Canadian correctional officers,institutionalization,and the social impacts of prison work

Introduction

Haney's (2003) research on institutionalization provides an account of the psychological consequences of imprisonment, detailing how incarcerated people are psychologically shaped, or ‘prisonized’ (Clemmer, 1940: 299), by their time in custody. Institutionalization and prisonization ¹ processes culminate in many individual-level psychological changes (Haney, 2012). For incarcerated people, these changes manifest as adaptations in response to the pains of imprisonment, a set of deprivations that exist within the prison environment (Haney, 2003; Sykes, 1958). Prisonization research focuses on incarcerated people and their difficult experiences of adjustment post-release (Martin, 2018), but modern conceptualizations also relate to parents, children, and romantic partners of incarcerated people—all of whom have connections to prisons (Aiello and McCorkel, 2018; Comfort, 2003; Reizabal et al., 2023). However, current analyses of institutionalization effects are limited to incarcerated people and their associates, meaning there is little insight into whether these processes may explain the experiences of other groups.

Research on correctional officers (COs) consistently describes prison work as a damaging experience that negatively impacts the physical and mental health outcomes of correctional staff (Frost and Monteiro, 2020; Ricciardelli, 2019; Schultz, 2022; Smith, 2021; Wills et al., 2021). A broad reading of the institutionalization literature demonstrates remarkable similarities to CO mental health research, raising questions about whether prisonization might explain social and psychological changes experienced by COs. We draw on 131 semi-structured interviews with Canadian COs to examine this overlap and answer the following research questions: 1. How do officers describe prison work as harmful, and which parts do they specifically identify? and 2. Do these narratives justify a broader application of prisonization to COs?

Literature review

Clemmer (1940: 299) defines prisonization as ‘the taking on in greater or less degree of the folkways, mores, customs, and general culture of the penitentiary’. Haney (2003: 38) updates and modernizes this definition, defining it as ‘the incorporation of the norms of prison life into one's habits of thinking, feeling, and acting’. Haney outlines several harmful psychological changes that result from institutionalization, including hypervigilance, distrust, suspicion, alienation, social withdrawal, isolation, psychological distancing, and emotional overcontrol (2003: 42). These adaptations reduce incarcerated peoples’ ability to productively navigate interpersonal and family relationships post-release (Haney, 2003; Martin, 2018).

Researchers have built on these insights and now widely employ institutionalization as an analytical tool to explain other groups’ experiences with prisons. Comfort (2003) argues that women visiting prison experience ‘secondary prisonization, a weakened but still compelling version of the elaborate regulations, concentrated surveillance, and corporeal confinement governing the lives’ of incarcerated people (2003: 101). Incarcerated peoples’ family members consequently experience reduced rights, fewer resources, and marginalization. Aiello and McCorkel (2018) develop this concept, identifying elements of secondary prisonization in the experiences of children visiting mothers in prison. Likewise, Reizabal et al. (2023) discuss the psychological effects of secondary prisonization on older adults with incarcerated children.

This work has expanded and applied prisonization to groups beyond incarcerated people. However, such research has tended to focus on associates of incarcerated people, rather than on people who work in prison (Ricciardelli, 2019). Scholarship on COs instead tends to focus on their roles as powerholders, who enforce rules and reproduce the controls incarcerated people experience (Applegate et al., 2023; Crewe, 2011a; Schultz et al., 2021; Williams and Liebling, 2023). These analyses overlap with CO culture research and identify broadly negative impacts of officer subcultures on how prison staff act toward incarcerated people (Schoenfeld and Everly, 2023; Schultz, 2023a). CO cultures are characterized by hypermasculine values of physical and mental toughness (Ricciardelli, 2019), and Higgins et al. (2022) suggest these cultures play a key role in shaping negative interactions between COs and incarcerated people. Schoenfeld and Everly (2023: 232) further describe an officer ‘security mindset’, a set of behavioural norms that emerge from CO culture and govern their behaviour toward incarcerated people. These norms are primarily concerned with limiting relationships with incarcerated people to matters of ‘official business’, thereby distancing officers from rehabilitative goals and creating a hostile ‘us-versus-them’ attitude among officers (Schoenfeld and Everly, 2023: 234). Prospective COs have these values engrained into them during their training and reinforced at every stage of their careers (Adorjan and Ricciardelli, 2023; Eriksson, 2023). Schultz (2023b: 4) has recently argued that these processes create a ‘vulnerability axiom’ for officers, as COs’ perceptions of vulnerability become a central lens shaping nearly every part of how officers perceive their work and their relationships with incarcerated people and other COs.

