Animals,Robots,Numbers,and Monsters: Dehumanization Spillover in Prison Work

Abstract

Prisons are unique places of employment in that workers must participate in and witness norms deliberately designed to disempower and incapacitate incarcerated individuals. For prison workers to provide care, custody, and control, they must often perform emotion management strategies to resolve the emotional dissonance of their work, including by dehumanizing the incarcerated people they work with. On the basis of interviews with 22 participants who work inside or in conjunction with prisons, the authors develop the concept of dehumanization spillover to understand how the emotion practice of dehumanization spills outside the relationship with the incarcerated and outside the prison walls to affect prison workers inside and outside of their work role. A classic understanding of dehumanization, as practices that prison workers do to incarcerated individuals, is broadened to encompass workers’ experiences with administrators and coworkers and the negative impacts of prison work on workers’ sense of self and interactions outside of work. This adds to our understanding of dehumanization as an institutional rather than a merely inter-group process.

The U.S. prison industrial complex is plagued with mass incarceration and racial bias (Bustamante, Jashnani, and Stoudt 2019; Carriere and Ravn 2024; Nowotny, Rogers, and Boardman 2017), while also struggling to overcome staffing shortages and high turnover rates (Beeler et al. 2018). These strains negatively affect both incarcerated populations, as well as the prison workers (PWs) who are responsible for their care, custody, and control. PWs, such as corrections officers (COs) and nurses, work within institutions that often prioritize custody and control over care and rehabilitation of offenders. This is out of a necessity to (supposedly) keep everyone safe. Both of these occupations also include role sets that may be contradictory in practice, such as the contradictory responsibilities to be both a “caring professional” for inmates, as well as an “enforcer” of the prison rules.

Prison work is unique in that prison employees witness and personally experience the institutional norms of a dehumanized environment. As one prison nurse in our study reported, “when you walk into a prison, it’s different than walking into a hospital because the door locks behind you” (Judy, 70 years old, white nurse). As we argue, the experience of prison work affects their sense of self and their interactions with colleagues, family, and the public. Unfortunately, for both the incarcerated and those that incarcerate, there are high rates of burnout and turnover in corrections. Leone et al. (2024:174) explained that correction officer burnout can be detrimental for both the institution and the individual, as it is associated with “depression, withdrawal from the job, decreased work performance, lower support for rehabilitation of offenders, higher support of punishment of inmates, higher levels of substance abuse, greater absenteeism and higher turnover/turnover intent” (Carlson and Thomas 2006; Jaegers et al. 2021; Neveu 2007). Scholars have also found higher than average levels of posttraumatic stress disorder (Spinaris, Denhof, and Kellaway 2012) and suicide among COs (Violanti 2017).

Criminology scholars agree that dehumanization is a defining characteristic of the carceral environment (Bharara et al. 2014; Higgins, Smith, and Swartz 2022). In fact, many scholars have found that correctional staff members are trained and socialized into an organizational culture that devalues inmates (Bastian, Denson, and Haslam 2013; Deska, Almaraz, and Hugenberg 2020; Osofsky, Bandura, and Zimbardo 2005). Higgins et al. (2022:430) noted that criminologists have long been concerned with “how staff perceptions of the incarcerated may catalyze a ‘culture of harm’ in prisons (Bharara et al. 2014; Christie 2007; Haney 1993, 2008, 2012).” In some situations, this devaluation can lead to harsh inmate treatment (Haney 2008), which Higgins et al. suggested is “likely in response to the structural conditions of prison work” (p. 432).

Following Goffman’s (1961) foundational work, a great deal of research has focused on how dehumanization occurs and how it affects incarcerated individuals. But there is a gap related to how dehumanization affects staff members. Although Higgins et al. (2022) examined the implications of dehumanization for staff members’ identity, their findings are limited to one southern state. In using focus groups for data collection, their findings also raise questions about how prison staff members think and feel about their work when not displaying such views to other colleagues in group settings. The aim of this qualitative, interview-based study is to build on Higgins et al. and others by examining how PWs in diverse regions of the U.S. experience and manage the dehumanized environments in which they work. Our analysis suggests that dehumanization goes beyond the treatment of incarcerated people. We propose the concept of dehumanization spillover to refer to the impact of institutional dehumanization on workers, both in and outside of their work role. As staff members engage in dehumanization strategies to manage their emotions and make the job easier, they are simultaneously subject to dehumanization by management and colleagues. Staff members can become habituated to emotion practices like dehumanization, experience dehumanization themselves, and engage in these practices outside the prison walls. Staff members and inmates, while notably unequal, are interconnected in their social experiences of the prison. This conceptualization provides a more holistic accounting of dehumanization in prison work beyond a classic focus on staff members’ treatment of incarcerated individuals.

Literature Review: Dehumanization

As a concept, dehumanization has evolved from being weaponized against criminal offenders by Lombroso in the late nineteenth century to being used in the twenty-first century to help understand social and institutional exchanges. Bain, Vaes, and Leyens (2013:2) explained that the concept of dehumanization has progressed from “being restricted to extreme or overt prejudice” to now being used to help contextualize more subtle social exchanges. Throughout the twentieth century, the concept of dehumanization was used as a generic explanation for large-scale violence against individuals or groups of people, such as genocide, slavery, or massacres (Kelman 1976). In his work on Jewish victimization during the Holocaust, Fein (1979) explained that once a group of people falls outside of a “universe of obligation”, it is no longer normatively deviant to violate them. As such, they are often victimized (Kelman 1976).

