‘Prison officer pains’: How and why coloniality shapes the job of a prison officer in Guyana today

Abstract

In this exploratory article, we look at the understudied area of prison officer's lives in the Global South and the pains of their jobs. We provide a novel and decolonial perspective on these phenomena by documenting and discussing first-hand prison officer accounts and first-person observations of the different dimensions of their experiences of work and home today. We understand how they see and understand their jobs, including what the pains of imprisonment for officers in Guyana look and feel like from the bottom up. We learn about what prison officers perceive as the pains of their employment in Guyana – working conditions; psychological pains; prison infrastructure; intimate relations; prison within prison; social pains; and insecurity – and how such issues include echoes of the colonial past and impact officers not just in their everyday lives but how these pains also impact those closest to them. In this way, we show how, and why, the legacies of colonialism continue to haunt contemporary prison officers in Guyana.