Making Prisons Work: Black Correctional Officers and Carceral Geographies of Western New York

Mass incarceration, characterized by unprecedented prison population growth in the US and a disproportionately large representation of Black men, has garnered much scholarly attention; however, a parallel increase in the proportion of Black correctional officers (COs) has not yet received the same consideration. During the early 1970s, demands made by the Prisoners’ Rights Movement led to the recruitment of thousands of Black men and women into the US correctional workforce over the following decades. Focusing on New York State, this dissertation shows how socio-spatial processes of correctional workforce integration have been central to reproducing the mass incarceration of African Americans. I argue that the racialized process of mass incarceration came to depend on the labor of Black COs; in turn, correctional workforce integration has redefined New York State’s prison system and its broader carceral geography. Based on a qualitative analysis of life history interviews with Black COs recruited between the late 1970s and early 1990s, I find that dynamics of race, class, and gender shaped relationships between Black COs, their co-workers, and incarcerated individual as their day-to-day encounters were integral to cultivating consent and cooperation in a volatile, racialized prison environment. 

In three empirical chapters, I trace how Black COs from Buffalo’s Eastside negotiated their class status and race and gender identities throughout their careers. First, I analyze how this generation of Black COs secured public sector jobs during wrenching deindustrialization and urban disinvestment. This chapter traces the carceral geographies that shaped segregated Eastside neighborhoods from the perspective of Black COs who lived in the same communities targeted by mass incarceration. Second, I examine interactions and relationships between Black and white COs across formal and informal work hierarchies. These narratives reveal Black COs’ social and spatial strategies to confront, mitigate, or avoid discrimination and its multi-fold dangers in prison. Third, I analyze day-to-day encounters between Black COs and Black incarcerated individuals. This chapter reveals how prison reproduction relies upon the intimate, emotional care work of Black COs, work that is raced and gendered. Overall, this dissertation builds upon critical literatures on race, mass incarceration and workforce integration in sociology and geography to disentangle the raced, classed, and gendered processes that reproduce prisons and the carceral geographies shaped by them.