Gendering jail craft: Preparing graduate prison officers for the realities of women’s prisons in England and Wales

Abstract

This study examines the professional identity development of graduate prison officers working in two women’s prisons in England following completion of Women’s Estate Specific Training (WEST). While the professionalisation of prison work has received growing attention, the gendered dynamics of working in the women’s estate and the impact of gender-informed training on graduate recruits’ experiences remain underexplored. Using a qualitative semi-longitudinal design, the research followed a cohort of Unlocked Graduate officers over 1 year, employing focus groups and semi-structured interviews to explore how they navigated the complexities of gendered custodial work, institutional culture and relational and emotional labour. Reflexive thematic analysis identified three interrelated themes. First, officers negotiated their professional identities amid tensions between their rehabilitative ideals and institutional constraints, often confronting conflicts between personal values and operational demands. Second, gender-informed training shaped approaches to relational and trauma-informed work, revealing both its potential to enhance care and its limitations within rigid institutional structures. Third, officers’ experiences highlighted the ways systemic, patriarchal and managerialist practices shaped the women’s estate, reproducing structural harms that positioned both women and staff as responsible for mitigating outcomes beyond their control. The findings demonstrate that while gender-responsivity offers conceptual progress, it risks reinforcing paternalism unless reimagined as a transformative critique. Graduate officers’ reflections show that professional identity in the women’s estate is not only shaped by training but by the ethical, critical and hopeful negotiation of structural injustice. The study underscores the need to move beyond gendered managerialism towards gendered justice, recognising prisons’ incapacity to meet women’s needs and challenging the burden of care placed on individual officers. By illuminating these dynamics, the research contributes to scholarship on prison officer professionalisation, gendered custodial work and the ethical and emotional labour of prison practice, offering both a mirror and a challenge to contemporary penal reform.

Introduction

The role of prison officers has received increasing attention within penological scholarship, with growing emphasis on the importance of occupational culture, professional identity and processes of socialisation (Arnold et al., 2024; Crewe et al., 2017; Liebling et al., 2011). Recent research and policy debates have emphasised the complexity of prison work and the need for enhanced training and professionalisation, alongside growing recognition of the emotional and relational dimensions of custodial labour (Brierley, 2023; Prison Reform Trust, 2024). However, studies consistently show that early officer development is shaped less by formal instruction than by institutional culture, informal norms and experiential learning, often creating tensions for new recruits (Adorjan and Ricciardelli, 2023; Maycock et al., 2020; Ryan et al., 2022).

In England and Wales, these debates have intersected with an expanding focus on gender-responsive justice, including the introduction of Women’s Estate Specific Training (WEST) for officers working in women’s prisons (Ministry of Justice, 2021). Work in the women’s estate is widely recognised as distinctive, shaped by the constant negotiation between security, rehabilitation and care, further complicated by the gendered expectations placed on officers to perform intensive emotional and relational labour. Officers are required to navigate tensions between disciplinary authority, power and expectations of ‘trauma-informed’ care within carceral environments characterised by high levels of mental ill-health and self-harm (Auty et al., 2023; Carlen, 1983; Crewe et al., 2023; Kelman et al., 2024; Waite, 2023; Wood, 2020).

While a growing body of research has examined prison officer socialisation, occupational culture and the distinctive nature of work in women’s prisons, far less attention has been paid to how gender-informed training is taken up, interpreted and operationalised by new graduate recruits over time (Yesberg et al., 2025). In particular, there is limited empirical insight into how graduate prison officers, recruited for their rehabilitative and gender-conscious values, develop their professional identities after receiving specialist training and how this development is shaped by custodial culture, institutional constraints and everyday interaction with criminalised women. As a result, existing debates on gender-responsive reform and the professionalisation of prison work often rest on assumptions about training efficacy, rather than grounded analysis of how such training is lived, negotiated and sometimes constrained in practice.

This article examines the professional identity development of the first cohort of Unlocked Graduates to enter HM Prison Service following completion of WEST, drawing on data from two women’s prisons in England. Using focus groups and semi-structured interviews conducted across a year, the study explores how officers’ perceptions and practices evolved as they navigated gender-informed training, custodial culture and the tensions between rehabilitative ideals and institutional constraints. Reflexive thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2019) was used to trace how officers made sense of gendered prison work, emotional labour and their own sense of agency over time. The paper contributes to debates on the professionalisation of prison officer work by foregrounding how gender-informed training is experienced and negotiated in practice. Organised around three interrelated themes, the findings illuminate the gendered dynamics that shape early career trajectories in women’s prisons and highlight the limits of training-led reform in the absence of broader conceptual and institutional transformation.

