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

Session Submission Type: Pre-arranged Panel

Abstract

The session is based on a research project founded by the Lithuanian Research Council that ran from 2023 to 2025. Using qualitative data methods (semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions), this study analyses and elaborates on the transitions of prison officers' roles and duties under changing conditions in Lithuanian prison settings. The study acknowledges that officers' activities and the environment in which they pursue their professional goals necessarily generate contradictions and internal conflicts. Prison officers are forced to continually balance and reconcile their use of authority and control with the goals of assisting and resocialising offenders (Bruhn et al. 2010; Liebling 2011). Contemporary correctional systems place a major emphasis on social work and care-based correctional work. Nevertheless, this orientation fails to guarantee the possibility of reconciling the officers' divergent and contradictory responsibilities with the accompanying duties. Constant efforts to reform the Lithuanian prison system, and the inherited Soviet-era methods of sentence execution, which is marked by a significant degree of supervision, control, and punishment (Sakalauskas et al. 2020), exacerbate the difficulty of carrying out the professional role, and responsibilities of prison officers. The goal of the presentations in this session is to explain the obstacles that Lithuanian prison officers face while striving to carry out their professional roles, as well as to examine how these roles have evolved in light of recent reforms.

Subtopic

• Topic 5: Social Control and Criminal Justice / Imprisonment, Prisons, Prison Life and Effects of Imprisonment (Prisons WG)

Chair

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

Individual Presentations

• Prison Officers‘ Roles and the Negotiation of Prison Order: Transitioning from Carceral Collectivism to Care-based Correctional Work - Ruta Vaiciuniene, Law Institute of the Lithuanian Centre for Social Sciences

• Professional Roles of Lithuanian Probation and Prison Officers in the Context of Shifting Correctional Policy and Practice - Simonas Nikartas, Law Institute of the Lithuanian Centre for Social Sciences

• The Nature and Quality of Staff-inmate Relationship in Lithuanian Prisons: Correctional Officers‘ Perspective - Liubovė Jarutienė, Law Institute of the Lithuanian Centre for Social Sciences

• The Emotional Labor of Prison Officers: A Lithuanian Perspective - Arturas Tereskinas, Law Institute of the Lithuanian Centre for Social Research