Law enforcement officers (often called school resource officers or SROs) are an increasingly common feature in schools across the United States. Although SROs’ roles vary across school contexts, there has been little examination of why. One possible explanation is that SROs perceive threats differently in different school contexts and that the racial composition of schools may motivate these differences. To investigate this possibility, this study analyzes interviews with 73 SROs from two different school districts that encompass schools with a variety of racial compositions. Across both districts, SROs perceived three major categories of threats: student-based, intruder-based, and environment-based threats. However, the focus and perceived severity of the threats varied across districts such that SROs in the district with a larger proportion of White students were primarily concerned about external threats (i.e., intruder-based and environment-based) that might harm the students, whereas SROs in the district with a larger proportion of Black students were primarily concerned with students themselves as threats. We consider how these results relate to understandings of school security, inequality among students, racially disparate experiences with school policing, and school and policing policy.
Correctional scholarship has demonstrated concern over the dehumanizing implications of the carceral state for incarcerated people. This concern has been paralleled by an interest in understanding the work of prison staff and how correctional subculture may play an active role in prison dehumanization. By drawing from focus groups from all prisons in one state, we investigate how correctional staff construct and manage their identity through “us–them” ideologies. We find that staff leverage negative attitudes toward the incarcerated, and that these attitudes were underpinned by sensational cultural stories and epithets. Moreover, we find that staff use “othering” toward the incarcerated as a means to construct a warped badge of honor, which illustrates the burdens they bear from prison work and which frames themselves as heroes, guardians, and protectors. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our findings, where we consider how dehumanization illustrates the mental coping work staff endure to carry out the symbolic violence and dehumanizing objectives of the carceral system.
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