Abstract
Despite early calls to pay attention to the role of emotions in crime and criminal justice, including in prison studies, empirical research focusing on emotions in the administration of criminal justice has been sporadic. With notable exceptions, little attention has been paid to the role of boredom, meaning, and the labour processes of criminal justice personnel more broadly, and correctional officers specifically. We fill the lacuna in knowledge by examining the relationship between boredom, temporality, the labour process of correctional officers, meaning making, and officer wellness. We first offer an overview of boredom as an emotion and its contribution to meaning making. We then outline the labour process of correctional officers, reviewing literature on the structure of their carceral work environments and their experiences of boredom. We draw on 651 interviews with correctional officer recruits (n = 375) and follow-up interviews with correctional officers (n = 276) within federal prisons across Canada to understand the emotional experiences of correctional work, specifically focusing on boredom as a dominant emotion and its effect on officer wellness. Our study uses a phenomenological approach to consider how boredom plays a role in the daily lives of those providing security within prison spaces, how prison officers make sense of their work in relation to temporality and boredom, and how boredom and havoc contributes to poor officer wellness.
Introduction
Despite early calls to pay attention to the role of emotions in crime and criminal justice (Abrams and Keren, 2009; Giordano et al., 2007; Haan and Loader, 2002; Karstedt, 2002; Wouters, 2002), empirical research focusing on emotions in the administration of criminal justice has been sporadic (Chamberlen, 2016) – particularly among those in institutional custodial security roles. With notable exceptions (Phillips, 2016), little attention has been paid to the role of boredom, meaning, and the labour processes of criminal justice personnel and absent in relation to correctional officers’ (COs) wellness. In this article, we attempt to fill that lacuna by examining the relationship between boredom, temporality, the labour process of COs, meaning making within the profession, and officer wellness. Specifically, we focus on CO experiences of boredom when on shift, how COs resist the effects of boredom, and boredoms relation to havoc and its effects on CO wellness. As such, whereas scholars have recently drawn attention to the prominence of the experience of boredom for criminal justice personnel (Mikkelsen, 2022; Phillips, 2016; Steinmetz et al., 2017), we contribute to the nascent literature on boredom and correctional officer work through focusing the relationship between temporality, boredom, and correctional work. In addition, we contribute to understandings of boredom and correctional work through focusing on instances of havoc as breaking up the experience of boredom in prison environments.
Our context is the Canadian federal prison estate, which hold residents sentenced to a minimum of 2 years. There are 43 federal penitentiaries in Canada across five regions: Pacific, Prairie, Ontario, Quebec, and Atlantic. The federal officers core orientation is ‘rehabilitation’ alongside the preservation of life. Federal correctional services coincide with the corresponding political agenda of the day, and under the current Liberal Trudeau government, can be argued to engage in more progressive policies like the removal and banning of solitary confinement, the introduction of gender identity for resident placement, prison needle exchange programmes, and overdose prevention sites. It is in this context, and contributing to the sparse existing literature on COs and boredom, that we examine the link between boredom and its cessation through moments of havoc (i.e. moments of chaos, of response to chaos) to officer wellness, as well as that of meaninglessness, boredom, and officer wellbeing. We then reflect on the implications of boredom and havoc for carceral environments.
We structure the current article in four main sections. First, we offer an overview of boredom as an emotion and its contribution to meaning making. In the second section, we outline the labour process of COs, paying close attention to the structure of their work and work environments. We then offer an overview of the methods of the study. In the final section, we analyse how boredom plays a role in the daily lives of COs, how they navigate the oft-mundane routinized elements of their occupational responsibilities, how they make sense of their work, and the effects on CO wellbeing.
