Doing Shifts: The Role of Correctional Officers

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.