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We’re both here to do a job and that’s all that matters’

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Michael Adorjan and Rose Ricciardelli examine new trans prisoner placement policies in Canadian federal prisons under the Liberal Trudeau government, focusing on cisgender correctional officer recruits’ views on working with transgender officers.

Image courtesy of interviewee. January 18, 2024

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This video video outlines a research study focused on correctional officers and their interactions with prisoners, particularly in the context of changes in policies related to transgender prisoner placements. Conducted by researchers, including someone named Rose, the study seeks to fill a gap in understanding the experiences and mental well-being of correctional officers, emphasizing their significant role in inmate rehabilitation and daily interactions.

Key points include:

1. **Research Context**: Past scholarship has largely overlooked correctional officers, despite their critical role in managing prison environments.

2. **Longitudinal Study Design**: The research tracks correctional officers from training through their careers, employing surveys, psychological assessments, and qualitative interviews to gauge their well-being, job satisfaction, and experiences related to their work, including the relatively new policies on transgender inmates.

3. **Transgender Prisoner Policy**: The researchers aimed to assess how these policies impact the attitudes and perceptions of correctional officers regarding transgender colleagues and inmates.

4. **Findings on Attitudes**: While most correctional officers expressed broad support for working alongside transgender colleagues, some revealed qualified support, highlighting a persistent cisnormativity within the prison culture and concerns about safety and competency.

5. **Cultural Shifts**: The study drew comparisons to historical shifts in attitudes towards female correctional officers in male facilities, noting how initial fears often dissipate over time as experiences inform attitudes.

6. **Need for Training**: The researchers emphasize the importance of better training for correctional officers regarding gender diversity to enhance their ability to interact positively and supportively with transgender inmates and colleagues.

7. **Broader Implications**: The researchers argue that addressing issues within the criminal justice system requires broader societal changes to support marginalized individuals before they become involved with the justice system.

Overall, the study highlights the complexities of correctional work, the social processes that influence attitudes towards gender diversity, and the need for systemic improvements in training and support for correctional officers.

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The study comes from Rose

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and I have been doing research a lot in general areas such

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as crime and deviance, including penology,

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public perceptions of prisoners and, and criminality.

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Uh, and Rose has done extensive research, with prisoners

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and prisons in Canada, but it come, we came to be aware

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of the lack of studies on, an very important, set

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of people, correctional officers.

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And, we're not alone in this.

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There has been, of course, recent attention

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to correctional officers as well

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around the world in England,

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as well as other parts of the world.

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Um, and I think that, that, that was,

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a major gap in our knowledge

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because correctional officers serve a very important role in

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terms of their daily interaction with, the prisoners,

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under their, responsibility

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to supervise their rapport with prisoners.

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Their ability to interact with them,

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makes a big difference in terms of

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prisoner experiences while imprisonment

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and potentially an impact on their rehabilitation

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community reintegration.

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But it's, there's also an important factor

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to look at mental health

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and mental wellbeing of correctional officers,

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because this was, an important area to look into.

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There's all sorts of occupational studies in sociology

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that examine burnout

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and the various stresses placed on certain occupations.

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But prison work

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or correctional work, has its own unique, of course,

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circumstances in securitized, environments.

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And I think that this project, it's a, it's a long,

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long-term longitudinal analysis of correctional officers.

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We're following them from their initial, training

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or, you know, here where they're in,

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they're in the correctional training program.

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This article focuses on those coming out of that program.

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But we're also conducting interviews,

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with correctional officers who've,

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who've been employed in, in federal facilities and,

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and follow up with often many of the same ones year

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after year to see how they're doing,

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what are their experiences, how do their experiences,

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resonate with their initial training.

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Uh, and so this study looks, at one slice of

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that wider, wider project.

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One of the challenges,

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around the time when we wrote the paper,

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the transgender prisoner placement

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policy was relatively new.

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And a lot of what we were doing was trying to understand

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how it was causing an impact

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because, the concern, the concern

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that prevailed was that we could miss,

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we could confuse transphobia for lack of knowledge.

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And part of it was understanding if, if transphobia was real

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in that space, if it was a lack of knowledge,

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and how people actually felt about it.

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Because that potentiality to be confused

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for other things in this ambiguous space, when pol you have

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to remember policy changes.

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Um, it was a one week time zone

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where correctional service candidate released a report about

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biological placement.

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Our, our prime minister, Justin Trudeau, went

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to a town hall and changed it.

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And, and, you know, a couple days later we had a new policy

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that was on gender placement.

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So, and we were right at in the cusp of that.

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So it was talking to people to understand

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where they were coming from

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and what they needed to know in order

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to serve the people they serve,

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including those in custody in a way that was meaningful

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and that wouldn't cause harm.

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Correctional officers, if we're looking back at the 1970s,

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were predominantly male, and then we had a movement

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to have more females in the organization.

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And then moving forward,

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we probably have a 60 40 split depending on the institution,

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women's institutions, more a 75, 25 split

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if you average 'em out.

