Publication Cover
Corrections
Policy, Practice and Research
Volume 8, 2023 - Issue 2
266
Views
0
CrossRef citations to date
0
Altmetric
Research Article

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

ORCID Icon, & ORCID Icon
Pages 57-73 | Published online: 17 Sep 2020
 

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.

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.

Log in via your institution

Log in to Taylor & Francis Online

PDF download + Online access

  • 48 hours access to article PDF & online version
  • Article PDF can be downloaded
  • Article PDF can be printed
USD 53.00 Add to cart

Issue Purchase

  • 30 days online access to complete issue
  • Article PDFs can be downloaded
  • Article PDFs can be printed
USD 184.00 Add to cart

* Local tax will be added as applicable

Related Research

People also read lists articles that other readers of this article have read.

Recommended articles lists articles that we recommend and is powered by our AI driven recommendation engine.

Cited by lists all citing articles based on Crossref citations.
Articles with the Crossref icon will open in a new tab.