Boredom and correctional officer work
Boredom and work
Kuhn (1962) distinguished between ennui, a valid, internal, and enduring malaise similar to what we now call clinical depression or major depressive disorder, and boredom, that is in some ways antipodal to ennui. Boredom, he evinces, has a brief history in life, and is superficial, vague, and temporary (see also Kemper, 1987). Barbalet (1999) supports this assertion confirming how absence of meaning in an activity or circumstance leads to an experience of boredom. Its experience is marked by a restless, irritable feeling that the individual's current activity or situation holds no appeal, and there is a need to get on with something more stimulating. Thus, boredom emotionally registers an absence of meaning and leads the actor in question towards meaning. Boredom, then, is central to key social processes centred on questions of meaningfulness. Given the pervasive preconditions for boredom, release from boredom is a factor that explains characteristic social practices, including risk taking and intergroup conflict. The preceding designations point to how ‘meaning’ typically refers to a set of symbolic objects, inter-actively formed or constructed that identify or create salient social realities. Meaning, therefore, is not an intrinsic property of objects, but of the relations people enter with them.
Perhaps no thinker has contributed more to this relational approach to boredom than phenomenologist, Martin Heidegger (2001). He offers an existential interpretation of three variabilities of boredom. The first is becoming bored by something. The second is being bored with something. And lastly, profound boredom is articulated in the phrase, ‘It is boring for me’. Accordingly, Heidegger (2001) argues these three forms of boredom uncover a tangled set of relations between temporality of human existence and meaning. That is, each form of boredom is distinct from the others in terms of its relation to how time passes, and progressively, each form of boredom becomes more fundamental depending on what boredom is capable of revealing to us. Boredom drains away existential significance and slows time. Such experience of time in boredom – the conception of time that is deployed here – is a form of protracted duration (Flaherty, 1991, 1999), where time is perceived to move slowly. Such experience of profound boredom manifests in the call to take charge of one's existence and making meaning and thereby effects a fundamental change in existential temporality.
Despite the centrality of boredom to everyday life, there has been relatively little, as compared to other emotions, treatment of boredom in sociology and even less empirical research on the topic (see Barbalet, 1999; Levine, 2023; Misztal, 2016). As Gamsby (2018) evinces, boredom is often believed to be inconsequential and as such, not worthy of serious sociological inquiry. This is despite the fact that virtually everyone experiences boredom on a daily basis and contributes to marked dispositions towards the unique rhythms of modern everyday life (see Misztal, 2016; Simmel, 1907). As such, empirical investigations into the effects of and responding social actions resulting from boredom are warranted (Barbalet, 1999; see O’Neill, 2017; Teeger, 2023).
One area where boredom has manifested is in literature on work and organizations and clearly illustrates the profound effects of boredom. Early on Kafry and Pines (1980) defined tedium as a state of physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion, characterized by negative attitudes towards oneself and/or their environment. Boredom in the workplace reflects a state of exhaustion from repetitive tasks, lack of stimulation, and disengagement with work responsibilities. Scholars have explored the multifaceted nature of boredom, highlighting its association with routine, monotony, and work underload. Work monotony arises from tasks or routines that lack substantial awareness and intentionality, leading to a lack of autonomy and decision making about work responsibilities (Chae and Choi, 2019; Fisherl, 1993). Anleu and Mack (2014) suggest that certain job characteristics, such as repetitive tasks and inflexible schedules, contribute to feelings of boredom among employees. The monotony and lack of variety in job responsibilities can impact workers’ motivation and overall interest in their work, also leading to increased levels of boredom. This mismatch or imbalance between skill level and job requirements can result in a lack of mental stimulation and challenge, leading to a state of boredom and apathy among employees (Nielsen and Daniels, 2012).
In terms of psychological effects of boredom, previous research explores how work monotony impacts psychological wellbeing (Shirom et al., 1999; Weinberg, 2016). Psychological distress resulting from boredom encompasses symptoms such as anxiety, depression, and somatic complaints. Industrial and service jobs which require watch-keeping, monitoring, and inspection exemplify work underload. These jobs require sustained alertness with a lack of arousal tasks, potentially creating stress to employees (Casey and Alach, 2004; Melamed et al., 1995). CO work too requires alertness, a hypervigilance, but repeated days without incident can lead officers to become complacent. In relation to industrial and service professions, the uniqueness of CO work is the threat of violence and harm and the constant need for surveillance that varies with posts in the prison. In relation to the latter, an officer on a tour is likely to experience boredom due to inactivity while securing a parameter and an officer on a post must be do frequent rounds and counts of residents, the time between is too little for additional activities but too long to simply sit. Thus, boredom when underpinned by preservation of life moves in tandem with havoc – the break from boredom.