Research on COs and prison staff is currently undergoing significant expansion (Arnold et al., 2023; Brierley, 2023; Higgins et al., 2023). As Ricciardelli (2019: 64) notes, ‘working in prison or living in prison – both ways to experience prison – shapes both correctional workers and those in custody’, and much of the new scholarship implicitly focuses on how prison work damages COs. Research on officer mental health reveals major impacts of prison work on the long-term mental wellness of correctional staff in Canada and the United States (Carleton et al., 2018), and research by Frost and Monteiro (2020) highlights elevated levels of suicide among COs, with rates considerably exceeding the national average. Likewise, Wills et al. (2021) suggest that officers are unlikely to seek mental health help, citing hypermasculine institutional cultures and concerns surrounding stigma, confidentiality, and punitive responses to self-disclosure.

Officer cultural responses exacerbate mental health issues. Researchers suggest that COs react to external situations in ways consistent with the embodied identity, or habitus, of being a prison worker (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992; Haggerty and Bucerius, 2021; Lerman, 2013). Officers embody suspicion, techniques designed to mitigate risk and reduce vulnerability, and conformance to an ‘us versus them’ attitude in solidarity with other officers (Ricciardelli, 2019; Schultz, 2023b; Worley et al., 2023). As Lerman notes, COs frequently develop a ‘hardened workplace persona’ characterized by ‘rigidity, aloofness, or even aggression’, which poses a threat to their relationships beyond the prison walls when their actions do not align with expected social roles (2013: 126). Unsurprisingly, research suggests these values damage CO relationships with people outside of prison (Higgins et al., 2023). Garrihy (2022) describes how COs view themselves as socially tainted by the socially ‘dirty’ nature of their work (Hughes, 1958), something which reduces officers’ ability to connect with family and friends. Likewise, Eriksson (2023: 329) identifies how COs reframe their roles by infusing positive values into their work, thereby ‘reframing their work as something to be proud of, a badge of honour, for the worker’. Both Garrihy and Eriksson describe taint management as a key method that officers use to reduce the damaging and often stigmatizing characteristics of prison work (Ricciardelli, 2019). However, such tactics also lead to suspicion and isolation (Higgins et al., 2023).

COs face significant identity changes and mental health impacts because of their experiences within the prison (Ricciardelli, 2019; Wills et al., 2021). The notoriously volatile environment that characterizes high-security North American prisons (Bucerius et al., 2023; Worley et al., 2023) also means that COs experience significant levels of vulnerability and uncertainty as part of their work (Ricciardelli et al., 2022; Schultz, 2023b). Much of the existing research discusses prison work as a life-altering experience and often implies that learning and embodying the CO habitus is deeply harmful on personal, emotional, and relational levels (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992; Higgins et al., 2023). These findings share strong similarities with research describing the negative post-release experiences of incarcerated people, which are often explained via prisonization processes (Haney, 2003; Martin, 2018). However, Maycock et al.'s (2020) work on throughcare support workers appears to be the only time researchers have used institutionalization to understand CO work. Throughcare support officers, who were employed in the community after previously working as prison officers, expressed difficulties moving past the hypervigilance required in prison settings, missed ‘the regularity of prison routine’, and described needing a period of adjustment to navigate the renewed autonomy provided in the community setting (Maycock et al., 2020: 367). This account sheds light on the impact of prison work on COs’ professional lives but only insofar as it relates to a shift in geographical setting, leaving a broader gap in how we understand the psychological and social impacts of prisonization processes on COs.

