ABSTRACT
In Chapter 4, human service and helping relationships receive special atten tion. Here the concept of “sympathetic understanding,” or social distance, is employed to explore the guard’s “person-to-person” interactions with inmates. The correction officer’s experience with his authority is examined in Chapter 5, along with the informal rule enforcement processes employed to manage and regulate inmate behaviors. Chapter 6 brings together the material in Chapters 4 and 5 in an attempt to re-examine the “corruption authority” perspective on guard-inmate relationships put forward by Sykes in his classic work The Society of Captives.