Correctional services and boredom
Criminological awareness of meaninglessness and crime is longstanding, as is the association of boredom with meaninglessness (see Ferrell, 2004; Katz, 1990). The dynamic element of boredom in establishing meaning, however, is generally overlooked. This is to say that the role of boredom lies in both indexing a loss of meaning and motivating or directing actors towards meaning, confirming the necessity of meaning in systems of social action and interaction (Barbalet, 1999). This opens criminological inquiry to the commission of criminalized activities as a means of breaking with boredom (Ferrell, 2004). Following this approach, Steinmetz and colleagues (2017) evince in their qualitative analyses of police detectives, computer hackers, and prison residents serving life sentences that boredom as a social condition works in a dialectic with excitement. They suggest because boredom saturates everyday life for these groups, boredom is an inextricable element of crime and crime control under late modernity.
In relation to correctional services, specifically, COs play a fundamental role in shaping the experiences of people who are incarcerated. Lerman and Page (2012) demonstrate penal attitudes are determined by the broader penal and political environments in which COs are embedded. As such, their view of punishment and their work can have serious implications for their interactions with people incarcerated and the meanings they attach to those interactions. Crawley (2004) discusses the emotional arena of prisons and the difficulties faced by COs in managing their emotions that are generated by working in prisons, because of the isolation and vulnerability induced by prison architectures. Despite working in this environment, Crawley confirms that CO's must manage their emotions to not show weakness, despite the stress experienced within such environments. COs’ experiences of boredom are mainly found in the repetitive routines, meaningless tasks, and waiting, all activities that are inherent to fulfilling their occupational responsibilities of care, custody, and control (Mikkelsen, 2022).
Out of sight from public attention, COs are also responsible for providing policing functions to the ‘prison society’, an operationally different task than the public police (Clemmer, 1940; Goffman, 1961; Sykes and Messinger, 1960). Although academics have explored the concept of time in relation to incarceration, little academic analysis has explored the connection between time, boredom, and CO experiences. People incarcerated lose track of time due to the unchanging space that is prison living and the sameness of the environment in relation to prisoners’ captivity – which would stand to reason also be the experience of COs. Indeed, as Hans Toch (1981, 2008) has continuously indicated, enforced inactivity and extreme boredom is entrenched in prison environments (see also, Toch and Acker, 2004). In a more extreme example, Johnson (1990) evinces that in the severely lonely and isolated life of death row confinement, visitations break up the boredom induced by the routinization of the everyday lives of prisoners and staff. Regardless of prison contexts, this collective sameness of experience ineluctably leads to boredom and complacency and, as we will demonstrate in this article, can lead to circumstances where COs experience compromised wellness.
We add to this literature by demonstrating how boredom can create the preconditions in an environment for what can be described as havoc. Here we define havoc in the conventional sense of the term meaning wide and general destruction and devastation, characterized, in part, by disorder. However, we refrain from absolutely correlating havoc with use of force as it is only one response to crisis and the preservation of life in prison environments. Since with boredom can come complacency – the lack of vigilance given the routine mundaneness – people may feel unprepared for havoc, particularly in minimum and low medium security units and penitentiaries where havoc is less omnipresent. Therefore, much of the time spent doing prison work can be constituted as being “bored of something” and this underprepares COs to effectively mitigate conflict, violence, and self-harm (especially in relation to inmates) if they become complacent during the monotony of the job. This is a too common experience, given the monotony of the CO job, where officers spend the day enforcing routines, standardizing experiences, and serving people incarcerated as they all seek to meet their legal obligations. Such routines are broken up by havoc that include bursts of often adrenaline-fueled responses to, inter-alia, violence between officers and prisoners, prisoners and prisoners, riots, self-harm and suicide attempts, and other forms of disorder that break with the high-security context of prisons. In terms of temporality, the experience of time in events of havoc, is one of temporal compression (Flaherty, 1999; Flaherty and Meer, 1994), where time is experienced as passing quickly. Thus, havoc is related to boredom, insofar as havoc appears intermittently in events of upheaval (and primed adrenaline when emergency codes are being called in prison environments), and time moves fast and when unprepared, can lead to negative outcomes. This is due to how, in temporal compression, parts of havoc-filled events happen so fast they may fall outside comprehension and the CO may be unprepared for the traumatizing event (see Spencer, 2011).