When viewed through the lens of institutionalization, similarities between the prisonization literature and research on CO experiences become apparent. Incarceration impacts the mental health of both incarcerated people and officers (Lerman, 2013; Lerman et al., 2022; Wills et al., 2021), with consequences that last long after leaving prison (Frost and Monteiro, 2020; Warr, 2016). Looming threats of violence impact both carceral and officer subcultures (Bucerius et al., 2023; Higgins et al., 2023), which negatively impact individuals’ ability to deal with the challenges of broader society (Garrihy, 2022; Martin, 2018). Finally, the social taint of prison negatively impacts how both COs and formerly incarcerated people relate to loved ones (Eriksson, 2023; McDonald et al., 2023). The similarities between these literatures raise questions about whether institutionalization processes may serve as an effective tool for understanding the unique challenges facing prison workers and prisons more broadly.

Method

We draw on 131 semi-structured qualitative interviews with COs across four provincial prisons in Western Canada, collected as part of the University of Alberta Prison Project (see Bucerius et al., 2023; Schultz et al., 2021). ² Provincial prisons, which house most of Canada's incarcerated people (Statistics Canada, 2023), include both sentenced prisons and remand centres. Sentenced prisons have varying security levels and are responsible for housing people sentenced to less than two years. Remand centres hold those awaiting trial for crimes ranging in severity and are all considered maximum-security facilities. We conducted interviews with officers from two remand centres, one sentenced prison, and one mixed institution. The remand centres held approximately 1600 and 700 individuals, respectively. The sentenced prison housed about 300 individuals, and the mixed facility held around 500 individuals who were either remanded (70%) or sentenced (30%). These institutions were largely representative of Western Canadian prisons in terms of size, programming, and population.

We interviewed 55 officers working at the remand centres and 76 officers at the sentenced prisons. One hundred participants were White men, 10 were Black, Indigenous, or other men of colour, and the remaining 21 were women, one of whom was Indigenous and the remainder White. This sample generally reflected officer demographics in these institutions. We recruited participants through email invitations from prison administration, pre-shift meeting announcements, and chain referral (or ‘snowball’) sampling (Biernacki and Waldorf, 1981). Most participants agreed to participate after we had spent time on their units and had built relationships. This recruitment method is common in CO research (Crawley, 2004).

To ensure interview consistency, we asked participants questions from a generalized prompt guide. Scripted prompts included, ‘Tell us a little bit about your job responsibilities and work history in the correctional system’ and ‘What kind of challenges do you encounter in your work?’ However, we allowed participants’ unique experiences to shape the direction of each interview, meaning that officers elaborated on topics relevant to their perspectives and experiences (Charmaz, 2014; Strauss and Corbin, 1990). We provided each participant with a detailed consent form, which explained the ethical protocols of the study and described how they could remove their information from the study if they chose. We requested permission to digitally record interviews, which all participants included here granted. Some officers asked that we pause the recordings when they discussed sensitive topics, such as the use of force or corrupt colleagues (Schultz, 2023a). When ethically appropriate, we asked permission to restart the recorders. Overall, interviews averaged 50 min in length and were transcribed verbatim. During transcription, we removed identifying information from the interviews and assigned randomly generated pseudonyms to protect participant confidentiality.

We drew on grounded theory methods to initially analyze our data (Charmaz, 2014). The study's principal investigators and two research assistants ³ read six randomly chosen interviews and identified themes emerging from these data (Schultz et al., 2023). We verified the overall strengths of patterns by tabulating the themes, thereby identifying cases that deviated from these patterns as well as similarities and differences in these data. We continued to test this scheme against randomly chosen transcripts, adjusting and redefining concepts as required until we consistently reached 85%–90% overlap between coders. Having thereby established interrater reliability, we then coded all transcripts line-by-line using Nvivo software. This process led to codes including ‘Life outside the walls’ (n = 43, with 109 references), ‘Mental health’ (n = 33, with 89 references), and ‘Perceived vulnerability’ (n = 61, with 269 references). This approach left us with a limited cross-sectional data set, which prevented us from identifying changes over time. However, these codes allowed us to identify a large body of narratives that officers used to detail their perceptions of how prison work had changed them. For this article, we studied these accounts through narrative analysis, allowing our participants’ storied experiences and their subjective accounts of work-related personal change to be the central objects of discussion (Presser and Sandberg, 2015; Schultz et al., 2023).