Within the U.S. context, dehumanization, slavery and mass incarceration are historically intertwined. In their edited book Humanness and Dehumanization, Bain et al. (20142) explained that the concept of dehumanization “is perhaps most contentious (and has received the most attention) when applied to intergroup context” (p. 2) This connection is illustrated in the Virginia Supreme Court case of Ruffin v. Commonwealth (1871), in which it is explicitly stated that while incarcerated, a prisoner “is for the time being the slave of the state” (Ruffin v. Commonwealth of Virginia 1871). As such, Carriere and Ravn (2024) argued that racial discrimination has historically been a feature of the criminal justice system in the United States. The disproportionate representation of minority members in prisons is well documented. In 2023, a press release from the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that 32 percent of individuals who were incarcerated at the state and federal levels were Black, “while 31% were white, 23% Hispanic, 10% multiracial or some other race,” and fewer than 4 percent identified as American Indian, Alaska Native, Asian, Native Hawaiian, or other Pacific Islander (Bureau of Justice Statistics 2023). The racial composition of the incarcerated is not only disproportionate to the general population, but also to the staff members who are charged with their custody and control. In 2024, 60.5 percent of federal prison staff members identified as white, while only 21.5 percent identified as Black and 14.3 percent as Hispanic (Federal Bureau of Prisons 2024). The combination of the historical connection between slavery and incarceration with the disparity between the racial composition between incarcerated individuals and PWs makes carceral systems unique environments through which to examine experiences of dehumanization.

Social psychologists have further developed the idea of dehumanization to describe how it is connected to the emotions of the individual that is doing harm or violence. Bandura (2002) connected dehumanization to the process of moral disengagement, which provides justification for negative behaviors against other people. Haslam et al. (2007) credited Bandura (1990a, 1990b) with refining the analysis of the moral disengagement process in his explanation that it relieved people of “feelings of guilt over their aggressive actions and empathy for their victims” (Haslam et al. 2007:410). Osofsky et al. (2005) further demonstrated that dehumanization, as one form of moral disengagement, assisted prison staff members in carrying out the death penalty (Vasiljevic and Viki 2013).

Haslam (2006) and colleagues (Haslam et al. 2007) developed a model to differentiate between two types of dehumanization. Building off of Leyens et al.’s (2000, 2003) work on group emotion attribution, Haslam (2006) advanced a theoretical approach that distinguishes between animalistic dehumanization and mechanistic dehumanization. The authors explain that animalistic dehumanization happens when people are perceived to lack in “uniquely human” attributes, such as “civility, refinement, higher cognition, and moral sensibility,” and as a result are perceived to be “animallike” (Vasiljevic and Viki 2013). Individuals who are perceived to lack in characteristics such as “emotionality, warmth, vitality, openness and depth” are compared with machines, and Haslam et al. (2007) explained that they may experience mechanistic dehumanization. The authors further explained that comparing a person with an animal or a machine is meaningless at face value; however, when both types of dehumanization occur, they can also involve acts of hate and aggression, as well as “patronizing and condescending behavior, dismissive attitudes, lack of empathy, and indifference to the interests of others” (p. 420). One limitation of psychological approaches to dehumanization, however, is that an individualistic approach underappreciates the more pervasive “culture” of dehumanization found in prisons and thus does not fully account for the experience and impact of dehumanization on PWs as well as incarcerated individuals.

Organizational Dehumanization of PWs

Recent work in social psychology has advanced our understanding of the interconnectedness of prison culture, employee perceptions of dehumanization, and the treatment of incarcerated individuals. Bell and Khoury (2011:168) explained that when employees feel “objectified” and “made to feel like a tool or instrument for the organization’s ends” they are experiencing organizational dehumanization. Wo, Schminke, and Ambrose (2019) further developed an integrative perspective of “trickle-down effects” to explain the “flow of perceptions, feelings, attitudes, and behaviors down the organizational hierarchy” (p. 2264). In their study of the relationship between emotional labor—the modification of emotions to fit organizational emotion norms on the job (Hochschild 1983)—and organizational dehumanization, Nguyen, Besson, and Stinglhamber (2022) found that organizational dehumanization “leads employees to adopt emotional labor strategies that are harmful to them” (p. 190). These studies demonstrate the harmful associations between experiences of organizational dehumanization and the performance of emotional labor by PWs.

In considering recent developments in the sociology of emotional labor and emotion practice (Cottingham 2022), we theorize dehumanization as an emotional labor strategy that can become habitual to PWs and thus, might shape their emotional habitus (Bernatchez 2024) and ways of relating to both self and others outside of the prison walls. Like nurses who transferred not just stress, but also emotional resources and practices between their roles as workers and parents (Cottingham, Chapman, and Erickson 2020), the emotion practices of prison work are not exclusively limited to interactions with the incarcerated or within the worker role.

