Gender, risk, and presentation of self in “caring” prison work: Insights from institutional parole officers in Canada

Abstract

While scholars have investigated how prison workers understand and navigate occupational risks through performances of gender, most studies have focused on staff in security roles whose organizational cultures value displays of masculinities premised on characteristics such as toughness and stoicism. Less scholarly attention has considered how prison staff in nonsecurity roles, who perform duties oriented toward using interpersonal skills and helping others—characteristics that are commonly associated with female-dominated helping professions—understand and navigate risk through gendered forms of impression management. The current study explores the question of how one such occupational group, institutional parole officers (IPOs) working in Canadian federal prisons, performs gender in response to both their perceptions of workplace risk and their occupational, and often personal, commitment to supporting the rehabilitation of prisoners. We organize and analyze our findings using Goffman's (1959) theory of impression management to demonstrate that IPOs, as they attempt to both support prisoners and mitigate the perceived risks of a prison workplace, perform gendered presentations of self that fluidly incorporate aspects of masculinities and femininities. However, we also argue that female IPOs experience greater feelings of workplace vulnerabilities and, thus, perform more impression management labor than their male counterparts. Our analysis thus deepens the limited literature on gendered presentations of self among nonsecurity prison workers by situating gender performances within the occupational risks experienced in the prison workplace.