ABSTRACT
According to Hay and Sparks (1991), there is a distinct lack of information in theoretical and policy-oriented writing about what it is that prison officers do, both in terms of the tasks they are asked to carry out and the methods they use to achieve these tasks. Although in recent years some studies of prison staff working life have been conducted (Crawley 2004; Arnold 2005; Arnold et al. 2007; Bennett et al. 2008), prisoners still get far more attention from researchers than prison officers. The academic literature does not tend to concern itself empirically with the demographic profile of the people who become prison officers, and in the media, on television or in films, prison officers are often referred to as ‘guards’ or ‘warders’, stereotypically painted in unforgiving and unsympathetic colours. Such typifications fail to capture the people behind this uniform.