Dehumanization in prisons has been characterized as a “social phenomenon” by researchers (Goffman 1963; Robison et al. 2024). Although most of this work has focused on the experiences of incarcerated individuals (Annamma et al. 2024; Davis 2016; Ross 2010), recent research has begun to explore how the dehumanized environment affects PWs. For example, Stinglhamber et al. (2022) were the first to empirically test this trickle-down effect in prisons. In their study of Belgian correctional officers, the researchers found that higher levels of organizational dehumanization were associated with officers treating incarcerated individuals less humanely (p. 1610). They further suggest that it is possible that the officer’s dehumanization of the inmates might be a “self-protective mechanism” to help them reduce their occupational stress. Building on Goffman’s (1961) early work on the role of institutional perspectives, Higgins et al. (2022) explained that correction workers engage in mental strategies aimed at “othering” inmates in an effort to neutralize their role in carrying out symbolic violence against them. The researchers further suggest that organizational dehumanization in prisons is multidirectional, negatively affecting the incarcerated as well as PWs. Despite these contemporary applications, a gap remains in the literature related to the interconnected experiences of organizational dehumanization and PW well-being. Additionally, as Haslam et al. (2007) noted, there is a need to determine the potential behavioral implications and social consequences of dehumanization.

This study turns to developments in the sociology of emotion in order to fill this gap and introduce the concept of dehumanization spillover. Emotion scholars have used and developed the notion of “habitus” from sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, as a way to account for how external conditions come to shape people’s dispositions and emotional habits (Bernatchez 2024; Cottingham 2022; Gould 2009; Miles 2023), as well as appreciate how habitus—as internalized dispositions, preferences, and tastes (alongside forms of capital, Cottingham 2016)—can change over time as a result of primary and secondary socialization, as well as disjunctures between fields and habitus (Decoteau 2016). Although Hochschild’s (1983) theorizing of emotional labor techniques like surface acting and cognitive deep acting is helpful for making sense of the situated emotion management that PWs must perform, the structured and structuring habitual practices that emerge from certain types of emotional management techniques is more fully captured with the notion of habitus. Using Bourdieu’s (1990) social practice theory, we can theorize how tendencies toward dehumanization, practiced over time and through repetition, become part of the secondary habitus of PWs. This process is neither total nor complete, as workers are in various stages of acclimating to expectations of work inside the prison and they encounter other workers with different approaches and coping strategies. Qualitative research with those who work in prisons can illuminate the impact that an environment of dehumanization has for worker’s interactions, emotion management techniques, and sense of self.

Method

In this qualitative study, ¹ we analyze interview data from 22 participants (10 women and 12 men), from an ongoing study, who have direct experience working in (i.e., COs, nurses, supervisors and administrators) or with (such as the police officer who provided support to local prisons) a carceral setting. PWs were recruited through a convenience sampling strategy, beginning with the first author’s network, and were provided with $25 in compensation for their time. The semistructured interviews, which averaged 50 minutes in length, were all conducted in private locations or over the phone (during the pandemic) and were recorded. In total, participants worked at 14 different carceral settings in five different states: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia, Florida, and New York. The participant sample includes 16 COs, 4 nurses, 1 police officer with prison experience, and 1 prison administrator (with 26 years of experience working in corrections).

It is essential for researchers to reflect on how their positionality might influence their research process. Coffey (1999) described fieldwork as “personal, emotional and identity work” and called for academics to reflect on how their positionality influences “this ongoing negotiation” (p. 1). Reyes (2020) explained that qualitative researchers possess in/visible ethnographic toolkits, which are a combination of visible demographic characteristics and invisible characteristics, such as family background and social capital. Folkes (2023) further explained that these toolkit characteristics, such as sharing personal experiences, can be used strategically to gain access to participants, as well as build rapport. As such, it is important to note that the primary investigator for this project teaches courses related to criminal justice studies and mental health and, most notably, offers classes in the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program model. ² Her discipline expertise, as well as her experiences teaching inside prisons, influenced all aspects of this project. It is also important to note that both researchers identify as white, similar to the majority of participants in this project. Although this demographic similarity may have aided in developing rapport with participants, it is in contrast to the overall demographics of incarcerated individuals. The researchers attempted to overcome any potential weaknesses associated with personal demographics through collaborative analysis and the analytic techniques detailed later.

During data collection, a detailed audit trail was used by the researchers to document all of the activities and decisions that were made in the study (Carcary 2009). These documentation efforts follow Seale’s (1999:158) suggestion to use “reflexive methodological accounting” in an effort to demonstrate intentionality and care. Shenton (2004) explained that detailed audit trails assist the researcher in documenting their systematic approach to qualitative research, in an effort to “help ensure as far as possible that the work’s findings are the result of the experiences and ideas of the informants, rather than the characteristics and preferences of the researcher” (p. 72). In addition, the researchers took detailed field notes during and following each of the interviews. While the audit trail documents the details of the research process, the field notes provide a place for researchers to document their interpretations and reflections in real time. Both of these documents also serve as additional sources for analysis.

