NCJ Number
118728
Date Published
1989
Length
250 pages
Annotation
This study updates an earlier study of the working life of prison guards at the Auburn Prison in New York State.
Abstract
This study follows the careers and impressions of the officers whose experiences and insights in 1976 provided the material for the first edition. The 1986 interviews involved 17 of the officers interviewed for the 1976 study. A description of the changes that occurred for the officers and the institution from 1977 through 1986 provides a contextual backdrop for interpreting the material added to each chapter of the original edition. Chapters pertaining to prison guards at work examine human service and helping relationships, the correction officer's experience with his authority, and the perspective on guard-inmate relationships presented by Sykes in "The Society of Captives." Chapters on how the guards react to their work address the pressures of the work and ways of coping as well as the rewards of being a guard. Overall, the interviews indicate that officers act as well as react, manipulate their environment as much as they are manipulated by others, define their own tasks as much as their work is defined by their formal job descriptions, and experience and cope with stress and derive rewards from their work in ways far more complex and varied than the traditional view of the correctional officer as a product of an anti-inmate occupational subculture. 131-item bibliography, 19 tables.