Working with women in prison: Gender, institutions and professionalisation

Understanding women’s imprisonment requires attention to the distinctive social, relational and structural harms that shape criminalised women’s lives and experiences of custody. Extensive research has documented the ways in which women in prison are disproportionately affected by poverty, violence, mental ill-health, substance use and prior victimisation, often in interconnected and cumulative ways (Carlen and Worrall, 2004; Corston, 2007; Crewe et al., 2017). Imprisonment frequently compounds rather than alleviates these harms, disrupting family relationships, intensifying stigma and exposing women to regimes that infantilise and discipline rather than meaningfully address the conditions underpinning criminalisation (Booth, 2020; Carlen, 1983; Masson, 2019; Rutter and Waite, 2026). A substantial proportion of women in prison are mothers, and separation from children produces acute emotional distress with long-term and intergenerational consequences (Baldwin, 2020). Women in custody also experience significantly higher rates of mental health need and self-harm than men, alongside complex physical health needs shaped by histories of abuse and neglect (McCann et al., 2020; Tyler et al., 2019; Walker, 2022). These experiences are further layered by race and ethnicity, with Black and minoritised women facing compounded harms linked to structural racism and gendered forms of criminalisation (Bozkurt, 2022; Charles, 2024; McLean, 2026; Thomas, 2023). Feminist and intersectional scholarship has therefore emphasised the importance of understanding women’s imprisonment within broader continuums of marginalisation, social control and gendered power, rather than through individualised or risk-based framings (Boyle, 2019; Quinn, 2023; Segrave and Carlton, 2013). Alongside this body of work, scholars have highlighted the importance of understanding prisons as gendered organisations; institutions historically structured around masculinised norms of control, authority and emotional restraint (Britton, 1997, 2003); Despite housing women, prisons in England and Wales remain shaped by organisational cultures and practices developed primarily for men, with responses to women often filtered through gendered assumptions about vulnerability, emotion and compliance (Bosworth, 1999; Carlen, 1983). This has significant implications not only for women in custody but also for the staff who work with them.

Since the publication of the Corston (2007) Report, policy developments in England and Wales have increasingly emphasised the need for ‘gendered justice’ and gender-responsive approaches within the criminal legal system. These initiatives have sought to recognise women’s distinct needs and promote more relational, ‘trauma-aware’ forms of practice, though they have often done little to collaborate with, mobilise and network criminalised women and rarely acknowledge the harms caused by processes of criminalisation and the institutions themselves (Ministry of Justice, 2018, 2021; Buck and Tomczak, 2025; Slovinsky, 2023). Critical scholarship has raised concerns about the ways in which gender-responsive reforms often adopt therapeutic and feminist language while leaving intact the structural harms of imprisonment itself (Hannah-Moffat, 2000, 2005; Carlton and Russell, 2023; Waite, 2022; Waite and Darley, 2025). In this framing, women are positioned as subjects to be transformed through intervention, with responsibility for managing trauma and vulnerability increasingly individualised and depoliticised. A growing international literature has interrogated these tensions, showing how gender-responsive governance can simultaneously recognise women’s needs while reinforcing surveillance, responsibilisation, criminalisation and control (Carlton and Russell, 2023; Sufrin, 2017). Such approaches risk rendering trauma as an individual pathology, disconnected from its social and institutional contexts and obscuring the role of imprisonment itself as a source of harm (Hannah-Moffat, 2005). These critiques raise important questions about how gender-responsive policies are enacted in practice, and who is tasked with operationalising them.

One key feature of gendered justice policy in England and Wales has been the introduction of specialist training for staff working in the women’s estate. Women’s Estate Specific Training (WEST) is designed to equip prison officers with knowledge across a range of gendered issues, including self-harm and suicide, honour-based violence, young women and gangs and relationships, reflecting broader moves towards the professionalisation of gender-informed prison work (Ministry of Justice, 2021). Training is increasingly positioned as a mechanism through which institutional change can be achieved, premised on the assumption that better-informed officers are better equipped to respond to the complex needs of criminalised women. However, this policy response can also be problematised as a form of responsibilisation, placing the burden of managing structural harms and systemic marginalisation onto individual officers through the acquisition of the ‘right’ skills. While training and recruitment processes are often framed as catalysts for wider cultural change and for developing officers capable of delivering trauma-informed practice (Kelman et al., 2024), evidence evaluating the impact and sustainability of such training remains limited (Bradley, 2021; Petrillo, 2021). Moreover, questions persist about the extent to which gender-responsive training can be effectively operationalised within custodial environments characterised by risk management, resource constraints and entrenched occupational cultures (Auty et al., 2023; Kelman et al., 2024).