We used QRS NVivo 11, qualitative analysis software to organize and analyze the interview transcript data. The first stage of the analysis included the development of a loose coding scheme that was developed from the field notes and the audit trail. New codes were added as they emerged during analysis and were also documented in the audit trail. In addition to using the audit trail as a place to document the study decisions and timelines, it was also used as place to engage in memo-writing in between the coding and writing phases of the project. Charmaz (2004) explained that memo-writing between coding and writing gives researchers the opportunity to experience “coding as processes to explore rather than as solely ways to sort data into topics” (p. 511). These detail-oriented efforts contextualized the qualitative analysis of PWs’ experiences of organizational dehumanization.

In an effort to protect confidentiality, each participant was originally assigned a number and was coded for self-reported age (at the time of the interview), racial category (W for white, B for Black), and occupational role (CO for correction officer, N for nurse, A for administrator, and P for police officer). In total, this sample includes 10 participants that identified as women, 11 as men, and one as a transman. The sample includes PWs from across a range of ages and experience on the job. The mean age was 45 years, with a range between 25 and 70 years. Mean years of experience was 12 years, with a range of 2 to 40 years. All but one of the participants identified as white, with one identifying as Black. Our sample is thus diverse in terms of gender, age, and experience, but Black and Hispanic COs are notably underrepresented in our sample compared with their national representation in the occupation. During the writing process, pseudonyms were assigned to each of the participants and their identity characteristics (pseudonym, age, race, and occupational role) are included to contextualize the contributions of each of the participants in the findings section. In addition, we use italicized text in some of the direct quotations to emphasize specific language used by the participants.

Findings

In our analysis we found that PWs talked repeatedly about the humanity of the incarcerated people in their care. At times, this talk was meant to contrast their humane approach with other less humane coworkers. In other instances, participants’ discussion of inmates framed the latter as less than fully human. It was clear that participants felt as though dehumanization was an ever present threat to inmates and, in some cases, to themselves directly. Rather than being confined to their relationship to the incarcerated people in their care, a broader culture of dehumanization in prisons leads to dehumanization spillover (see Figure 1). In the most extreme cases, this dehumanization spillover also negatively affected PWs outside of the facility. Essentially, the culture of dehumanization that is present within carceral systems infiltrates all social relationships and exchanges.

Figure 1.

Schematic representation of dehumanization spillover.

Our interviewees discussed dehumanization in three distinct ways. First, PWs discussed the dehumanization of incarcerated individuals directly themselves or indirectly in reference to the actions and beliefs of other PWs. Second, PWs shared examples of dehumanization between coworkers, illustrated in cases of lateral violence and sexual harassment between PWs. Third, PWs reported experiences in which their internalization of dehumanization negatively affected their interactions with family members, the public, and their sense of self. Thus, we see dehumanization spilling out from the traditional relationship between PWs and the incarcerated and influencing the relationships among PWs, prison management, their families, and the public.

Dehumanization of the Incarcerated

Participants in this study noted in no uncertain terms that inmates’, and to some extent, their own humanity, were continuously on the line. Few explicitly said that they do not see inmates as human, but in assessing the approaches of other workers, they relay a perception that the dehumanization of inmates was pervasive. For example, some PWs suggested that viewing inmates as fully human was the minority view, while others suggested that this dehumanized approach to inmates was associated with either time on the job or the gender of the guard.

Typical correctional officers, they try not to view inmates in a human way. They try to just view them as someone who violated the law, was sentenced to prison, and now they’re here. That’s, I think, the majority of correctional officers, how they feel. Now your small minority correctional officers, yes they see them as someone who broke the law and was sentenced, but they’re still human and they still have, whether it be medical needs . . . they still have needs. (David, 51 years old, WCO)

There are a lot [of workers] of the old school mentality. Like, I worked daylight shift for 3 to 4 years as a sergeant down there. Working the daylight hours, the normal hours, you’re working with the higher seniority, more seasoned people. They were more of the old school, “screw these inmates, they’re just inmates.” Stuff like that. And I feel like the younger generation were almost trying to work with the inmates. (Tim, 32 years old, WCO)

A lot of the older guys basically treat the inmates like a number, almost. They don’t really look at them as human beings. . . . Um, I would say a lot of the younger generations, I would say 40s and younger there’s a lot of guys who treat them like human beings. (Hannah, 25 years old, WCO)

But I think some of the other officers, especially the male officers think “Oh he’s an inmate, so he’s going to be an inmate . . . he’s a piece of crap, we’re gonna treat him as such . . . he’s not a human being.” (Emily, 27 years old, WCO)

Paul (36 years old, BCO) and Hannah (25 years old, WCO) reiterated their belief that they themselves treat inmates as humans. Although this might seem to contradict our claim that dehumanization of inmates was rampant, their reflections point to the larger climate of dehumanization that they work within, a climate that makes their compassionate approach appear as an anomaly, at least in their own perception. Here too, inmate humanity was not a taken for granted assumption, but something that had to be continuously, discursively performed by Paul and Hannah as they described their own approach to the job:

You [inmate] are a human being. If you are doing something that I don’t agree with, then I’m going to speak to you like a human being. I’m not going to be like “Hey you inmate . . .” because you’re like a crook. . . . You’re like a criminal. That’s just not how I am. (Paul, 36 years old, BCO)

You know I was always willing to help the inmates on my block. They know they can always come to me with questions or if they absolutely need something that first shift couldn’t offer them, I could help them. And they know that. I just try to be fair and treat them all the same. (Hannah, 25 years old, WCO)

Our findings support previous work that has established an institutional norm of devaluing the humanity of inmates (Bastian et al. 2013; Deska et al. 2020; Osofsky et al. 2005). Judy (70 years old, WN) also shared an incident in which another nurse responded to her correcting their faulty medical intervention with “well, they’re only inmates.” Although some participants conceptualized this as part of the natural trajectory of working in a prison, such as James, others shared specific situations in their career that served as turning points for their compassion toward inmates (such as Mary, 55 years old, WCO).