Findings

Discussion

COs described prison work and institutional socialization as having a wide range of harmful consequences on their lives. Participants crafted narratives of social taint and intrusive latent social identities, and suggested that the pressures of their work negatively reshaped relationships with people outside of the prison environment. The similarities between these narratives and the experiences of previously incarcerated people re-entering the community are striking. Like previously incarcerated people, COs identify social withdrawal and isolation, psychological distancing, hypervigilance, and distrust as factors preventing them from participating in ‘normal’ society (Haney, 2003, 2012). Such findings suggest that COs may experience their own forms of prisonization, something supported by how closely the themes of this article reflect research with previously incarcerated people (Martin, 2018).

When analyzing their work, our participants drew narratives that suggested the ‘incorporation of exploitative norms of prison culture’ was an extremely harmful aspect of prison work on their lives (Haney, 2003: 9). This description both contrasts and complements the prisonization experiences of incarcerated people. Since incarcerated people are deprived of their liberty and confined to prison, they experience the pains of imprisonment on a continuous basis, and their adaptive responses are consistently reinforced as a result (Crewe, 2011b). As Haney notes, ‘the longer prisoners remain in an institution, the more likely it is that the process will significantly transform them’ (2003: 39). Yet despite the ‘voluntary’ nature of prison work and leaving prison at the end of each workday, COs describe deeply and consistently embodying the characteristics of prison work, thereby ensuring that prison values and personality adaptations routinely influence their day-to-day lives (Higgins et al., 2023; Ricciardelli, 2019).

COs describe ‘develop[ing] an unrevealing and inpenetrable “prison mask”’ and, in some cases, ‘withdraw[ing] from authentic social interactions altogether’ (Haney, 2003: 42). Officers across these data draw narratives outlining efforts to hide their mental health struggles, both to protect loved ones from the realities of their work and from colleagues’ feared judgment for failing to ‘live up’ to the CO standard (Higgins et al., 2023; Martin, 2018). Such tensions limit their ability to relate to others, weakening social networks outside of the CO cadre (Garrihy, 2022). As a result, officers perceived few feasible options for addressing the stress and mental health concerns they experienced. Instead, COs described suppressing and trying to deal with the harmful impacts of prison work on their own.

These decisions distinctively shape COs’ lives beyond the scope of their work. Participants narrated how institutional processes changed their habitus, detailing shifts in how they perceived friends, other people, and the world more broadly, and suggesting that their outlooks became exclusively negative (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992; Higgins et al., 2023). Consequently, officers described ‘losing’ the ability to fairly judge the motives and intentions of others. In officer Tina's words, COs discussed seeing ‘all the negative, all the bad, all the time’, something that limited their ability to meet people, develop friendships, and maintain healthy relationships with family members. Garrihy's research provides additional insight into this process. Prison work necessitates COs to behave in certain ways, but when this behaviour carries over into their non-occupational lives, officers view themselves as being psychologically tainted (Garrihy, 2022). This taint has distinctly negative impacts on how COs view themselves, contributing to both individual and interpersonal conflict (Garrihy, 2022). Likewise, Eriksson's (2023) concept of selective social comparison provides an illustration of how COs respond to psychological dirt associated with prison work. The use of selective social comparison contributes to harmful interpersonal dynamics within and between groups (Eriksson, 2023), something many of our participants identify as a feature of their work. Some officers placed techniques of acting ‘crazy’ or ‘intimidating’ as superior and ridiculed COs unwilling to make these changes as ‘weak.’ Participants like Carrie and Ethan took pride in these strategies, but most of our participants described harmful and unintended consequences emerging from the internalization of such attitudes. Reflecting experiences of institutionalization in formerly incarcerated people, COs deeply internalized the processes of selective social comparison, contributing to negative dispositional shifts and setting beliefs that nobody could possibly relate to their experiences (Haney, 2003). Unsurprisingly, our findings suggest that the use of taint management strategies had lasting impacts on COs’ ability to establish and maintain healthy relationships with family members and friends (Eriksson, 2023; Garrihy, 2022).