As such, correctional service work can be a particularly stressful occupation. Such stress can affect physical and mental wellness and can affect individual employees and the entire organization (Haynes et al., 2020; Lambert et al., 2006, 2009). Organizational structure of correctional services has been evinced as a prime contributor to stress in correctional services work (Finney et al., 2013; Lambert et al., 2006; Lambert and Paoline, 2008). The (lack of) participation in organizational decision making and control over work environment, poor organizational cohesion, perceived negative organizational legitimacy and fairness all contribute to stress in correctional work.
In the context of COs, research reveals a high prevalence of mental health disorders among tenured officers (Carleton et al., 2020; Ricciardelli, 2019), as well as high rates of suicide behaviours (Carleton et al., 2019), and exposures to potentially psychologically traumatic events with negative effects on CO mental health (Carleton et al., 2020). Officers experiencing boredom in their job may feel overworked and become distracted or distressed. The limited extant research indicates COs’ experiences of boredom are principally tied to job stress, job dissatisfaction, fatigue, and burnout (Martin et al., 2006). Boredom, then, may have implications for CO mental health, even their physical and social health. Regarding the latter, there is recognition that COs find interactions with colleagues most stressful on the job, with gossip being a dominant source of stress (Siqueira Cassiano and Ricciardelli, 2023). The reality may suggest that boredom drives gossip, which then stresses COs and negatively affects their social health. In addition, and most importantly, boredom creates space for mistakes and decreased productivity, which can affect the security of any correctional institution. Boredom can make a CO complacent or result in their observations being subdued due to the monotony, which can affect institutional safety and impair the performance of their security function and may result in exposures to the havoc that follows psychologically and physically traumatic events.
What has yet to be interrogated, and examined in this article, is the link between boredom and its cessation through moments of havoc to officer wellness, as well as that of meaninglessness, boredom, and officer well-being. Here we draw on interviews with COs about their experiences of their work, probing the relationship between time and boredom, their struggles towards and with boredom, and the relationship between boredom and havoc. We also consider the implications of boredom and havoc for CO wellness.
Methods
Our data is from the qualitative component of our multi-year, mixed-methods study (2018–2028) on the mental health and well-being of COs in Canada, ‘Canadian Correctional Workers’ Well-being, Organizations, Roles and Knowledge’ (also known as CCWORK, Ricciardelli et al., 2021). Canada's correctional system includes provincial, territorial, and federal prisons, but CCWORK studies only COs from federal penitentiaries, which are administrated by Correctional Services Canada (CSC) – federal institutions do not house pretrial, remand, or those sentenced to fewer than 2 years.
As a longitudinal project, CCWORK collects qualitative (interviews), clinical (mental health assessment), and quantitative (surveys) data from COs when they are recruited (i.e. baseline interviews) and annually thereafter (i.e. follow-up waves). Interviews are semi-structured and inquire into the officers’ expectations, experiences, and perceptions of correctional work, which includes the following topics: their views of correctional training, prison, prisoners, and co-workers; work-life balance; exposure to potentially psychologically traumatic events; correctional policies; and health and wellness. To capture participants’ experiences and perceptions of correctional training/work, we inquired into their experiences of boredom by analyzing narratives of COs about their occupational work, specifically, we pulled out discussions of boredom that arose from COs explaining the nuance of the job, their stressors, their interactions with prisoners, their views of policies, and the challenges that arose on duty.
CSC facilitates participant recruitment by allowing us to advertise the study to CO recruits (between 350 and 700 individuals per year) and conduct interviews during paid time, as well as by providing a private space for the project team to conduct interviews in-person or over the phone (since the COVID-19 pandemic). Interviews last between 45 and 90 minutes and are voice recorded and transcribed verbatim. Despite CSC's collaboration, participation in our project remains voluntary. CSC had no access to research data, and interview data (i.e. all participant identifying information) were anonymized during the analysis, including participants’ names, which were replaced with a unique identification number.
