How to Diagnose Prisons' Failures: Three Perspectives on Officers' Responsibilities

ABSTRACT Prison officers play a vital role in shaping prison conditions. Assessing their responsibility for, and potential role in reforming, the prison's failures is an urgent and important task in corrective justice efforts. This article takes up this task, with a focus on the US prison context, by applying and critically examining two general theories of institutional action: the ‘outward’ perspective, which emphasizes rule‐following to achieve institutional purposes, and the ‘inward’ perspective, which brings to the fore the relational aspect of institutional life and officeholders' interrelated responsibility for guiding institutional action. After presenting the prison's purpose and its documented failures in Section 2, I frame the ordinary liberal reformist approach in terms of the outward perspective in Section 3, and outline a more promising public ethic of office accountability with the inward perspective in Section 4. I sketch in Section 5 a third, ‘downward’ perspective to challenge both, given their neglect of the prison staff culture and the broader epistemically unjust landscape that deem incarcerated people dangerous and untrustworthy. I conclude that to correct the prison's dysfunctions and achieve its raison d'être , we need to distrust officers.