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

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.