Understanding prison living: Mitigating the problem of ‘incompatible’ incarcerated people through the perspectives of correctional officers

Prisoner incompatibility is a challenge for correctional officers (COs), as incompatible people in prison are more likely to engage in negative interactions, participate in altercations, cause harm to each other and create tension on a unit. Through in-depth semi-structured interviews with 28 COs employed in Atlantic Canada, we explore how incompatibility among incarcerated people shapes how incarcerated people are managed and perceived by COs. Engaging the prison design literature, we further examine the kinds of spatial designs and protocols that contribute to, or mitigate, incompatibility. We find that COs describe a complex prison hierarchy that, while being laced with challenges beyond the control of COs, could nevertheless be effectively mitigated through architectural transformation or policy reforms. We highlight the need to consider how prison culture informs and is interpolated through spatial configurations of correctional institutions and how these social and spatial dynamics shape interactions between prisoners.