The Emotional Labor of Prison Officers: A Lithuanian Perspective

• In Event: Changes in Prison Officers’ Professional Roles within the Shifting Lithuanian Custodial Sentencing Policy and Practice

Abstract

The prison is a specific emotional field that influences the identities of prisoners and officers
and creates specific emotional geographies. Impression management, central to subcultures of
prisoners and prison staff, further highlights the primacy of emotions in prisons. The
language of emotions serves as a crucial means of conveying what it is like to live and work
in a prison. Based on twenty-five semi-structured interviews with officers of different
Lithuanian prisons, this presentation focuses on how Lithuanian prison officers, female and
male, manage their emotions as well as the emotions of prisoners. What emotional
competencies are necessary to work in a Lithuanian prison? What strategies of emotion
management are most often employed by prison officers? How do altering and suppressing
emotions directed towards inmates and co-workers affect various situational behaviors in
prison? Besides answering these questions, the presentation also examines the recent
developments in Lithuanian prison policies and their impact on officers’ emotional labor in
this institution.

Author

• Arturas Tereskinas, Law Institute of the Lithuanian Centre for Social Research