CO mental health literature demonstrates a clear link between prison work and negative health outcomes in COs (Carleton et al., 2018; Frost and Monteiro, 2020; Wills et al., 2021), and suggests that perceived threats of violence inside the prison contribute to feelings of anxiety for officers and the fear of victimization (Schultz, 2022, 2023b). The consequences of these perceptions extend beyond the concern for one's physical safety, as Frost and Monteiro suggest that vicarious trauma impacts CO suicides (2020: 1288). COs are frequently involved in or witness traumatic violence, including physical assault, self-harm, and attempted or completed suicides (Frost and Monteiro, 2020). These traumatic events have lasting impacts on officers’ mental health, including the development of PTSD and other mental illnesses (Carleton et al., 2018). However, our participants suggest that officers who speak up about their mental health struggles may be perceived as weak, something that threatens both relationships with other officers and career hopes (Frost and Monteiro, 2020: 1292).

Within these data, COs emphasized the importance of reputation, holding the perceptions of colleagues in high regard (Frost and Monteiro, 2020; Waddington, 1999). Such considerations impact how COs deal with individual challenges. Our participants describe CO mental health as a significant consequence of prison work but consider the potential label of ‘weakness’ to be of greater concern when shaping how they respond to stress. As this implies, the topic of mental health remains heavily stigmatized among COs, with Wills et al. (2021) identifying both cultural and structural barriers that impede officers’ willingness to seek help. COs describe expectations to ‘suppress feelings of mental distress’ or risk being perceived as weak and experience judgment and harassment from other officers (Wills et al., 2021: 431). Our participants felt tacit pressures to stay silent, put on a brave face, and conform to the hypermasculine expectations of CO culture (Lerman, 2013). This remained true beyond the prison walls, with many participants reporting that they prefer to leave discussions about work at work, even when they simultaneously described work as a damaging and even traumatizing experience that they struggled to deal with mentally and emotionally.

COs also described using occupational culture to address the violence they witnessed. While cultural solidarity was an effective means of reducing fears of vulnerability (Schultz, 2022; 2023a; 2023b), these perspectives negatively shaped COs’ behaviour outside of prison. Our participants suggested that the harm associated with officers’ occupational responses went far beyond the prisons, and contributed to COs’ latent social identity. Higgins et al.'s concept of identity scars provides a conceptualization of this process, as ‘identity scars displayed how prison work has left indelible marks that have changed the individuals’ sense of self to be in alignment with one's occupational identity’ (2022: 445). Such processes also highlight how the broader social narratives of institutionalization shaped individual perspectives, as institutionalization served as a significant feature of the social frames shaping how COs embodied officer subcultures (Haggerty and Bucerius, 2021; Higgins et al., 2023).

Our participants considered the operative responses of CO culture as serving a protective purpose in their work (Chenault and Collins, 2019; Garrihy, 2022). However, COs described these responses as carrying over to their non-occupational lives, creating a figurative scar left behind from the experience of prison work. Building on Higgins et al.'s (2022: 445) concept, we consider these ‘identity scars’ to be the harmful aspects of CO culture that, through institutionalization, develop into a latent social identity. Our participants spoke about multiple contexts and situations in which their latent social identity guided their actions in their personal lives. Included in this were low- and high-stakes situations, ranging from going through doors in shopping malls and eating in restaurants to routine narratives of relationship breakdowns and disguising mental health struggles from family and romantic partners. Garrihy (2022: 988) outlines the implications of using ‘psychosocial practices’ associated with prison work in non-occupational contexts and emphasizes the unconscious performance of these practices. Garrihy suggests that COs’ unintended violation of societal norms may result in ‘psychological spoilage’ for officers, which is ‘perceived as degrading to human dignity’ (2022: 989). The institutionalization framework serves as a lens to help understand the consequences of this process. As Haney remarks, the process of adapting to imprisonment ‘creates habits of thinking and acting that are extremely dysfunctional outside the prison walls’ (2003: 37). Our findings demonstrate that the negative features of prison work develop as an unintended consequence of COs’ adaptation to prison work and subcultures, and ‘close off’ other career opportunities.

