What are the Implications of Changing Place for the Professional Performativity of Prison Officers?

ABSTRACT

Throughcare Support Officers (TSOs) were a unique role in the Scottish criminal justice system when they operated between 2015 and 2019. This research challenges and extends existing prison scholarship by asking a number of novel questions: to what extent do prisons as places shape prison officer identities and what happens to prison officer identities when you largely remove the prison itself. TSOs were prison officers who worked with newly released individuals from custody, and their work was based largely in the community supporting reintegration. In this article, we utilize two strands of Judith Butler’s theories of performativity and materiality, theories that have been used to analyze professional identities in other professions, although not in the criminal justice system until now. Analysis from data generated through 20 semi-structured interviews (a sample of 49% of all TSOs), illustrates that through a greater fluidity of TSO roles, TSOs are able to agentically adapt to a range of situations and hierarchies. The reflections of TSOs provide a unique insight into the place and perception of prisons within the criminal justice system in Scotland. More widely our analysis provides new insights into the ways in which custodial and the community settings shape particular professional identities.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• prisons
• reentry/reintegration
• performativity
• theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In Scotland a short term sentence is under four years.

2. TSOs referred to those they supported in the community as “service users”. This term will be used throughout this research.