Prisoners, Prison Executives, and Correctional Officers: Three Explorations into the US Prison Experience During the Era of Mass Incarceration.

Abstract

This dissertation attempts to better understand a particularly insular and difficult to reach institution: the contemporary US prison and the prisoners, prison workers, and the prison leadership within. Mass incarceration as our criminal justice policy has pushed issues of who and how we confine human beings into our politics for the first time since the prison reform era of the early 70s. Chapter one introduces the reader to these issues, including their disproportionate effects upon poor, people of color. But chapters two and three take us into new territory and begin to examine the ways LGBT individuals are understood and treated by our contemporary punishment regime. Chapter two, connects prisoner correspondence regarding the hegemonic sexual misconduct rule, which bars consensual sex and gender nonconformity among prisoners, to the official institutional record on this rule. Findings show LGBT prisoners may be disparately punished, despite broad progress since Stonewall. Thus enduring what I term a New Iron Closet while incarcerated. Chapter three asks correctional leaders across 23 states why this rule exists despite broad socio-legal progress for LGBT citizens. Interview data show that the rule is embedded in a deeply held organizational mythology, rooted in19th Century religious codes. This organizational habitus incorrectly links consensual sex and gender nonconformity to institutional violence and insecurity and thus makes LGBT prisoners eligible for harsh punishments. Chapter four moves into new terrain and asks why, with the vast problems of mass incarceration, people continue to choose prison work as a viable career choice. First, I reclassify prison work by its pervasive physical, social, moral, and emotional stigma. Then, through interviews with over 70 guards across every prison in Kentucky, I ask how and why individuals might approach such a dirty job. Findings reveal that individuals engage in tactics to neutralize this pervasive stigma in order to approach prison work, which builds a new temporal understanding of the power of extremely dirty jobs to coerce individual and collective action. Yet while some worry about prison work’s stigma, others welcome the opportunity. If jobs are scarce, individuals may forego these neutralizing tactics out of basic economic necessity.