Emotional Labor Routes to State Embodiment: Recalibrating Dynamic Security

• In Event: Roundtable: Law Enforcement and Correctional Practice

Abstract

In a carceral system riddled with deprivations and gang ascendancy—within a facility operating at five times its ideal capacity—the institutional embodiment of jail officers is challenged and derailed (Nario-Lopez 2021a). This chapter gives attention to officers' interaction routes to embody institutional goals using affective strategies to deliver dynamic security. Straddling between conflicting emotional climates amid bureau directives and turbulent inmate politics, this ethnographic study argues that jail officers overcompensate for material insufficiencies through the manipulation of personal emotions to achieve bureau mandates. This research sheds light on officers’ role in moderating between highly charged affective forces to deliver ‘humane’ custody. While previous literature found that emotional labor can be stressful, leads to exhaustion, and causes cognitive and affective dissonance, this study finds that officers appropriate emotional labor as a necessary instrument in their profession, an empowering strategy to control social situations, aiding public service. With a nationalistic tone, jail officers route affective dispositions by carefully deploying feeling rules as an embodiment of their ‘paramilitary yet humane’ profession. The chapter concludes with critical questions about the use of persons and their emotions to maintain carceral regimes and render invisible state inadequacies in delivering justice.

Author

• Hannah Glimpse Nario Lopez, University at Buffalo, SUNY