Research on prison officer professionalisation consistently highlights the limits of training when set against entrenched occupational cultures. Morrison and Maycock (2021) show that despite formal training and organisational commitments to reform, officers’ views are often pulled away from optimistic policy aims towards cynicism and emotional withdrawal, shaped by exposure to everyday pressures, emotional labour and negative staff cultures. Similarly, Sibley et al. (2024) demonstrate how institutional cultures can erode belief in reform, normalising harmful practices and undermining change-oriented initiatives. Together, this work underscores that professionalisation is not achieved through training alone but is mediated through informal norms, peer dynamics and the cultures of prison. While much of this literature is androcentric, research has long argued that prison work in the women’s estate is qualitatively distinct and requires specialist skills, knowledge and support (Arnold, 2008; Carlen, 1998; Rutter and Waite, 2026; Waite, 2023). Staff–prisoner relationships in women’s prisons are often characterised by heightened emotional closeness, relational intensity and forms of benign paternalism, producing complex power dynamics that can generate stress, insecurity and mistrust for both staff and prisoners (Crewe et al., 2023; Waite, 2022). Officers working in this context encounter sustained emotional and psychological demands, particularly in relation to self-harm, distress and systemic marginalisation, within a cultural framework that feminises emotional labour while simultaneously rendering it invisible and undervalued (Tait, 2011; Walker et al., 2017; Wood, 2020). This body of work highlights the need to examine how gendered cultures shape not only prison practice but also the ways in which graduate officers might interpret, adapt to or resist professionalisation initiatives over time.

Considering the connections and continuums between gender, the prison and prison officer training and the momentum of gendered-justice policy initiatives in England and Wales, critical examination of gender-responsive professionalisation is vital. It is within this context that this paper emphasises the complexities of gendered prison officer training. This article captures the experiences and perceptions of graduate prison officers within the first 12 months of their role, following gender-responsive training. The paper outlines the themes found within their trajectories, examining the impact of gendered training alongside the tensions, challenges and multi-directional pulls that characterise their experiences of gendered work.

Methods: Exploring gendered journeys

This study employed a qualitative longitudinal design, combining focus groups and semi-structured interviews to examine the early professional identity development of graduate prison officers working in women’s prisons. A longitudinal qualitative approach is particularly suited to capturing processes of occupational socialisation and identity formation as they unfold over time, rather than as fixed or static experiences (Arnold, 2008; Morrison and Maycock, 2021). This design enabled analysis of how officers’ understandings, values and practices developed in relation to gender-informed training, custodial culture and the everyday realities of working in the women’s estate. Participants were recruited from the 2022 cohort of the Unlocked Graduates programme, the first group of graduate officers entering the HM Prison Service Women’s Estate to complete Women’s Estate Specific Training (WEST). Ten participants volunteered to take part at the outset of the study, representing the full available cohort. Seven participants completed the final interview stage; two withdrew from the graduate programme during the study period and one was unavailable for the final interview. While the sample is small, it reflects the size and bounded nature of the cohort and is appropriate for in-depth, longitudinal qualitative analysis focused on meaning-making and identity development rather than generalisability (Schwab and Syed, 2015).

All participants were employed as Band 3 prison officers in one of two large, closed women’s prisons in England and remained on the Unlocked Graduates programme throughout the study period. Ethical approval was granted by the relevant university ethics committee and the HMPPS National Research Committee. Informed consent was obtained at the outset and reaffirmed at each stage of data collection. To protect anonymity, further participant details, including age, race and gender, are not disclosed, although it is recognised that these social locations shape officers’ experiences, interactions and perspectives in meaningful ways (X, Officer, 2026). Data were collected at three points over a 12-month period. Two focus groups were conducted during the early stages of participants’ training to explore shared meanings, expectations and emerging professional narratives. Focus groups were chosen to capture the collective construction of attitudes and norms and to explore how participants negotiated understandings of gendered prison work in dialogue with peers (Finch and Lewis, 2003). The first focus group took place following an intensive block of HMPPS and Unlocked Graduates training but prior to WEST, allowing exploration of participants’ motivations, perceptions of women in prison and expectations of gendered work. The second focus group was conducted one week after completion of WEST and focused on participants’ reflections on the training and its perceived relevance to their forthcoming roles. In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted after approximately 12 months in post, lasting between 60 and 110 minutes. These interviews enabled participants to reflect on their experiences over time, including their emotional labour, relationships with women in prison, interactions with colleagues and developing sense of professional identity. This sequencing allowed analysis of continuity, change and tension between training ideals and operational realities.

Data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2019). All interviews and focus groups were transcribed verbatim by the researcher to support familiarisation. Coding was conducted inductively, with attention to both semantic and latent meanings, and themes were developed through iterative engagement with the dataset. Reflexivity was central throughout the analytic process. During the study, the researcher was involved in delivering the academic component of the Unlocked Graduates programme, necessitating ongoing critical reflection on positionality, assumptions and power in the research relationship. Rather than undermining rigour, this reflexive approach strengthened the analysis by making explicit the conditions under which knowledge was produced (Braun and Clarke, 2021). Three interconnected themes were generated, each underscoring the gendered labour of prison work in the women’s estate and the difficulty of sustaining rehabilitative ideals within punitive and institutionally conflicted systems. The findings illustrate how graduate officers negotiated structural constraints, workplace culture and their own values as they attempt to enact relational, gender-responsive practice.