As you work in corrections, you develop a hard heart. So, I don’t really stress about inmates attacking inmates. There comes a point in time where you just don’t react. (James, 51 years old, WCO)

They’re your people [other COs], you have relationships with, so it changes how you feel about the inmates when it happens [inmate attacks a CO] because it makes you dislike them immediately. . . . I have seen males assaulted, officers, females assaulted and its sad, you get to the point you don’t care who they are beating up, as long as it’s not your people. Because they fight so much, you know, I mean I have had guys fight over paper plates. (Mary, 55 years old, WCO)

In addition to PWs’ discussing the dehumanizing of inmates directly and the impacts this has on keeping innates safe, we can see dehumanization of inmates at work in the way that PWs discussed their perception of the risks of humanizing the incarcerated. Participants shared examples of the social risks associated with the perception that they were compassionate toward inmates. For example, Tim describes being teased and mocked by subordinates and friends for treating inmates as human:

They wouldn’t say it to my face, as a supervisor, but I heard, “What, you want to hug the guy?” And some people would joke about it if I was good friends with them . . . but that was almost the way to handle things, you had to calm the situation down differently. You had to be nice about it and talk to them like a human being. Some of them would not, and like I said, they would look down on me or younger officers trying to calm the situation down. Let’s avoid a use of force, let’s avoid going hands on. Let’s avoid anything stupid, but the senior officers are like, “No, you’re just hugging them.” They would say hug-a-thug. (Tim, 32 years old, WCO)

David clearly outlines the perceived risks associated with being too compassionate, or friendly with inmates, when he explains,

If you’re pegged to be an inmate lover, other staff will view you differently. They may not even want to hang out with you. You may be watched more carefully by the higher ups to see how much of a so-called inmate lover you are. Would you be someone that’s willing to bring in contraband for an inmate? So, if you’re known as an inmate lover, you might become a suspicious type. (David, 51 years old, WCO)

Some participant’s also shared negative feelings associated with the institution trying to “humanize” inmates. This reaction seemed to be associated with a perception that inmates were somehow receiving more treatment or resources than the PWs thought that they deserved. For example, in discussing a recently implemented new prison initiative that involved allowing incarcerated individual to play video games, Karen shares her frustration over what she perceives to be undeserved privileges:

They encourage CO’s to treat them like normal people, not inmates. . . . It is going to go down in a flaming crash because we already have hooch and drugs and all the fun stuff being found in this block. They [inmates] know their way of exploiting the state. This is the best place to live because you got large screen televisions that are hooked up to gaming systems and recliners and the whole nine yards. It’s a joke. (Karen, 47 years old, WCO)

We see this same negative feeling echoed throughout the interviews related to services and resources, such as prescription medications and too many perceived freedoms. These negative feelings may result from the fact that PWs coexist with incarcerated individuals in an environment in which they also feel dehumanized.

Organizational Dehumanization of PWs

Although much of the prison literature has documented dehumanization of inmates and the processes that lead to such dehumanization, one surprising finding from our interviews with PWs was the extent to which they themselves seemed to be affected by the culture of dehumanization within the organization. For example, Frank (61 years old, WCO) talks about trying to retain his sense of humanity and the humanity of the inmates during his time as a CO. He contrasts himself with the “robotic” and complacent nature of other COs (to those COs, “they [inmates] were just a face, they were just a number”) and he distances himself from the guards. In his use of the adjective robotic, his descriptions of the “other” guards align with how Haslam et al. (2007) defined mechanistic dehumanization. Lucas (28 years old, WCO) also identifies a feeling of mechanistic dehumanization that he experienced when working in the prison, an experience that is clearer now that he has taken on a new role as a parole officer. He says,

I feel like I’m actually a human being and not a number and at least making a difference in some people’s lives. I mean, I think I was in prison too [as a CO], but not in the way I wanted to be. (Lucas, 28 years old WCO)

Interestingly, Frank (61 years old, WCO) also contrasts himself with the inmates, who he described as “zombies from medication” or “like animals in a cage”. This second contrast clearly demonstrates Haslam et al.’s (2007) concept of animalistic dehumanization.

Our findings build on Haslam et al.’s (2007) work by demonstrating that although PWs were likely to feel dehumanized by the prison administration in a “machine-like” way, some concurrently dehumanized inmates in “animalistic” ways. Situations, such as those shared by Frank, highlight examples of dehumanization spillover, in that the mechanistic dehumanization that happened to the PWs cooccurred with their animalistic dehumanization of the inmates. Interestingly, as if he perceived a continuous threat that he or the inmates might lose their humanity, Frank reiterates in his interview that “you’re [as an officer] still a human being and they’re [inmate] a human being” (Frank, 61 years old, WCO). This declaration suggests that an inmate’s humanity and his own humanity must be repeatedly claimed and, through discursive repetition, affirmed despite the dehumanizing conditions of the prison.