These findings are more broadly consistent with an organization under stress, characterized by emotional numbing on one end and volatility on another (Bloom, 2004; Crawley, 2004). To phrase this differently, stress in corrections is not only apparent at the individual level, but also reflects the larger organization. ‘Emotional numbing’ results in the suppression of emotional expression (Bloom, 2004: 215), as COs are under immense pressure to suppress or hide their emotions and conform to the hypermasculine ideals present in the correctional culture (Ricciardelli, 2019; Schultz, 2022; Wills et al., 2021). As a result, COs are resocialized to perceive any ‘feminine’ emotions as negative and instead frame them to a more culturally appropriate response, or hide them altogether (Ricciardelli, 2019). Our participants frequently turn to emotional suppression, hiding their struggles from family, friends, and peers.

Our analysis offers some explanations as to the specific facets of prison work and culture that COs describe as harmful, including mental health, identity, and overall disposition. These themes also create several policy implications. To reduce the impacts of institutionalization on COs, we believe administration should consider prisonization processes when addressing the mental health of their employees. In recent decades, administrators have successfully centred institutionalization when designing prison policies for incarcerated people (Government of Canada, 2019). Keeping institutionalization at the forefront when designing mental health programmes for COs may prove equally productive. Decision-makers may want to consider the root causes of harm shaping CO subcultures, as our data provide insight into the far-reaching impacts of subculture on officers’ lives outside work. Some parts of the CO subculture actively require intervention, as they appear to be harming officers, rehabilitative goals, and prison operations more broadly (Schultz, 2023a, 2023b). Prison administration should take steps to encourage help-seeking in COs, such as mandating mental health counselling after traumatic workplace events, providing external and anonymous mental health resources, and raising a larger awareness of the mental health impacts of prison work. However, we stress that independence and anonymity in this process are crucial due to the subcultural pressures of prison work.

Our analysis has limitations. Our data are not longitudinal, meaning that we rely on officer narratives of change. Narrative analysis serves as an appropriate lens to present our participants’ perceptions of interpersonal change, as ‘the stories people tell are tools used in the everyday work on the self they engage in as part of their encounters with other people’ (Ugelvik, 2015: 28). With that said, a longitudinal examination of CO institutionalization is an obvious next step in detailing the impacts of prison work over time. Likewise, research in other national settings may reveal nuances in terms of how COs respond to institutional pressures. Finally, we have primarily focused on highlighting the utility of institutionalization as a means for understanding CO behaviour, meaning there is significant room for deeper analysis of specific aspects of CO institutionalization. For instance, future research should consider the impacts of CO institutionalization on day-to-day prison operations more broadly, as research has hinted at how COs may resist policy implementation (Schultz, 2023b). In addition, these data suggest an overlap between CO mental health, officer subcultures, and institutionalization processes, something we believe is an obvious area for further investigation. Given how closely our findings reflect other data on CO mental health (Carleton et al., 2018; Wills et al., 2021), we believe there is significant room for more work on the subject.

Conclusion

We use Haney's account of institutionalization as an analytical lens to understand CO narratives of mental health and social processes and accomplish two things in doing so. First, we argue that researchers can productively use institutionalization and prisonization frameworks to analyze CO actions, thereby providing new insight into how officers relate to their work and the world around them. Second, we identify some of the harmful consequences Canadian COs associate with work-related institutionalization. The impacts we describe are features of prison work that directly influence the socialization of individual officers, thereby contributing to impacts on their dispositions and posing a significant threat to their short and long-term mental health. Likewise, such processes contribute to the persistence of harmful behaviours and negative work cultures (Schoenfeld and Everly, 2023). The detrimental effects of prison work continue to burden prison staff with an elevated risk of PTSD and suicide (Carleton et al., 2018), and the negative shroud of correctional subculture contributes to the justification of abuse and violence toward those facing incarceration (Higgins et al., 2022). Understanding these things as features of institutionalization provides new means of addressing them going forward.