Looking over your shoulder: Embodied responses to contamination in the emotional dirty work of prison officers

Abstract

Fear of contamination is central to our thinking about ‘dirty work’, that is, tasks and occupations that carry a stigma due to being perceived as having degrading, disgusting, or immoral qualities. However, most existing literature focuses on the symbolic dimension of taint, particularly, dirty workers’ cognitive, ideological tactics to counter taint. While contamination has more material consequences, the processes through which it is experienced and contained in dirty work have not yet been well-explicated. Drawing on an ethnographic study of work in two Danish prisons, this article offers an opportunity to see behind the walls and gain insight into the extreme emotional dirty work of prison officers as they face burdensome emotional encounters with manipulative and intimidating inmates. As society’s agent in the containment of inmates’ emotional dirt, officers, as emotional labourers, risk contamination if they give into inmates’ pressure and manipulation and do them illicit favours. I use embodied phenomenology as an original and fertile approach to deepen the understanding of how contamination occurs in emotional dirty work and the bodily responses that workers engage in to resist it. Drawing on these findings, I extend our understanding of emotional dirty work.

A qualitative examination of the experiences of defence lawyers in working with emotional material in the criminal law

“…This highlights dirty work strategies of recalibrating as described by Ashforth & Kreiner (1999) and is in line with other dirty work strategies that help other frontline dirty workers to cope with this emotional work (e.g. Erikkson, 2021;Mikkelsen, 2021). These approaches help to protect self-identity and job satisfaction among professionals.…”

“…It is clear that working in the criminal justice system is considered dirty work due to frequent interactions with people who have offended and highly distressed people; thus, engaging in both social and emotional taint. This includes frontline and back-office roles such as defence lawyers, court registrars, police and court administrators, prison officers, and police officers (e.g., De Camargo, 2019;Lemmergaard & Muhr, 2012;Mawby & Worral, 2013;Mikkelsen, 2021;Wilson-Kovacs et al, 2022). Preliminary research overseas suggests that defence lawyers are also engaged in this essential dirty work (Gunby & Carline, 2020;Rotherick, 2019).…”

“…To date, studies into the experiences of dirty work in the criminal justice system has predominantly focused on prison officers (e.g., Mikkelsen, 2021;Sundt, 2009;Tracy & Scott, 2007) and police officers (e.g., De Camargo, 2019;Spencer et al, 2019;Wilson-Kovacs et al, 2021), with few studies examining the experiences of legal professionals working in the criminal law. The lack of focus on criminal lawyers' experiences of dirty work may reflect the historical assumption that dirty work is carried out by people in lower societal positionswhich would not include lawyers (Jervis, 2001).…”

Challenging the ‘dirty worker’—‘clean client’ dichotomy: Conceptualizing worker‐client relations in dirty work

“…The research we have reviewed shows that this final category of clients may also include people intimately involved in the conduct of the work: care recipients in community eldercare programs (Flensborg Jensen, 2017; Hansen, 2016; Chia, 2020; Stacey, 2005; Yu, 2018); clients of prostitutes or other types of sex workers (Neal, 2018; Toubiana & Ruebottom, 2022; Wolfe et al., 2018); patients in medical care settings (Godin, 2000; Roitenberg, 2020; Solimeo et al., 2017; Ward, 2021; Williamson et al., 2014), prisoners being re‐socialized (Mikkelsen, 2021) and family members cared for within their families (Brittain & Shaw, 2007). It is not intuitive to call the recipients of such care ‘clients’, nor the people who do care work as ‘dirty’.…”

Organisational perspectives on boring prison work: Between emancipation and paranoia

“…Interview questions covered officers' perceptions of their work role, primary task and what kind of work situations they found triggered negative or positive emotions in them. Boredom was not directly part of the original research question, which was about the emotional labour of prison officers (Mikkelsen, 2021), yet it emerged as a core theme in the data. All interviews lasted from 45 to 60 minutes and were recorded and transcribed verbatim.…”