PWs identified various aspects of the job with their feelings of dehumanization. One of the most consistent structural concerns of prison staff members related to the stress of getting mandated, that is, being required to stay and work after your work shift was supposed to be done. Judy (70 years old, WN) explains that when PWs get mandated, they stay to work another shift “no matter what your plans were at home, no matter if that’s when you slept, or if you had a doctor’s appointment.” Mary (55 years old, WCO) suggests that the mandating problem is directly connected to the high turnover rate among corrections staff members. She explains that “people are doing 16-hour shifts, so people aren’t seeing their families, they aren’t seeing their children and its every day.” Megan’s (44 years old, WCO) experience seems to support this suggestion. She shared with us that she was mandated 46 times in one year, which she described as “like a month and a half with no days off.” These stressors over getting mandated are further exacerbated by the uniqueness of the prison setting, an environment where all people, including PWs, can be confined inside the facility when there is a “lockdown,” regardless of personal or family responsibilities they might have. For many, the stress associated with getting mandated or locked in during a lockdown was connected with feelings of powerlessness, a persistent feeling in dehumanized environments.

In addition to the stressors of mandating, several of the participants directly identified that “management” was the most stressful part of the job.

There are a lot of the stressors there. It’s a lot more management than even some of the inmates. You can talk to the officers. Beyond the inmates, you complain about the monstrous people you work with. It’s not even the inmates. Sometimes management is just god awful. (Lisa, 54 years old, WN)

Regardless of what happens in the correctional system or whatever is going on, it’s like staff doesn’t matter. Our supervisors care more about appeasing society as opposed to keeping us safe. (Paul, 36 years old, BCO)

You’re constantly watching your back cause you never know. Um, that’s one of the biggest stressors. You just never know. You’ll see upper management even the management in our prison and beyond that doesn’t care. You’ll see them reactive instead of proactive. They don’t care to listen to “lowly” CO 1s because we don’t know what we are talking about. Even though we are the ones who actually run the jails. (Justin, 42 years old, WCO)

Interestingly, in his description of stress caused by management, Justin (42 years old WCO) attempts to disempower prison administrators when he labels them as the “cogs” in a system where the COs are the “wheels”:

Here’s the thing they [management] forget: We can run the prison system without them, but they can’t run it without us. We can run it without management, without psychiatrists, all that stuff, but they can’t have a prison without COs. They forget that. . . . They are the cogs, we are the wheels. The COs are so. The only people we need in prisons are nursing staff, food staff and COs . . . we’re the ones that make the prison system go around. (Justin, 42 years old, WCO)

At face value, while it may seem that Justin is attempting to validate the importance of his occupational role, his assertion also highlights the looming presence and acceptance of feelings of mechanistic dehumanization by PWs.

Dehumanization spillover can also be seen in interactions between coworkers, which included violence and sexual harassment between staff members. As this goes outside the bounds of the PW relationship with the incarcerated, we see this as illustrating the spillover of dehumanizing tendencies. David describes the institutional culture related to staff-on-staff violence as a “meet me at the flagpole” mentality and goes on to explain the understanding that violence between staff members needs to take place “out of memo range” (David, 51 years old, WCO). He explains,

The stress levels amongst the staff get so high that you kind of take it out on your coworkers sometimes. I’ve seen staff-on-staff violence . . . sometimes they’ll look the other way if they know there’s tensions between this officer and that officer. (David, 51 years old, WCO)

Sometimes there comes a time when an officer won’t back down, and the supervisors won’t back down and they literally got in fist fights right in the middle of the floor. (Paul, 36 years old, BCO)

Some female PWs also shared experiences of sexual harassment. Connected to the treatment of people as objects, sexual harassment entails the dehumanization of others (Jonnson, Langille, and Walsh 2018; Luft 2023). While discussing her frustrations over her personal experiences, Karen (47 years old, WCO) explained that when she complained to management about sexual harassment by male coworkers, she was met with a “welcome to the job” attitude. The following quotations are examples of some of the situations that frustrated female workers who either experienced or witnessed sexual harassment.

I have had men who have literally followed me from the parking lot and have tried to follow me home. . . . You can be sexually harassed up the wazoo by male staff and they [management] don’t give a fuck. They will tell you, “welcome to the job.” (Karen, 47 years old, WCO).

I feel like upper management kind of hides the negative things that some people do. . . . When I first got hired we had a sergeant, a male sergeant, that got transferred from [location retracted for confidentiality] due to sexual harassment allegations. He started at [location retracted], and of course he continued his behavior until it got to the point where there were multiple women where he had either exposed himself to or made really inappropriate comments to. I just feel like all of that could have been prevented if he would have been terminated. But it’s almost like the DOC [Department of Corrections] tries to cover up any bad publicity when it comes to their officers. . . . I just don’t feel very well protected. (Hannah, 25 years old, WCO)

The previous examples highlight various situations in which PWs experienced organizational dehumanization (i.e., feeling like robots, numbers, wheels in the machine), as well as the ways in which structural aspects of prison work (e.g., mandating and administration) seemed to exacerbate feelings of dehumanization. In addition, the quotations by Karen and Hannah identify feelings of frustration and powerless related to their experiences with and observations of the sexual harassment of female PWs. Both the administration’s failure to protect and the targeting of female colleagues as sexual objects suggest dehumanization spillover, as Karen’s example illustrates the literal spilling of dehumanizing practices outside the prison walls and into her personal life, as a harassing coworker tried to follow her home. We more fully examine how dehumanization follows workers home in the next section.

