ABSTRACT
Staff–prisoner relationships are a key feature of prison life. Moreover, trust is a fundamental quality in the social environment of a prison. Despite experiencing incarceration qualitatively different from men, explorations of women’s experiences of trust in staff–prisoner relationships are limited. The experiences presented in this chapter are based on ten semi-structured qualitative interviews exploring staff–prisoner relationships at a high performing open women’s prison in England. The findings suggest that trust plays a key role in the daily lives of the women interviewed and is at the heart of their experiences of staff–prisoner relationships in differing forms. This chapter will analyse key concepts within the literature on trust and develop these arguments through an intersectional lens. The chapter seeks to highlight how these themes intersect and cause and alleviate tensions in trust in these complex and involuntary relationships. It will be argued that pockets of ‘genuine/thick’ trust can be experienced by incarcerated women within an open prison environment when relationships or actions are perceived to operate beyond the prison regime and to be motivated by care and empathy.