All interviews are axial-coded (Saldhana, 2015) using the software NVivo according to a multi-item coding scheme that reflected the core themes explored in the interviews. The coding process involved a team who met regularly to discuss coding discrepancies in the codebook. In the codebook, we operationalize, define, give examples of, and state each code and the sub-codes within the code. For the current study, we pulled all mentions of boredom (i.e. boring, bored, and bore) and surrounding discussions across data coded into NVivo nodes. To develop our analysis on boredom and effects on wellness, we applied open coding (Cascio et al., 2019) to the excerpts coded under boredom and identified patterns and repetitions within the data, classifying them into the following three subthemes (i.e. sources of stress): work, time, and boredom; struggles against boredom; boredom and havoc. Codes with many inputs (not only a few mentions) constituted themes, which we analyzed for contradictions and similarities in experiences of the code subject to understand how boredom arises and contributions to CO work and their occupational responsibilities towards people incarcerated. Each theme, then, was further analysed for subthemes within the broader theme until we could pinpoint nuanced consistent findings that explicate the experience of boredom as articulated by COs.
We draw on 651 interviews with correctional officer recruits (n = 375) and follow-up interviews with correctional officers (n = 276) within federal prisons across Canada. Of the 651 interviews conducted, 189 participants (115 from baseline and 74 from follow up) discussed boredom. These interviews were conducted between July 2018 and March 2022 with COs (i.e. four baseline years and three years of follow-up interviews). We sampled based on convenience, as those interviews had been transcribed and coded and were ready to be analyzed. Our research ethics protocols received approval from the Memorial University of Newfoundland ethics board.
About two-thirds of participants self-identified as male, while about 40% self-identified as female. Most participants aged 19 to 24 (27%) and 25 to 34 (44%). Most participants were either single or married: slightly over half were in a marital relationship (i.e. married or common-law), while about 44% had never married. Most reported having acquired a postsecondary degree: almost a third had obtained a university degree (14%) or a college diploma (17%)1. A fourth of the participants had previous experience in correctional services before joining the federal prison system. Participant demographics were consistent with the CO population in Canada (Samak, 2003).
Results
We analysed how COs reported boredom based on three central themes, all tied to boredom within the carceral setting: (i) how correctional work and time is directed by boredom, (ii) how boredom is something to be fought or resisted against, and (iii) how boredom is related to havoc and can affect CO psychosocial wellbeing.
Work, time, and boredom
Over the course of the study, respondents described their work as structured, predictable, and routinized, but repeatedly interrupted by acute events or havoc. Such predictability stems from how correctional work, particularly when focused on security, is routinized. From the beginning of their career, COs are informed of the structured nature of their work – and the perceived importance of routine and structure for people incarcerated, which becomes how they conceive of their future occupation – they anticipate, from their days as a trainee living a structured and routine training programme, the structured nature of their day when working as a CO: P686: well, it's pretty clear that 95% of our job is going to be pretty boring and like sitting around doing posts or patrols, things like that and so the joke is that 95% of the time we’re grossly overpaid and then 5% of time we’re grossly underpaid because it's 95% boredom and 5% overstimulating excitement. So, I expect it's going to be that way because I have no real frame of reference otherwise. Yeah, the majority of the time it will be just doing mundane sort of things and trying to keep myself alert and then the other times will be potentially doing some pretty scary or difficult things.
Such struggles against boredom are considered by the tenured COs in our sample as being one of the hardest parts of the job. Consider the following responses: P148: Sitting around doing security rounds … Honestly, it's trying to stay awake and, that's what, interacting with the offenders. Like when working at [Names institution] and at the women's, it wouldn’t be uncommon to sit down play chess with the guys. P251: So there will be a lot of engagement, there will be. That's what I would like to see, the continued engagement and going out and finding things to do, so when people come on shift they don’t have to go running around and doing stuff. But, if boredom's a part of it, then boredom's a part of it. But you gotta check that boredom because that leads to bigger issues in the long run.
