‘… It Just Happened’: Becoming a Prison Manager

Abstract

This and the following empirical chapters are concerned with occupational culture and in particular the influence of traditional prison officer culture. When people enter an occupation, they bring with them a biography, history, a sense of values and expectations. They then enter into a dialectical process with established cultures and practices within the workplace. Becoming a prison manager is not simply a matter of taking up a post; instead, as described here, it is as a process of socialisation in which, over time, an individual becomes assimilated within the group whilst also maintaining a sense of individuality and self. As Crawley (2004) has observed in relation to prison officers:

the new recruit must acquire the ‘working personality’ of the prison officer. This is not acquired through mere habituation and repetition; rather it involves inhabiting a way of being. It is in this sense that the prison officer himself, like the occupational culture to which he must subscribe, can be described an ‘achievement’ or ‘process’ produced over time. (p. 92)

It is similar with prison managers: those taking up management roles undergo a process of inhabiting a ‘working personality’ and learning how to express themselves within this personality and using it creatively.