Developing gendered practice

It’s easy but it’s not easy, it’s nice but it’s not nice

Several officers reported encountering gendered assumptions and stigma from family and friends when disclosing their work in a women’s prison. Notably, officers also experienced such stereotyping during Prison Officer Entry Level Training (POELT), where some more experienced staff and trainers referred to women as manipulative, bitchy and emotional or took a sharp intake of breath when officers explained they had been allocated to the Women’s Estate, which officers interpreted as problematic. PO6 further explained:

. . .in general, like public life, there just seems to be this idea that obviously women are so much more emotional and so needy and so manipulative, and it was going to be so bitchy and things like that. And so I had that told me from people that really actually have, like, no experience of prisons at all. And so I was like, OK, well, take that with a pinch of salt, but then also during training, like, there were other people who were, like you know, there were a lot of trainers or. . . prison officers who actually said, oh, ‘I’ve never worked female estate because of these reasons’. Or, you know, they had worked for the female estate and for them they were like, oh, ‘men are so much easier, all day long. I’d rather take, like, the fighting and the violence than I would have to deal with all the emotion and manipulation’. So, I was like, oh, wow, this is going to be, like, really awful. And I mean, obviously I don’t really have much comparison, but no, I don’t think it’s been anywhere near as awful as everyone said it was going to be. (PO6)

Some POELT interactions reflected persistent stereotypes of women in prison, portraying them as overly emotional or manipulative (Greer, 2002; Pollock, 2002). Officers’ early cultural scripts and ‘craft rules’ (Reiner, 2010) shaped how women were perceived and managed, which can reinforce stigma for those who do not conform to feminine norms (Estrada et al., 2012; Rutter and Barr, 2021). Approaches diverging from traditional, masculinised models are often viewed with suspicion or dismissed as ‘soft’ (Day et al., 2012). Officers described interactions that were influenced by limited understanding of women’s imprisonment and broader societal stereotypes, generating gendered dimensions to the symbolic taint officers can experience from ‘dirty work’ (Mikkelsen, 2022).

Following POELT, officers described being left with several questions around the operationalisation of security practices that ran in tension to discourse on relational work. Officers described how POELT focused heavily on security, control and restraint strategies that were ‘not relevant’ in the women’s estate and did not focus on addressing the relational skills they felt they would need in their role:

We were trained on batons and pava . . . but then you don’t get them in the Women’s Estate, so it’s like learning to use something and then not having it. Managing your personal safety is a different matter. It felt like so much of what we were told was either irrelevant or even inappropriate. In the Women’s Estate, you need to de-escalate through empathy, through calmness. It’s not about physical dominance, if you approach it that way, you’ve already lost the room. (PO9)

Following WEST, officers reflected upon the juxtaposition of institutional frameworks of control and restraint alongside ‘trauma-informed’ operational discourse commonly found in their training and the women’s estate more broadly. During these early stages, officers were unsatisfied with these tensions, unclear of what this meant for their operational practice, alongside their moral values:

I would never ever put my hands on a woman, like, unless it was like a life or death situation to save my own life, if she’s trying to kill me or something. So then to have to go into prison and start like, like causing pain to them and doing pain compliance stuff, it really, it comes so, so unnaturally to me. I mean, we talked about putting pregnant women on their left side, but actually the thought of taking a pregnant woman to the ground in any way is just, like, repulsive to me and we didn’t really discuss whether you would, you know, how you’d handle that. (PO8)

Many officers described encountering a pronounced staff testing culture during their early months, in which many colleagues informally assessed their competence, resilience and alignment with established norms. This scrutiny was intensified by their association with the graduate leadership programme, which some staff perceived as elitist or detached from ‘real’ prison work. As a result, new officers often felt they were continually required to prove themselves before being accepted as legitimate members of the staff group. This testing culture shaped early identity formation, influencing the extent to which some officers felt included, trusted and supported, and it often acted as a gatekeeping mechanism through which established staff reinforced existing cultural expectations within the women’s estate.

At the start. . . it didn’t help that I didn’t feel comfortable around my colleagues. . . they don’t always make the best assumptions about you. But once they know you’re competent, everything becomes easier. (PO7)

Following initial periods of uncertainty, most officers explained that early worries regarding colleagues, women and processes waned and were instead overshadowed by the enormity of the work at hand:

After initial worries of building relationships with staff and getting to know prisoners and knowing processes and how best to handle situations, those issues went into the background and then you start to tackle more of the actual issues – working within a system that doesn’t wanna do . . . all the mental health stuff you’re dealing with on a daily basis. (PO5)

Echoing wider research on prison officer development (Arnold, 2016; Morrison and Maycock, 2021; Ryan et al., 2022), officers emphasised the limitations of formal training, explaining meaningful learning came through their daily interactions with women. This experiential learning not only shaped officers’ practices but also underscored institutional shortcomings in preparing staff for the gendered realities of prison work, effectively shifting responsibility onto individuals to navigate relationships and emotional demands with minimal structural support. Moreover, while training tended to position the Prison Service or external ‘experts’ as the primary source of knowledge, officers’ reflections suggest that the women themselves were often the most authoritative voices. This expertise is routinely marginalised within carceral frameworks, where criminalised women in particular are rarely networked and positioned as equal sources of knowledge (Buck and Tomczak, 2025). PO8 reflected:

Some of the best things I’ve learned have come from prisoners . . . some have explained to me more about how the procedures work than any staff member could . . . that balance, compassion and discipline, is what the job is really about.