The Impact of Organizational Dehumanization on the Self and Family and Public Interactions

Spillover happens in cases where coworkers feel dehumanized by the administration, where they dehumanize each other through violence and harassment, and, as shared by several participants, in how their work follows them into their personal lives and sense of self. Recall James’ claim earlier about developing a “hard heart.” Aligned with his description, others described experiences of “desensitization” or “institutionalization,” such as David and Karen, while others shared how the realities of their work environment changed how they felt about the public and how they navigated public space.

When you deal with certain situations all the time, you become desensitized. Just like nurses in an ER. They see horrible, terrible things, and they become immune to it. You will actually joke about the creative, horrible things you see as a coping mechanism. Or just the jacked-up things you see. . . . I’m institutionalized. It doesn’t phase me. (Karen, 47 years old, WCO)

You become so desensitized by working in a prison. The term “do your eight, hit the gate.” You go home, and you’re still desensitized. You’re still, you may see something that other people would be sympathetic to, and you’re not because you’re thinking of some thug in prison when you should be more open-minded when you leave the prison, but it doesn’t happen. You’re very desensitized and unsympathetic towards people. . . . I just felt a general sense of being unsympathetic towards normal things on the outside that I probably should have been. I should have been more open-minded to things. (David, 51 years old, WCO)

The phrase “do your eight and hit the gate” was echoed by other participants and represents an acknowledgment of the uniqueness of a work shift in a prison, in that you are locked in to serve your work time. At the same time, the phrase “hit the gate” seems to suggest intentionality in attempting to leave the work stress behind when leaving. Reflections from Karen and David suggest that participants struggled to manage this form of dehumanization spillover.

For some PWs, the constant exposure to a work culture saturated with dehumanization altered their perspectives and interpretation of life outside of work. PWs who are parents shared specific stories related to how working in a prison affected their perceived sense of “threat” on the outside.

I bring that home with me, and because of what I see on a day-to-day basis, it kinda makes me harder on my girls. Because sometimes they take a lot of things for granted and it drives me crazy cause I’m so super security minded that I’m pinpointing and picking a lot of things out. And sometimes they [his girls] feel stressed because the job is turning me into this . . . insecure monster that is just paranoid about everything. (Paul, 36 years old, BCO)

You will see the switch flipped if somebody says or does something wrong in front of me in public. I turn into work me like that [snaps fingers]. Sometimes, I have no control over going after somebody. (Karen, 47 years old, WCO).

In these two examples, participants identify some of the negative ways in which their practices of emotion management at work have spilled into their personal lives. For Paul, although a heightened amount of security-minded paranoia might be functional in a prison setting, it is clear that his internalization of this practice causes stress for him and his children when he is not at work. His use of the term monster points to a sense of self-estrangement and self-dehumanization. Similarly, Karen’s description of “work me” suggests that the organizational dehumanization that she experiences at work is connected with a loss of personal agency (“I have no control”), a core feature of her humanity. In describing how her “work me” emerges in public, Karen goes on to describes a situation in which a rowdy group of intoxicated men were yelling vulgarities at a table next to her and her daughters as they ate pizza at a restaurant. Her daughters tried to contain her, saying, “No mom, let it go. You’re not at work, let it go. Let’s eat. Ignore him.” She would later approach the table as she was leaving to tell them, “You know what, only because of my daughter am I not beating the shit out of your little friend.”

In a final example, from Megan (44 years old, WCO), she talks about the toll that her ten years working in corrections has had on her children and her relationship with her family:

[Correctional facility name] affected my kids too. Even to this day, my son, every night when I leave, “Mom, don’t get shanked, come home, be safe.”

Later in the interview, she states that being “social” and “normal” become more difficult and require more effort:

You have to make an effort to be social sometimes. You have to make an effort to seem normal sometimes, which just seems stupid, but you do. I guess I have pulled away from my family a lot, my mom, everyone’s really close and stuff. Sometimes, I don’t care. I’m like, “Yeah that’s great and stuff.” Yeah, I don’t care. So, I don’t know. Maybe I’m not mother of the year, who knows.

The culture of dehumanization that PWs confront regularly in their job is not confined to their relationships with the incarcerated nor to the prison grounds itself. Rather, dehumanization spillover as a construct captures the flow of dehumanization practices and its effects on PWs’ sense of self and their relationships with family and the public. They feel hardened, not normal, desensitized, or like a monster who is quick to paranoia and hostility in public.

