Critical Discourse Analysis and the Study of Officer-Inmate Interaction: Social Control in Action

Abstract

While Chapter 3 focused on the written discourse of Reasoning and Rehabilitation: a Handbook for Teaching Cognitive Skills (Ross et al., 1989), Chapter 4 will deal with the spoken discourse of several Cognitive Skills classes. My sources of data in this chapter are two ‘Values Enhancement’ classes — each run by a different officer with a different group of inmates. I used my impressions as participant-observer and participant in these sessions together with the perspective of an outside reader of the transcripts to give functions and meanings to the interactions.