Officers saw their role as less like prison work. The role diverged markedly from their initial perceptions of prison work, as the gendered realities of the women’s estate redefined what it meant to ‘be’ a prison officer. Officers consistently described working tirelessly to build and balance these relationships amid emotional and operational uncertainty. This expectation intensified in the women’s estate, where relational care and emotional attentiveness were implicitly gendered responsibilities (Crewe et al., 2023). While officers described their relationships with women as the most positive feature of the job, challenges and tensions in trust could be taken personally:

. . . when you build up trust with people and like you go out of your way sometimes to do something for someone . . . then you build this relationship with them and like, you know, they trust you as an officer and, you know, and they just go break your trust, and they just like . . . because at the end of the day to them, you’re just an officer and like. But you just like, why have I done all of that stuff for you and for you to just be, to throw it back in my face? I find that stuff quite hard. Sometimes they just don’t actually even care, like, the majority of the time they do . . . but a lot of the time it is something they just shove it back in your face. Like, they just don’t seem to realise that actually you’d go out your way to like, make sure they get this phone call. And like, you know, make like chase up who’s on their visit list . . . (PO2)

Navigating the complexities of emotional labour emerged as the most significant professional challenge, yet this aspect of the role was largely overlooked in training, reflecting broader gendered blind spots and institutional neglect. The complex emotional work of navigating relationships, women’s needs, questions of agency and challenges to officers’ power was experienced as draining, often invisible and largely unexpected, echoing earlier findings on the hidden emotional demands of prison work and their disproportionate impact within women’s prisons (Crewe et al., 2023; Tait, 2011; Waite, 2022). Carrying out this work within a highly uncertain and hypervigilant operational environment intensified these challenges. Officers described themselves as becoming accustomed to running to the unknown and remaining perpetually alert to potential crises and sudden shifts in atmosphere.

Operationally, WEST was regarded as useful in helping officers articulate their views on equality, navigate challenging staff cultures and establish a framework for approaching their roles. While not all elements of the training were easily transferable to practice, officers described drawing on WEST to inform their responses to trauma, motherhood and self-harm, applying this awareness both in their everyday interactions and in practical decision-making on the wing. Developing an awareness of the impact of trauma was particularly valued. As PO8 explained, even small adjustments in practice, such as warning women before shouting for medication, were recognised by prisoners as meaningful acts of consideration:

One big thing actually for me, which I’ve been acknowledged by the women on the wing, is that not shouting for meds and stuff . . . I’ll go, ‘guys you might want to cover your ears, I’m shouting meds’. (PO8)

Such reflections suggest that trauma awareness encouraged officers to adopt more attentive, reflective and relational practices, though these were improvised rather than systematically embedded. When it came to working with mothers, however, the gap between training and practice was felt most acutely:

WEST touched on women being mothers, but it’s very different in reality. You’re not just managing behaviour, you’re trying to support someone who’s terrified about losing contact with their children. That’s not a scenario they role-play with you in training. (PO4)

For many, this aspect of the role was experienced as emotionally demanding and structurally frustrating. Officers described supporting women through bureaucratic delays and barriers that left them powerless to maintain contact with their children:

I’ve sat with women while they’ve tried to get hold of social services, or to check in on their kids. It’s endless forms and delays. You try to help but it feels like the system is stacked against them, and you’re the one trying to soften the blow. (PO10)

These accounts highlight both the value of gender-informed awareness and its limits, showing how officers were left to absorb much of the weight of maternal distress in a system that neither prioritises nor adequately supports family relationships. This sense of emotional responsibility was echoed in officers’ descriptions of self-harm, which emerged as one of the clearest illustrations of the moral and practical complexity of prison work. While officers entered the role with some awareness of self-harm from training, many spoke of being unprepared for the intensity and frequency with which it shaped daily life on the wings (Walker et al., 2017):

You genuinely don’t know what you’re going to walk in on, day to day. . . sometimes it’s someone who’s ligatured, sometimes it’s blood everywhere. The training talks about self-harm but it doesn’t prepare you for seeing it, or for how often it happens. (PO4)

Many recalled how, during POELT, self-harm was framed as manipulative, yet their experiences working with women led them to reject this narrative. As PO7 reflected:

