Full Description
This book offers a sustained study of one feature of the prison officer's job: the threat and use of force, which the author calls 'doing' coercion. Adopting an interactionist, micro-sociological perspective, the author presents new research based on almost two years of participant observation within an Italian custodial complex hosting both a prison and a forensic psychiatric hospital.
Based on observation of emergency squad interventions during so-called 'critical events', together with visual methods and interviews with staff, 'Doing' Coercion in Male Custodial Settings constitutes an ethnographic exploration of both the organisation and the implicit and explicit practices of threatening and/or 'doing' coercion. With a focus on the lawful yet problematic and discretionary threatening and 'doing' of coercion performed daily on the landing, the author contributes to the growing scholarly literature on power in prison settings, and the developing field of the micro-sociology of violence and of radical interactionism.
As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, anthropology and criminology with interests in prisons, power and violence in institutions, and visual methods.
Contents
Foreword by Mary Bosworth
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction
2. 'Doing' coercion: a micro-sociology bricolage
3. Peacemaking and beyond: the prison officer's everyday duties
4. The bureaucratic organization of 'doing' coercion
5. Implicit coercion logic
6. The symbolic and credible threat of force
7. The use of force
8. Notes from my visual ethnographic diary
9. Methodological afterthoughts
10. Conclusion: on prison officers and (good) violence
Index