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Um, and, you know, and,

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and one of the things I wanna put forward

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that I've really found across this work, I,

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I should say we've found, sorry, is that,

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correctional officers enter

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with a rehabilitative orientation that is very strong.

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They wanna do the job

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because they feel they can change lives,

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and they build on their past experiences

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to understand different ways they can do that.

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And in that space, they also focus large, largely

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on meeting people where they are

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and what they can do for that individual.

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Some of the early studies that we cited in the article,

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suggest the, the wide changes in terms

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of attitudes towards women working,

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for example, in male facilities.

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Uh, there was, there were similar and, trepidations

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or, or qualified support,

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for women in these facilities on the view

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that based on issues of fear, sheer

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physical differences, right, between men

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and women, cos they would not be competent

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or able to handle situations.

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Uh, and many times prisons, nothing

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happens on a day-to-day basis,

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but then things, incidents can, can,

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can occur RA rapidly, and,

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and the risk to both prisoners

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and cos can, can, can elevate

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to very serious levels very quickly.

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So there were concerns of that,

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but those dissipated relatively quickly over time.

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And as sociologists we're interested in the social processes

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that explain that change.

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And so we drew on Anne sr's work on culture as a toolkit,

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this idea of settled and unsettled cultures.

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And here we have this transition initially

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where even women CEOs working in male facilities were seen

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as potential, you know,

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producing vulnerabilities and anxieties.

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And those dissipated over time relatively quickly,

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probably based on experiences of,

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of cos within those facilities who, in later research,

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underscored changing attitudes, for example, women,

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sometimes able to deal with communication

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and rapport better than male cos I mean that some,

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that those are the views of some cos anyway.

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Um, and I think this is an important thing

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because rapport communication, there's such core aspects

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of correctional work being able to communicate effectively.

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But what's interesting from our,

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for our purposes in this paper is to see how that trends,

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how that, you know, transferred away from

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those anxieties, if

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probably based upon subsequent generations

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of CEOs changes in training and so forth.

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This is part of a broader study.

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So the, the larger study follows correctional officer

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recruits for 10 years post-deployment.

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And we use three methodologies annually,

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starting at baseline, and we follow up each year.

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So our first is, a survey that includes,

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psychological assessments like self-report assessments

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and mental health and wellness, as well

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as some more criminological assessments

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where we talk about organizational commitment and,

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and a variety of different nuance in that,

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like job satisfaction, turnover, intention, et cetera.

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Um, the next methodology is the mini,

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and that's a psychological assessment

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that's about 15 minutes, half an hour.

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Um, but it can give us understanding of prevalence

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of mental health disorders,

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and we can triangulate that with, the, the survey.

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And then our final assessment is qualitative interviews

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where we, go in depth

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and understand the context in forming those numbers.

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The qualitative nature of,

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of the research is, is significant.

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Um, and this speaks to our findings as well.

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I mean, it, it's pretty much a, a direct connection with

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what we're able to find based on the fact

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that we have a semi-structured interview.

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We have a set of questions

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that certainly we can compare across correctional officers,

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but then we can explore novel directions as they emerge

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and explore those, those things

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because each facility is so different

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and even within, like, you're looking at federal prisons,

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but the, you know, the level of, of, of security, the,

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even at the same level of security,

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sometimes there's very different, physical structures,

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you know, makeup of prisoners, et cetera.

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But the qualitative design of the project is, is important.

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We do have, of course, the mini psychological assessments

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because we are primarily concerned here with,

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correctional officer wellbeing and resilience and,

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and, assessing that.

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But the qualitative design also allows us to,

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find elaboration on our questions rather than simply asking,

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for example, tell us about, you know, the, your view on,

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on new transgender prisoner management policies.

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Um, you know, there, there we, we,

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we had elaborate statements.

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So rather than just okay, support

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or not support, we could see the different angles.

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And that actually came through in the paper.

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Um, and maybe this is a good transition

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to talk about some of the findings.

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Um, but the, the findings, were,

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we found largely positive support overall.

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We found correctional officers expressing views such as

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that in the title of the article, right?

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It's, you know, it's, we're both here to do a job,

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that's all that matters,

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or it's none of my business and so forth.

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And a lot of the times these correctional officer recruits,

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had support on a general level.

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Uh, some of them offered though elaborate elaborations.

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And when we probed a little bit, we found qualified support.

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Um, it's important to look at the context

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of the qualified support in the context

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of working in prisons

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because it's, you know, when we, when we look at the,

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the nature of, of concerns about the policy,

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the concerns here specifically about in working with other,

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trans CEOs, for example, transgender cos

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and how that would impact working with prisoners

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and interacting with prisoners, it always comes back to

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that context of looking at

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what criminologists dubbed a total institution or a,

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or a securitized environment of a, of a, of a prison.

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So I think that that's highly relevant.

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Um, now some of the, most of the recruits that we spoke

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with did not have direct experiences working,

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with trans CEOs, but some of them actually did.

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And they were largely positive

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and suggested that, you know, in the prisons

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that they worked in, either at the provincial

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or territorial level, that they had experience in,

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they had, a fairly, accepting environment and,

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and one that they could support working with them.

