Foreword / Mary Bosworth -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- Studying "doing" coercion : a micro-sociology bricolage -- Peacemaking and beyond : the everyday prison officers' duty -- The bureaucratic organization of "doing" coercion -- Implicit coercion logic -- Symbolic and credible threat of force -- The use of force -- Visual notes from my visual ethnographic diary -- Methodological afterthoughts -- Conclusion: on prison officers and (good) violence -- References -- Index
"This book offers a sustained study of one feature of the prison officer's job: the threat and use of force, which the author calls 'doing' coercion. Adopting an interactionist, micro-sociological perspective, the author presents new research based on almost two years of participant observation within an Italian custodial complex hosting both a prison and a forensic psychiatric hospital. Based on observation of emergency squad interventions during so-called 'critical events', together with visual methods and interviews with staff, 'Doing' Coercion in Male Custodial Settings constitutes an ethnographic exploration of both the organisation and the implicit and explicit practices of threatening and/or 'doing' coercion. With a focus on the lawful yet problematic and discretionary threatening and 'doing' of coercion performed daily on the landing, the author contributes to the growing scholarly literature on power in prison settings, and the developing field of the micro-sociology of violence and of radical interactionism. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, anthropology and criminology with interests in prisons, power and violence in institutions, and visual methods."--Provided by publisher
This is an autoethnographic note on conducting fieldwork with the purpose of documenting; first, outside academia––doing documentary photography; and second doing ethnography and autoethnography within academia. It explores different ways to conduct fieldwork (alone or in groups, ethnographically or autoethnographically) and different traditional and innovative ideas about how the "field" was interpreted commonsensically in the past and could be interpreted now, using the analytical dimension of the hybrid field. It is written both autoethnographically and creatively and includes a short methodological "novel." The research note concludes with a reflection on a particular field-work experience, tackling its limitation and imagining different ways to perform it.
This article focuses on the practice of using the threat of force within a custodial setting. Prison ethnographers have rarely focused their observations on prison officers' threats of the use of force or on the actual use of force, partly due to the difficulty of access. The theoretical framework adopted here is mainly grounded on Collins' interactionist approach and, concurrently, Popitz's phenomenology of power. The ethnography was conducted alongside officers on duty as well as interventions by emergency squads. In the first section, the paper introduces the issue of threatening the use of force, presents the research goals, and then unpacks the theoretical framework. The final section firstly illustrates the construction of a «critical event», introducing the idea of «status magnet/status shield» as a tool to integrate the focus of the interaction; it then defines and describes prison officers' symbolic threats and credible threats of the use of force. The latter are two relevant means of influence that officers would usually use in the case of a critical event. Threats of force would either result in a de-escalation of the situation or the actual use of force.