Discussion and Conclusion

Dehumanization is a cognitive deep acting strategy (Hochschild 1983) that PWs might adopt in order to meet the occupational expectation that they keep other human beings locked up, while avoiding feelings of compassion for inmates or as a way to rationalize the (threat of) violence that the incarcerated represent. This framing aligns with prior research on PWs (Higgins et al. 2022). However, while this short-term strategy might help PWs adapt to the inhumane conditions of incarceration, it is not a unidirectional strategy that affects only the incarcerated. Rather than PWs simply and directly dehumanizing inmates, dehumanization spills outside the bounds of this relationship, shaping how PWs see each other, themselves, others in public, and their interactions with family. The dehumanizing culture of prisons arguably harms workers as well as prisoners, to such an extent that the provision of mental health services or informal support for workers is likely to have limited effect on the rates of divorce, suicide, alcoholism, and drug abuse that are rampant in the profession, and were detailed in our interviews (Carlson and Thomas 2006; Jaegers et al. 2021; Neveu 2007; Violanti 2017). We can partly explain this dehumanization spillover as a consequence of the distinct emotional habitus that workers in prisons adopt in order to do the work of surveilling inmates.

Emotion management techniques such as dehumanization can become part of one’s habitus and thus cannot be easily or consciously avoided by PWs. In this way, we can better understand the reality that dehumanization can’t simply be “turned off” by PWs when they “hit the gate,” rather, these techniques become a part of who they are and their mode of being, leading them to turn these strategies onto their coworkers (discussed at times as “robotic” and “monstrous people”) and themselves (“I’m institutionalized,” “insecure monster,” “the wheels . . . that make the prison system go around”). Dehumanization spillover refers to the proliferation of this emotional labor technique in terms of who and where such techniques are deployed. Although it might begin as a means for managing the contradictions of placing humans in inhumane conditions, dehumanization becomes pervasive to the organizational culture, coworker interaction, and sense of self maintained by PWs in and outside of the prison environment.

Like other emotion practices, dehumanization is embedded in the prison setting and the feelings induced in particular settings are

stored in the habitus, which provides socially anchored responses to others. Shame wells up in the cheeks in answer to a contemptuous glance; compassion propels one toward the pain in another’s face. However, these reactions are always already tightly bound up with apprehensions of who the other is, whether they are higher or lower in rank than oneself, if they are like or unlike oneself, if they are victims or perpetrators. (Scheer 2012:211)

Following Scheer’s logic here, emotional reactions are bound up with whether one is seen as human or something nonhuman (an animal, number, monster, or robot). The working conditions of the prison—conditions in which workers endure forced overtime, indifferent management, and potential violence from inmates and coworkers—are not constrained behind the prison walls, but spillover through their incorporation into the PW habitus. Hearts become hard and the humanity of others, and the self becomes diminished. The concept of habitus is useful for understanding how emotions and emotional repertoires, more than momentary strategies or conscious tactics, become cemented into the self and shape future interactions. The habitus of PWs is “an acquired and unconsciously embodied knowledge” (Bernatchez 2024:62) that cannot be slipped off with a uniform or locked up behind the prison gate.

Given that the habitus is shaped through primary and secondary socialization (Cottingham 2016), it is possible that the amount of time that someone works within a dehumanized environment might have an impact on their likelihood in engaging in dehumanization. If this is true, then it would help explain the perceptions of some of our younger participants, who tended to contrast their self-perceived higher levels of humanization with more seasoned prison employees who had become hardened over time. Emotional practices unfold over time, with repetition leading to changes in the habitus to match external demands. We might expect that over time, these same younger PWs will either leave the work or adapt their habitus to the techniques of dehumanization. Additional, longitudinal research could better address the question of workplace socialization and habitual practices of dehumanization.

Although our sample of PWs was diverse in terms of age, years of experience, and gender, one limitation of the current project is the lack of racial diversity, which is partially due to the convenience sampling strategy used for this project. The insidiousness of racial bias within the criminal justice system is well documented in the literature focusing on incarcerated individuals (Bustamante et al. 2019; Carriere and Ravn 2024; Nowotny et al. 2017); however, the relationship between dehumanization and race of individual PWs has yet to be fully explored. An analysis of this relationship is outside the scope of this project, but this type of analysis could improve our understanding of how dehumanization spillover unfolds. A second limitation is that we limited the category of PWs to correctional staff members and nurses. Future research on dehumanization spillover among PWs should seek to include the perspectives of individuals in a variety of other occupational roles within prisons, such as mental health professionals and support staff members (e.g., office-based prison personnel, prison educators). The experiences of PWs whose roles do not generally include frontline responsibilities, or continuous interactions with incarcerated individuals, could further contextualize our understanding of how the dehumanized environment affects different types of PWs.

The concept of dehumanization spillover illustrates the wide-ranging impacts of dehumanization within and beyond the institution of criminal justice. Following Maynard and Luft (2023), who called for further research on dehumanization as an institutional process, this research counters overly psychological treatments of dehumanization. Interviews with PWs revealed the reach of dehumanization beyond a unidirectional relationship with incarcerated people, to include the dehumanization experienced by PWs in relation to each other and the administration, as well as to their sense of self and engagement with family and the public. We theorize this process in relation to emotional labor practices and the development of a dehumanized habitus. This process might explain the high rates of divorce, suicide, and drug and alcohol abuse among the prison workforce and provide clues to their amelioration. Only by addressing the root causes of dehumanization in the context of prison work can we address the harm caused, certainly to the incarcerated, as is well documented (Alexander 2010), but also to workers, family members, and the public.