Moreover, the inherent boredom tied to the monotony of CO work, particularly when working in isolated posts (e.g. tower), and can have an effect on correctional and CO culture. Consider the following response: P419: I think it's being with the same people like twelve [hours a day] – honestly you see your co-workers more than you see your family and I think that is a lot of time on their hands, a lot of, sometimes, it's a lot of people that are immature and you’ll get that in every workforce. I feel those who are immature and bored and just maybe aren’t so happy in their own life, so they focus on everyone else's life.
Struggling against boredom
Boredom as an object can be a source of struggle, insofar as actors attempt to avoid – while not wanting to experience the adversity of incidents – the experience of boredom. This experiential element of occupational responsibilities is decisive in the choice to engage in correctional work. To exemplify, P59 draws on an experience of boredom to justify their return to work during the first waves of the COVID-19 pandemic, when otherwise he was home: P59: I did, yeah. At the beginning of Covid when it was relatively new and everybody was scared, I was scared cause I have asthma. I didn't, I already have a weak immune system. So I did take 699 [leave], I believe for two and a half months at the beginning of COVID. And then I got really bored and then I just went back to work.
In the case of COs, the mundane and routinized nature of their work can be a source of boredom despite its potential to erupt with excitement. Conversely, then, when at work in prison, types of work can be motivators; a sort of preferable type of work. Consider the following response: P114: Yeah, I know it's frowned upon by other correctional officers they’re like, “Oh, management, they’re the scum of the earth,” but just for myself cause I hear what they do and there's little just boredom and I’m going to struggle with that, so I’m going to need that extra little bit. So, definitely be a CX-01 [correctional office classification] for a bit, really learn my role, and the institution, and everything else like that, but get into that 2 position, get on some case management load, and stuff like that, yeah. P457: … There is a lot of bullying obviously. It's a type A personality [type] culture [that] kind of breeds this ‘I’m right, you’re wrong’ kind of thing. It's simple ignorance and boredom for the most part because there is a large part of our job that is quite profoundly boring when things are going right which is quite a sad thing really. P366: P: That's just the way I work. Let's say someone is getting in my face and getting me up there, I know in my head when I’m getting up there. I can either make a conscious decision and take a step back and get out of it or if I’m allowing myself to go there, that's just cause I’m allowing myself to go there. That's just in my previous experiences and why do I allow myself to go there sometimes? [Because] I’m just bored. So, if other people get in your face most of the time, I’m just like whatever. I’m like I don’t care … But sometimes I’m just bored, I haven’t done anything, so what? Bring it on buddy, what do you got. So, it just that's how it is for me.
P457 describes how the organizational culture of correctional services work is characterized by high levels of dominating personalities among colleagues and such a motivation is counteracted by the nature of securitized prisons where ‘when things are going right’, correctional work is boring for COs. Furthermore, P366 evinces they have limited tolerance for confrontation and will respond in kind. Concomitantly, they concede they feel the need to ‘go there’ to overcome boredom; that is, boredom can arouse the need to clash with their colleagues or an incarcerated person to offset their experience of boredom. In this way, they may aggravate situations to overcome boredom, even work to engage people incarcerated or colleagues into less neutralizing situations and instead create some excitement. Time on the job, therefore, becomes filled with more stimulation and meaning – that is otherwise inhibited by the sameness of prison environment.
Boredom and havoc
Boredom being causally connected to CO wellness is possible, when one considers the effect of boredom on an individual's quality of life. Their health – be it physical, social, and psychological health – can be impacted if boredom encourages complacency. To understand how complacency can be harmful for physical safety/health, consider the different sorts of havoc that happen in prison in which officers must intervene. COs are tasked with performing adrenaline-fueled responses to, inter-alia, violence between officers and prisoners, prisoners and prisoners, riots, self-harm and suicide attempts, and other forms of disorder that break with the high security context of prisons. Some participants spoke of complacency emerging as boredom affected their ability to remain observant of the routine interactions of those incarcerated; observant to such an extent that they can recognize an impeding or occurring incident. P631 explains: P631: Honestly, I surprisingly don’t do very well with boredom. So, I think sometimes [laughing] keeping being vigilant and keeping watch might be challenging for me. P180: Well, there's always the risk of contracting any STIs, any diseases really. I’m sure it's pretty – especially as a first responder dealing with someone who cut them self or hung them self. There's – there's always that risk or people soaking hankies with like blood and glass and stuff which I heard happens occasionally or feces. In terms of accidently becoming complacent, especially where they say it's 90 percent boredom, 10 percent panic. So you spend three weeks with nothing happening and then all hell breaks loose. It's gonna be harder to deal with then what I’m used to with just about every day with all hell breaking loose.