At POELT people said things like, ‘women self-harm to get attention.’ But when you see it for yourself, you know that’s not right. It’s not manipulation, it’s pain . . . That’s been one of the hardest things, but also the most important. (PO7)

This cultural resistance reflects officers’ efforts to move beyond entrenched gendered stereotypes (Greer, 2002; Pollock, 2002), instead recognising self-harm as an expression of trauma and distress. Yet the emotional demands of this work were relentless in trying to keep women safe in an environment ill-equipped to support them:

It can feel like you’re dealing with the same thing over and over again . . . opening ACCTs, chasing mental health, trying to keep someone safe. It’s exhausting, and you don’t always feel like you’re making a difference. (PO5)

For some officers, this work also revealed the uneven distribution of this labour within staff teams, with some shouldering the responsibility of responding to women in crisis. As PO10 reflected:

Other staff will sometimes roll their eyes, like ‘oh she’s cut again.’ And then you’re the one picking up the pieces, sitting with her, making sure she’s okay. That’s the extra emotional work that doesn’t get recognised. But the women know who takes them seriously and who doesn’t. (PO10)

These accounts show how trauma, motherhood and self-harm revealed the gendered contradictions of prison work. Officers, despite some training, felt unprepared for the intensity and frequency of such incidents, exposing a gap between instruction and reality. While resisting stereotypes that delegitimised women’s distress, they relied on constant vigilance, relational engagement and emotional labour, efforts largely unrecognised institutionally. The work was emotionally draining, morally complex and shaped by gendered expectations to bear an invisible burden.

Becoming a buffer

The weight of the work led officers to reevaluate not their values but their expectations of what could realistically be achieved within the constraints of the women’s estate. This theme captures how officers’ professional identities evolved over their first year, as they shifted from arriving as idealistic fixers to positioning themselves as buffers between women and the system. Recruited as high-achieving, socially driven graduates, officers entered the role motivated by the rehabilitative ideals of the graduate programme and emboldened by solidarity with others on their programme who hoped to bring about change. Many spoke of their early determination to fix everything imagining that their efforts could directly improve the lives of the women they worked with. PO9 explained:

I definitely found in my first year a bit of a sort of martyr complex where you kind of, you run yourself ragged trying to fix people trying to like, heal people’s problems and you know, you can’t you, you just, you don’t have that power, and their life is too complicated for you to just come in thinking that you can make it better and I think you have to re . . . reassess what your job is. (PO9)

Officers’ ambitions quickly collided with the structural and cultural realities of the prison environment, with two key features shaping this process. First, the experiential knowledge officers gained of the depth and complexity of women’s lives, particularly the intersections of trauma and marginalisation that shaped daily interactions. Second, officers encountered significant institutional and bureaucratic obstacles that made even small acts of support difficult to deliver. Officers consistently gave examples of referrals to mental health teams that went unanswered and efforts to advocate for women that were undermined by inflexible procedures:

A lot of prisoners will say, well, if we want help, we have to kick off, we have to shout and be rude and go on ACCTs . . . and they’re right, they will get more support that way. It’s not OK, but it is how it is. Not because we aren’t gonna try and get them help before that point, but because people don’t take it seriously until it gets to that point. (PO5)

Officers expressed growing frustration at how their efforts to prevent crises were ignored:

Feeling like you’re tackling the same thing. . . in the hundreds of emails I’ve never ever had a response. One time I called them because I was concerned about somebody and I actually managed to get them on the phone. I explained the person was hearing voices and it was really scaring them. . . and they told me, well, based on what this person has gone through and their life, it’s quite normal for them to hear voices. I said, well that’s okay, but you need to go and see them. You need to talk to them about that and offer them support. (PO2)

The cumulative effect of these experiences was a reorientation in officers’ sense of purpose. Many described learning to accept that they could not fix the system or its outcomes but could act as an individual buffer, absorbing frustration and trying to mitigate the emotional impact of structural neglect:

I used to think being effective meant solving things, but now I think it’s about just being there, helping them through the waiting, the disappointment, the not being heard. You become like this middle ground between them and everything that doesn’t work. (PO9)

Reframing professional identity from fixer to buffer was both adaptive and burdensome, reflecting the moral and emotional labour central to gendered prison work. Officers often bore responsibility for care that institutional frameworks neglected, mirroring wider patterns of responsibilisation in the penal system. Their buffering, including listening, empathising and mediating, replicated long-feminised, devalued labour (Britton, 2003; Tait, 2011). Positioned as agents of change yet required to act as emotional filters, officers carried the burden of harm management, facing moral harms from navigating contradictory workplace demands (Ricciardelli et al., 2024):

It’s hard when you know the right thing to do, but you can’t do it. You feel like you’re constantly explaining the system to women, why they can’t get what they need, why it takes so long. You end up defending something you don’t always believe in. (PO10)

In this sense, Becoming a Buffer captures the intersection of gender, institutional culture and the weight of emotional endurance and labour. The role demanded a capacity for empathy and care that was valorised rhetorically but unsupported in practice, situating officers within the moral contradictions of a system that asks them to humanise the inhumane while denying them the power to reform it.

