Doing Shifts: The Role of Correctional Officers [Hardcover]

This book offers an incisive account of correctional officers daily practices, their role and how they represent themselves in relation to the prison, and by extension, the state. Drawing on ethnographic research undertaken in an Italian prison, Doing Shifts explores how correctional officers perspectives and shared views reproduce and reinforce working behaviors with specific administrative and bureaucratic features. It explores how global penal trends are enacted in a local context and how the prison systems plays into our understanding of institutional and administrative power. It advances the discussion on organizational and institutional power through the lens of social control and street-level bureaucracy literature. It also explores gender variations in the discretional use of correctional officers power. This book has a cross-disciplinary appeal for criminologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and political scientists and to policy-makers.

Chapter 1. Introduction: From poverty governance to disciplinary practices in prison.- Chapter 2. Pervasive social control: How merit shapes authorities perception.- Chapter 3. Being correctional officer: Unattended expectations and coping strategies.- Chapter 4. Identifying as correctional officer: A relational factor.- Chapter 5.  Acting as correctional officer: Authority trough discretion.- Chapter 6. Conclusion.

Serena Franchi is Research Fellow at Istituto degli Innocenti research centre, Florence, Italy. Serena holds a PhD in Social and Political Change at the University of Florence and University of Turin and has 12 years of professional and academic experience in researching  the Italian prison system.