P180 expresses diverse concerns with boredom, first explaining the risk of infectious disease (see Siqueira Cassiano and Ricciardelli, 2023) and then how ‘all hell breaks loose’ in moments of havoc. In either case, complacency may reduce awareness and leave an officer with their ‘guard down’ suggesting the possibility of encountering harm, even though a misstep in response or accidentally, increases. Although the physical toll of complacency within boredom is evidenced in the consequences of poor preparation to respond to an altercation (i.e. physically hurting oneself) and in the potential to contract an infection, boredom also has consequences for psychological and social health. In the former, boredom can create or perpetuate compromised psychological wellness (Martin et al., 2006). Martin et al. (2006), for example, write that beyond boredom remaining poorly understood as a phenomenon there is much evidence of boredom's connection to ‘dysfunctional behavior and mental health problems’ (p. 193). In their interviews with 10 civilians, they found boredom to be ‘extremely unpleasant and distressing’, resulting in feelings of being restless and lethargic (p. 193). Thus, the association between boredom and mental health remains. Moreover, the understudied impact of boredom on social health is easily evidenced in the increase in gossip and other negative social behaviours. The additional challenge for social health occurs, for example, when an officer becomes complacent due to boredom, decreases their vigilance and, in consequence, becomes a security threat because they are no longer observing and reacting to the happenings in their surroundings. The consequence is a breakdown in trust between colleagues who then question if their colleague will ‘have their back’ in incidents or if their risk is elevated. The complacent officer may also become the target of gossip or be undesirable as a partner or on shift. Thus, in all elements of health, boredom can compromise wellness.
We would be remiss to ignore how officers also spoke of the lockdowns in the COVID-19 pandemic as impacting boredom and how their experience of boredom is and was affected by that of those in their custody – as bored prisoners can cause havoc. Here, P430 explains the general sentiment: Well I just think that the government only cares about saving money from overtime and people not going off work, they don’t care about how – well I mean I’m not gonna say they don’t care but cause they care about a lot of things but one of them – one of the things that I find that they’re not addressing is the fact that if we’re focusing so much on COVID, our clients aren’t getting what they need and therefore they’re bored and their mental health issues are affecting them. We’ve had more staff assaults because they’re just pent up and whatever and I had to deal with an issue of like suicidal behavior all day because we were in complete lockdown and the person couldn’t get help and like I’m a frontline worker I’m not really supposed to deal with that over that long period of time right – not that I don’t want to but I’m just saying for that person they should have had a person of a higher level helping them right so I just find that they care – like all of a sudden now before we even come into work we have to fill out a piece of paper, we’re wearing two pieces of mask, the union and the management are butting heads so it just feels like we are [sigh] – it's more important to them that COVID doesn’t come in the institution than [that] we’re safe when we’re interacting with these people who have a history of violence.
