Abstract

Drawing from an ethnographic study in an Italian prison, this essay aims to explore the way prison officers see prisoners by highlighting traits that are, to a greater or lesser extent, shared among these professionals because they are members of a specific social group working in a peculiar context. The findings describe officers’ widespread use of representations that, despite individual differences, contribute to labelling, stigmatizing, and dehumanizing prisoners. Officers generally accept these representations as normality, taking them for granted because they correspond to a self-evident “truthµ that cannot be brought into question. Furthermore, the article highlights some circumstances that allow the officers to challenge (at least partially) these representations. However, even in these situations, their stigmatized nature does not disappear, at the most it is only its essentializing character that tends to weaken. This research aims to highlight the extent to which everyday prison life is strongly defined by the structural conditions that construct the prison world. These structural conditions – such as its coercive nature, the strong definition of different social groups, their asymmetry of power and so on – determine the typology of interpersonal relationships which takes shape inside correctional facilities, placing them within a specific paradigm: the paradigm of “us and themµ, which imagines the prisoner as the guilty object of a coercive institution.