Growing senses of injustice and resistance

This final theme captures how officers perceive the broader context of their work, including their attitudes towards the criminal legal system and the ways it responds to women. Many cited undergraduate studies or previous charitable work as shaping their early values, which they hoped would be of benefit to their operational practice in the women’s estate. As one officer noted:

I came into this because I thought you could actually make a difference, because women’s prisons needed people who cared, who believed that rehabilitation was possible. (PO6)

Initially, officers’ values were sustained by optimism and a shared sense of moral purpose alongside other ‘mission-aligned’ graduate recruits. However, the operational realities of prison life soon confronted officers with a system steeped in systemic contradiction, bureaucratic inefficiency and chronic under-resourcing. Officers described their growing awareness that the system’s carceral purpose and processes frequently undermined their rehabilitative ambitions. As PO4 reflected:

When you’re in it, you realise the system isn’t built for change. It’s built for management. You can have all the good intentions in the world, but if the processes don’t support you, it’s like hitting a wall over and over again.

These experiences reinforced officers’ perception that prison, and particularly the women’s estate, was ill-equipped to support ideals of reform. Yet, rather than an absolute abandoning of their values, some officers anchored themselves in memories of rehabilitation they had observed in non-custodial contexts:

I do think there needs to be like, a sort of systematic rethink of the prison system if we want that for the majority of people. But in myself, I still hold true, like I know that rehabilitation works. I’ve seen it in action and I just wish that we were in a position where it could work for more people. . . People need to be given the opportunity and the help to change, they need to be given agency and someone to believe in them and listen to them. I’ve kept that with me and still have it at the same strength that I did when I started last year. (PO7)

Evidenced here was a form of emotional resistance and conscious refusal to succumb to the weight of the early cynicism that often characterises prison officer development (Arnold, 2016; Morrison and Maycock, 2021). Officers described reflective moments when this resistance was tested, particularly in response to distressing incidents of self-harm or suicide attempts. Knowledge of the complexities and ethics of self-harm, in a system that routinely contradicted this knowledge, generated an emotional tightrope between professional detachment and humane concern:

It’s always like, the what if? What if she actually just had a bad phone call and she does it again and we go in there and do an ACCT check and we don’t do it properly and, you know, she ligatured worse than the last time she did it. . . I’ve noticed that I’ve desensitised but I try not to. I try to make sure that I don’t lose my care for the women, because I feel like that’s very easily done. (PO1)

This acute awareness of institutional desensitisation, referred to as a ‘facade of coping’ (Walker et al., 2017) meant some officers resisted this drift by actively reaffirming their beliefs. For most officers, their refusal to adopt cynicism and to view women’s distress as manipulative or performative was an active recognition to remain emotionally present, even when the institution demanded detachment. This process exposed an additional labour, present when enacting and maintaining compassion driven by training rhetoric is then contradicted by its cultural context. This resistance was also evident in officers’ use of discretionary practices, when officers sometimes described small acts that subverted punitive norms and hierarchical structures of operational command. Officers described choosing not to issue Incentives and Earned Privileges (IEP) warnings, re-opening ACCTs against managerial instruction:

I’ve opened ACCTs when I’ve been told not to, because I’d rather be safe than sorry. If something happened and I hadn’t done it, I couldn’t live with that. (PO3)

To exercise such acts within the early stages of prison officer development signifies meaningful resistance to the dehumanising tendencies of penal bureaucracy, likely emboldened by their position as graduates and as representatives of the Unlocked programme. However, officers’ reflections and resistance often captured a key tension at the heart of gender-informed penal practice, which is the adoption of paternalistic-managerialist narratives that construct women as a ‘transformative subject’ (Hannah-Moffat, 2005), in need of ‘fixing’ through care and containment, with limited agency and recognition of structural marginalisation and influence. As one officer explained:

I think the system treats women as if they’re being difficult rather than damaged. And that’s where it goes wrong, you can’t punish trauma out of someone. (PO7)

While officers’ critiques reflected gender-informed training and recognition of trauma, framing systemic marginalisation and trauma as individualised, often conflating risk and vulnerability, both masks and reproduces gendered penal governance (Gorga, 2025; Hannah-Moffat, 2000; Waite and Darley, 2025). Describing women’s experiences as ‘damage’ pathologises their responses, shifting focus to therapeutic governance and training rather than structural inequalities. These gendered narratives encourage officers to view women’s criminalisation through trauma while legitimising paternalistic surveillance and weaponising trauma-informed discourse (Carlton and Russell, 2023). Some officers recognised these broader contradictions:

the prison talks about trauma all the time, but not about why the system keeps retraumatising them. (PO5)

In this context, for many officers, making the system kinder became an act of resistance against the structural reproduction of harm, though this contributed to the cumulative exhaustion officers often felt when trying to maintain and follow their values:

You can’t fix the system, but you can make the system a bit kinder where you are. That’s how I think about it. (PO2)

These actions may act as a buffer in the lives of women in prison yet simultaneously risk reinforcing the very framework they seek to subvert if the underlying assumptions about women’s criminalisation remain unchallenged. Officers’ efforts to care for women, though ethically motivated, were embedded within a system that still positions women as objects of intervention rather than subjects of justice. Consequently, officers’ approaches can embody both compassion and contradiction, simultaneously challenging dehumanising norms within an operational framework focused on risk and managerialism.

