Prisons are a rich source for literary narratives – but what narratives do prison officers
themselves construct about working in a prison and their place in it? How do they talk about
their daily work with prisoners, justify disciplinary action or assess prison as a form of
punishment in general? As ontological narratives which position and give rise to the self,
prison officers’ narratives are highly relevant, as they shape officers’ daily practice, the
working of the prison as an organisation and ultimately the way prisoners are treated.
Christopher Young combines field notes and interviews from a Swiss prison to reconstruct a
typology of prison officers’ narratives of the self. One casts the officer as a tragic hero
fighting to prevent the decline of punishment, another positions the officer as a lone fighter
attempting to overcome the therapy-adverse inertia of the prison system. As the study shows,
this inherent tension ultimately contributes to the failure of the attempt to establish a
therapeutic detention unit.
Prison officers’ narratives are viewed as shared narratives which cite and echo legal and
media discourses, which the author in turn reconstructs on the basis of a discussion of the
history of Swiss penal law and practice and a recent corpus of newspaper articles