Discussion and conclusion
COs spoke of boredom as chronic – being bored at work or being in a state of boredom as omnipresent to correctional work. COs describe boredom as a chronic state of being, as COs report or anticipate being bored ‘95%’ or ‘90%’ of their shift. However, concurrently, COs were aware of the need to be chronically hypervigilant in case havoc ensued at a moment's notice – this was a reality inherent to the unpredictability of the prison environment. Our findings suggest boredom is an intrinsic motivator for COs, it drives them to remove boredom and instead be engaged across three occupational domains: as a call to action, as a push for career advancement (advancing to search for meaning in work and not be bored), and as a clash of personalities – gossip, cliques, discourse is a response to boredom with negative effects on morale and officer wellness. Our findings resonate with previous studies, because we too find COs award symbolic meaning in the structured nature of their work, which informs how they think about and anticipate their future (Riley, 2000). Boredom, then, in relation to COs is a way for officers to fight off monotony, similar to how routines help prisoners adapt to prison living. The ritualized workplace encourages COs to form their own symbolic meanings through boredom, shaping the coping strategies COs employ to help construct a seemingly less hostile and negative environment (Siqueira Cassiano and Ricciardelli, 2023). Conversely, as boredom becomes symbolic for COs, gossip, and the need to overcome boredom, makes the work environment more hostile and negatively affects morale. As COs, boredom can arouse the need to clash with colleagues or an incarcerated person to balance their experience and create a break from the routine and monotony of prison work (and living). Resultantly, the likelihood of COs feeling more stress due to boredom prevails, with implications for CO mental health and well-being.
Like in any profession, COs reduce the meaning in their work when they experience boredom. In this regard exists the potential for COs to feel their work is less meaningful and lacks stimulation. The problem here is the resultant feeling of engaging in meaningless work that may arise, harming their own morale and prohibiting fruitful rehabilitative efforts. The challenge is how the damaging effects of motivators are under-recognized and the status is strived for because the status represents a healthier prison environment. Thus, COs reinforce boredom for safety and security. The ability to become complacent due to inactivity does also mean there is the potentiality for COs to be underprepared when havoc ensues.
Time and temporality are interconnected to profound boredom. Given COs pass time, in instance, with the absence of meaning, the CO must try to create meaning to be removed from the liminal state. The transitionary period, from the 95% boredom to the 5% havoc, between meaninglessness and meaningfulness, between passing time and the delivery of care and security, may lead COs to feel the adverse mental, social, and physical implications of boredom. The social implications being just as detrimental to wellness as the physical and psychological. The state of limbo of passing time waiting for the havoc to ensue is prolonged, thereby compounding the negative effects of boredom as motivating, creating more hostile working environments for COs. Monotony ensues, which can create compliancy, thus increasing risk to self, others, and the institution. As the opportunities of ‘going there’ or being over exposed to hypervigilance by ‘keeping watch’ can lead to further mental wellness complications for COs. If the correctional environment continues to foster ‘anticipation’ for COs to feel meaningful, serious mental or physical implications could arise.
Conclusively, the anticipation of boredom as chronic is dialectic with COs wanting emancipation from boredom (cf. Steinmetz et al. 2017). The profoundness of the boredom leaves COs unable to fully release boredom's damaging effects, resulting in experiences of emptiness but always laced with hypervigilance and uncertainty, given prison is unpredictable. Because the emancipation of boredom is havoc, if havoc fails to arise, the chronic anticipation of ridding boredom remains, forcing COs to find new ways to ‘pass time’. The challenge is the tension between havoc and peace – they cannot co-exist. One is boring, the other is too much and harmful or a response to harm, thus the way forward becomes compromising and difficult to imagine, let alone create. We recognize how uncertainty's role in the development of occupational stress injuries or other mental health disorders (posttraumatic stress disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, major depressive disorder, etc.). The role of uncertainty, although not new in punishment and society literature, is built upon in the current article because of the link between boredom and havoc – which rests on uncertainty. Further, we build on punishment literature by acknowledging the changing face of correctional service work in Canada. Indeed, prison work is always transitioning, and much has changed in terms of the CO role that suggests a revisioning since the 1900s in the 2000s. Thus, our intention is to develop knowledge on punishment while calling for more work that contextualizes the current status of federal prison work. Our preliminary findings around boredom in correctional work provides a snapshot of how COs pass time in correctional work, but we invite future research to explicitly focus on how COs positively or negatively deal with passing time in the future. Considering boredom can make COs less alert to serious incidents based on the mundaneness of ritualized tasks, chasing the 5% to 10% of non-boring activities as resolution of boredom can bring harmful consequences, especially if the transition from boredom is attributable to negative results from incident codes being called.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (grant number 449140, 2113887, 411385, and 422567).