Conclusion

This study exposes the moral and emotional labour that underpins the professional identity development of graduate prison officers working with women. Officers entered their roles as graduates recruited for their rehabilitative values and social justice orientation, having completed Prison-Service training, charity-led preparation and gender-informed training. This training provided an important conceptual grounding in gender, trauma and relational practice. However, once in post, officers found that their most meaningful learning occurred through daily, embodied engagement, observing, listening, and working alongside the women themselves. This experiential learning underscores a critical imbalance in current approaches to professionalisation that positions institutional or external experts as authoritative, though it is the women in prison who hold the lived expertise that most effectively shapes officers’ relational competence. Meaningful efforts are needed to recognise criminalised women as legitimate sources of knowledge production.

Graduate officers’ reflections suggest that gender-informed practice requires not only knowledge but reflexivity, as an ability to interrogate one’s own position, power and the gendered narratives that shape prison work. These officers modelled that reflexivity, questioning assumptions about women as ‘damaged’ or manipulative and recognising how such framings legitimise paternalism. Yet, as they navigated emotional exhaustion and systemic operational pressures, their ability to sustain this critical stance depended on peer solidarity and self-generated spaces of ethical reflection rather than institutional support. Supporting staff entering the women’s estate, therefore, demands recognition of gendered emotional labour as central to professionalism and institutional accountability.

More broadly, these findings point to the contradictions embedded in the organisational fabric of women’s prisons. Policy discourse celebrates rehabilitation, gender-responsivity and care, yet the operational realities remain driven by bureaucratic efficiency, risk management and control. Officers are positioned as buffers between institutional demands and human need, expected to act as risk-managers, counsellors and social workers simultaneously but without the resources or authority to fulfil any of these roles effectively. The result is an impossible mandate that both conceals and produces harm.

Training programmes such as WEST offer well-intentioned interventions but are undermined by the structural contradictions of the prison itself. They invite staff to embody compassion within institutions that systematically erode it, creating a dissonance that officers must reconcile through moral endurance. Policies that appear gender-responsive often remain performative, failing to address how institutional logics continue to privilege managerialist and masculinised notions of order and emotional detachment. The enactment of care, in such contexts, becomes both a site of resistance and a mechanism of control and order, a process through which the emotional burdens of systemic failure are displaced onto staff. Here, the limitations of gender-informed initiatives become most visible. Despite conceptual progress, the current approach to gender-responsivity operates within a managerial framework that individualises both trauma and its remedy. By translating gender and vulnerability into categories of risk, the prison system sanitises the political realities of women’s criminalisation, poverty, violence, racism and state neglect and reconfigures them as deficits to be managed. In this sense, the prison still operates as both a symptom and a perpetrator of trauma, where training does not substitute for resources and services beyond the prison walls.

This analysis reveals that gender-responsivity, while conceptually progressive, risks reproducing paternalism by framing women as damaged subjects to be managed and staff as therapeutic surrogates of a failing system. Both are rendered responsible for mitigating harm that is structurally produced. To move beyond this impasse requires a reimagining of gender-informed practice as a transformative critique. This involves shifting the focus from gendered narratives that construct women as transformative subjects (Hannah-Moffat, 2005) towards a gendered-justice approach that addresses structural conditions that shape women’s criminalisation, including poverty, violence, care experience, racialised inequalities and the harms of the carceral system itself. In practice, it requires moving beyond therapeutic governance towards paradigms that prioritise material support, relational autonomy and community-led provision and recognising the limits of prisons as sites of care. For prison officer training, this involves equipping staff not only to respond to trauma but to critically engage with institutional constraints, challenge gendered assumptions and resist the responsibilisation of officers as substitute providers of care. More fundamentally, it demands a shift from gendered managerialism to gendered justice, one that recognises the prison’s incapacity to meet women’s needs and refuses to locate the burden of repair and care within the moral labour of individual officers. In this sense, the graduate officers’ reflections, ethical, critical and hopeful, offer a mirror and a challenge to penal reform. Their capacity to see, question and humanise within an inhumane system demonstrates that professional identity in the women’s estate is not merely formed through training but through resistance. The task, then, is not how to make staff better fit the system but to create systems worthy of the values that staff and the women they work with continue to hold.