Racial Tension and Responsivity: Understanding the perceived treatment of incarcerated individuals by prison staff

• In Event: A Changing Prison Environment? Preliminary Empirical Observations from The Scandinavian Prison Project

Abstract

Power dynamics in prisons are often tumultuous and complex. Staff in correctional facilities, particularly correctional officers (COs), are charged with maintaining custody and control of the individuals locked within their institution, while simultaneously ensuring those same individuals can access basic necessities such as medical care, benefits, programming, and family visits. Therefore, COs have authoritative power that inherently provides overt and implicit authority over incarcerated people. Practically, this means that officers must permit daily activities such as leaving a cell, going to work, getting food, and overall movement throughout the prison. Negative and adversarial relationships between those incarcerated and those in control may be due to perceived levels of inequality, animus, or favoritism in a housing unit or within other sectors of the facility. To understand the nature and sources of this tension, we use self-reported open-ended responses from the Prison Climate Survey (PCQ) collected from a population-representative sample of incarcerated men in a single facility. Analyses of those responses that focus on race and discrimination detail how administrative responsivity and perceived unprofessionalism may further complicate and hinder the correctional officer-incarcerated person relationship.

Authors

• Emily Greberman, Rutgers University, Newark

• Jordan Hyatt, Drexel University

• Synøve Nygaard Andersen, University of Oslo

• Britte van Tiem, University of Pennsylvania