-83) taints prison work so deeply that COs are more properly seen as subaltern enforcers, rather than workers. The enduring paramilitary approach to organizing prison staff, and the license to violence it seems to entail, can be invoked to defend such a position. Yet it is important to understand how, in this environment, coercion is deployed and restrained. COs are very aware of the practical constraints on their use of force, and consequently develop work styles that do not depend solely on coercive means. These incorporate practices such as talking, bargaining, and "peacemaking." As we will see, though, factors well beyond the reach of guards (and prisoners) may limit their room for maneuver.
The consensus in prison narratives seems to be that a purely coercive approach is rarely tenable, either at an individual or institutional level, as the primary tool for controlling inmates (Conover, 2001; Owen, 1988; Kauffman, 1988). Surprisingly, one of the factors that sets prison work apart from other frontline jobs is the power of the client population--a power usually traced to sheer numbers and enclosed spaces. The low ratio of staff to prisoners makes the CO's job inherently dangerous. Sometimes the work environment is "poisoned before we enter the door," so that:
if I'm in a room with say 200 people, chances are that 195 of those people really don't like me, and 150 of that 195 would just as soon see me literally die as talk to me right (G1, 2006).
Aside from being outnumbered, guards are usually unarmed as they walk among inmates, and so must rely on support from elsewhere should the need arise. Depending on the...
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