Who Are Correctional Officers? Race, Partisanship, and the Politics of Prison Conditions in the Deep South

• In Event: Bureaucratic Personnel Politics

Brief Overview

We use an original dataset of personnel and voter records of 70,000 correctional officers to show that prison workforces, especially in the South, are largely Black and Democratic. These identities, we argue, have little effect on prison quality.

Authors

• Ben Guy Goehring, University of Michigan

• Jacob Harris, Cornell University