Changing the Uniform, Keeping the Identity: Continuity of Ex-Military Prison Officers’ Military Identity in the UK Prison Service

• In Event: PWG - Power, identity, and abuse among prison staff

Abstract

Prison officers in the UK often have a military background: at least 25 percent of all prison staff are estimated to have served in the Armed Forces. After an intense socialisation process, leaving the military can be a difficult process in which veterans need to find their place and redefine their sense of self in the civilian world. For many, this is not an easy task, and so they apply to civilian jobs they expect to be similar to the military – uniformed jobs, such as the prison service – in the hope of seamlessly continuing their military identity. While research on ex-military prison personnel in the UK has looked at their military-civilian transition, their trajectories into the prison service and traits as prison officers, it remains unknown if and how their military identity is relevant in their job as prison officers, in what ways they express this identity, and how it affects those working with them.
Using 38 semi-structured interviews and observations in 5 English prisons, this paper explores in what ways ex-military prison staff’s continued military identity manifests in their job. I introduce the Matrix of Military Continuity as an explanatory model to make sense of how military experience continues to shape prison officers’ identities. I demonstrate that ex-military prison staff continue their military identity either actively or passively, on four different levels: materially, behaviourally, relationally, and attitudinally. I argue that on all these levels, the manifestation and expression of military identity is also one of masculinity. This entanglement of military identity and masculinity and its expression in ex-military prison staff’s day-to-day life runs the risk of perpetuating and deepening existing structures of inequality and exclusion within the prison service. I discuss the wider implications of those findings for ex-military staff themselves as well as for prisons in general.

Author

• Laura Haas, University of Oxford, Faculty of Law