Jail Officers’ Adherence to Traditional Bases of Social Power: Understanding Inmate Control in a Unique Correctional Context

• Published date: 01 November 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00328855231200637
• Author: Brandon K. Applegate,Heather M. Ouellette,Jennifer Wareham
• Date: 01 November 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

Jail Off‌icers’Adherence

to Traditional Bases of

Social Power:

Understanding Inmate

Control in a Unique

Correctional Context

Brandon K. Applegate

1

,

Heather M. Ouellette

2

,

and Jennifer Wareham

3

Abstract

Scholars have investigated the social sources of power that correctional off‌i-

cers embrace as their means of control over people who are incarcerated.

However, this work has been conducted with community correctional off‌i-

cers and those working in state prisons, with almost no attention to off‌icers

who work in local jails. Jails are distinctive in ways that may be important for

the bases of power on which off‌icers may draw, and the current study ana-

lyzed data from off‌icers employed by a large urban jail. Jail off‌icers favored

coercive power more so and referent power less so than has been reported

in prior studies of prison off‌icers. Further, we employed latent class analysis

to identify groups of off‌icers and analyzed covariates of the resultant classes.

We discuss implications for understanding the exercise of power in local

jails.

1

University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA

2

University of Louisville, Louisville, KY, USA

3

Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, USA

Corresponding Author:

Brandon K. Applegate, Department of Criminology & Criminal Justice, Currell College,

University of South Carolina, 1305 Greene St., Columbia, SC 29208, USA.

Email: applegate@sc.edu

Article

The Prison Journal

2023, Vol. 103(5) 655–678

© 2023 SAGE Publications

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/00328855231200637

journals.sagepub.com/home/tpj

Keywords

jail, corrections, social power, off‌icers

Introduction

In a recent comprehensive review, Butler et al. (2019) observed that the past

decade has witnessed increased scholarly attention on correctional off‌icer

issues. Compared to 39 studies published in the 20-year period between

1980 and 1999, nearly twice as many—77 studies—were published in the

f‌inal 8-year period included in their review from 2010 to 2017. Much of

the recent scholarship has addressed the workplace experiences of correc-

tional off‌icers, including job satisfaction, job stress, organizational commit-

ment, turnover intent, and burnout (Butler et al., 2019; Lambert et al.,

2021). Others have examined the real and perceived dangers of working in

a correctional institution as well as off‌icers’physical, mental, and emotional

well-being (Miller et al., 2022; Regehr et al., 2021). Beyond important work

in the United Kingdom (e.g., Crewe, 2009; Liebling et al., 2012), compara-

tively less attention has been devoted to how off‌icers supervise people who

are incarcerated. The scarcity of research on this dimension of correctional

work is notable because scholars have long recognized that the central

tasks of correctional institutions are maintaining order and custody of incar-

cerated individuals, and these tasks are carried out directly by correctional

off‌icers (Hepburn, 1989; Wooldredge, 2020). The current study adds to the

literature in this area by assessing jail off‌icers’perceptions of their social

power over incarcerated people and seeking to identify subgroups of off‌icers

with differing perspectives. Social power has received extensive attention in

broad scholarship intended to understand supervisor-subordinate relation-

ships (Brauer & Bourhis, 2006), and power both among people who are incar-

cerated and between inmates and off‌icers plays a central role in corrections

(e.g., Pyrooz & Decker, 2019; Wooldredge & Steiner, 2016). To provide

context for our analysis, we f‌irst review the existing literature on social

power in correctional settings.

Bases of Social Power

Social power involves a hierarchical relationship “in which one social actor,

A, can get another social actor, B, to do something that B would not otherwise

have done”(Dahl, 1957, pp. 202–203). Although it has been subject to further

development, French and Raven’s (1959) typology is the most widely cited

and applied effort to classify the sources of social power (Elias, 2008),

656 The Prison Journal 103(5)