The “Pains of Employment”? Connecting Air and Sound Quality to Correctional Officer Experiences of Health and Wellness in Prison Space

• Published date: 01 November 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00328855231200635
• Author: Jennifer Turner,Rosemary Ricciardelli,James Gacek
• Date: 01 November 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

The “Pains of

Employment”?

Connecting Air and

Sound Quality to

Correctional Off‌icer

Experiences of Health

and Wellness in Prison

Space

Jennifer Turner

1

, Rosemary Ricciardelli

2

,

and James Gacek

3

Abstract

This article highlights Canadian federal correctional off‌icers’(COs) sensory

engagements with their workplace to reveal how, in particular, air quality

and sound quality generate physical feelings that create health and wellness

concerns. These “pains of employment”support calls to improve prison

space. However, these sensations conf‌late with perceptions of space, which

infer that prisoners, not infrastructure, create poor environments. Such per-

ceptions seemingly inf‌luence COs’approaches to prisoner management.

Accordingly, the physical quality of prison air and sound not only shapes

CO constructions of health and wellness, but also has the potential to inf‌lu-

ence how they discharge their role.

1

Carl von Ossietzky Univesity of Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany

2

Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s, Canada

3

University of Regina, Regina, Canada

Corresponding Author:

Jennifer Turner, Institute for Social Sciences, Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg ,

Ammerlander Heerstr. 114-118, 26129 Oldenburg, Germany.

Email: jennifer.turner@uol.de

Article

The Prison Journal

2023, Vol. 103(5) 610–632

© 2023 SAGE Publications

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/00328855231200635

journals.sagepub.com/home/tpj

Keywords

correctional off‌icer, health, wellness, air quality, sound quality, pains of

employment

Introduction

Prisons are powerful and affecting places. Regardless of where on the scale

between extreme punitiveness and progressive exceptionalism they exist,

prisons are deliberate societal constructions designed and manifested in

ways that enforce spatial restriction, securitization, and loss of liberty upon

the persons incarcerated within them. In unpacking these intentions lies an

inherent assumption that the lived experience of life within such spaces

will take on various forms and practices. Such assumptions are widely

accepted by prison researchers via the dominating work by Sykes (1958)

on the “pains of imprisonment,”which documents the bodily-, symbolic-,

and societal-impacts of time spent behind bars. Here, the oppressiveness of

conditions and circumstances of incarceration is a recurring theme.

1

Nevertheless, such work has inf‌luenced a wealth of emergent, and perhaps,

varied ways of understanding the experience(s) of incarceration that create

dialogue between these encounters and the physical manifestations of

prison space. “In other words,”as Moran and Turner outline, “we have

known for some time that prison is a highly stressful place; we are now begin-

ning to understand the role that the built environment plays in producing that

tension”(2019, p. 63). For example, there is a growing literature in criminol-

ogy, carceral geography, architecture studies, and beyond, that seeks to

explore prison architecture, its aesthetic components and/or its signif‌icance

for human experience (see, e.g., Fransson et al., 2018; Karthaus et al.,

2019; Moran, Turner, et al., 2016). In many cases, this wave of attention

contradicts Sykes’suggestions of a “painful”or “pain-f‌illed”environment,

instead intimating the potential for architecture to have positive, health-

enabling (or, even, therapeutic) effect in the penal setting (Jewkes et al.,

2020; Moran & Turner, 2019; Turner & Moran, 2019). Whatever the eventual

outcome, such work posits an undeniable relationship between prison archi-

tecture and the lived experience of prison space, that is felt by those working

and living in prisons.

Yet, despite these steady progressions in the attention to the constructions,

components, and consequences of carceral space, the bulk of research still

focuses on the experience of incarcerated persons. Such attention is, of

course, unquestionably warranted. This population is, after all, the primary

“target”for incarceration and comprises the individuals whose presence is

Turner et al. 611