Bearing the Neoconservative Burden? Frontline Work in Prisons

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 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 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. …

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