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Um, I think the number one thing was would seals needed

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to feel regardless of who that, they're working with,

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the other CEO, whether it's they're cisgendered,

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whether they're transgender, CEO,

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do they have each other's back?

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Like do they have each other's support in a context where

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a lot of times the, the, the need to rely on one another,

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the need to coordinate things

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as a team took primacy over everything else.

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So that was the number one con, you know, issue.

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The qualifying support came from, from issues

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that did however, demonstrate among a, a, a,

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a fair minority, I would say, of the seals,

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not the majority, but, but, you know, a few

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of the interviews, qualified this in terms of things

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that demonstrated, however, an ongoing,

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cisgendered cis normativity within the prisons,

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and wider society.

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And I think I'm, I want to get back to that point as well,

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a little bit later,

249
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but the qualifying support came from CEOs saying things

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like, in a correctional officer environment,

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I would feel safer working with a man.

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Now, clearly, you know, that's problematic on a number

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of levels and, and also demonstrates a,

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a cis normativity assumption of working with a cisgendered,

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male co.

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Uh, another mention it depends on when

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that co started transitioning.

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Um, and, and there were other statements such

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as their qualified support, meaning,

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I have no problem working with trans cos so long

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as they're in less visible positions.

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So there was, you know, camera operators during an incident

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or working within, not, not, not,

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not necessarily responding, you know, in the way

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that would be more visible within the prison.

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Um, and then that, that demonstrated, you know,

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the problematic nature of course, of those responses.

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Uh, but also within,

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demonstrated this unsettled culture.

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And this very much, very much similar too, that that anxiety

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regarding women CEOs working in male prisons in the eighties

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suggested that these are still issues in relation

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to the wider officer culture,

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which should be distinguished from, from prisoner culture.

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These are two separate, separate areas

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that, that we've been looking into.

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So that's an important aspect of our findings.

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One of the things that I often say, you know,

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I'm teaching courses also on youth crime,

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on corrections in these sort of areas.

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I say, you know, the problems that we see in criminal

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justice, the problems in terms of prisoner management,

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rehabilitation, community reintegration, mental health

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and wellbeing, and all of these factors are

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resolved not in necessarily the criminal justice system.

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We're talking about changes to the wider society, changes

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that need to occur, on, on all sorts of sectors,

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in the wider culture.

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And, and I think one of the, the, the, you know,

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the sources Sikh's,

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argument here in the conclusion we quote

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as suggesting this revitalization in investing in trans

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lives in society, right, in the wider society

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before they become, criminalized, focusing on housing,

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jobs, social assistance, healthcare, these sort of factors,

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you know, these, these are important things to,

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to invest in in society

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that will inform what's going on in prison.

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Practically though, you know,

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there's also things within the prison environments that need

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to focus that, that need to be attended to, such as,

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training, you know, in we're here,

303
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I think this sample is particularly important

304
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because we're looking at people

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who are coming sometimes from not in,

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not having experience in corrections at all.

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Some fa some correctional officers coming from a wealth

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of family experiences, family habitus, if you like,

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sociologically, that have this experience in the military,

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this experience coming from that within corrections

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and bringing that culture.

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These, these things are not mutually exclusive.

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Military policing. The cultures

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that inform them also inform correctional work

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and correctional cultures.

316
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Uh, and I think further research on training,

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how training can attend to this as well as of course,

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following up, correctional officers

319
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as they engage in in their real world daily activities in

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prisons is an important thing.

321
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Um, you know, that's the best way to, to do that.

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And the, this project, the wider project is geared for that

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because it follows up correctional officers year after year.

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That longitudinal design, that ethnographic approach,

325
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I think is, is crucial to trace these shifts

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or lack thereof as as we proceed.

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And the only thing I would add to

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that is I think it's a complex space where there's a need

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for a lot more training

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and, a lot more insight and understanding.

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And as people can become more aware of, of the different,

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of the realities of gender diversity

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and the vulnerabilities it causes,

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for some, not for all.

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And the vulnerabilities don't need

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to be the gender diverse person.

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It can be the people around them

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who are worried about saying the wrong

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thing, doing the wrong thing.

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And we all know when our actions are under a spotlight

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or we feel they're under a spotlight,

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that's when we get all awkward, right?

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So, I, I think there's a lot that can be done

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to increase the comfort and understanding

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and to help everyone move forward in a space

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that is more conducive to, individuality.

Understanding Correctional Officers' Roles and Challenges

00:00:00 - The study comes from Rose and I have been doing research a lot in general areas such as crime and deviance, including penology, public perceptions of prisoners and, and criminality. and Rose has done extensive research, with prisoners and prisons in Canada, but it come, we came to be aware of the lack of studies on, an very important, set of people, correctional officers. And, we're not alone in this. There has been, of course, recent attention to correctional officers as well
00:00:32 - as well as other parts of the world. and I think that, that, that was, a major gap in our knowledge because correctional officers serve a very important role in terms of their daily interaction with, the prisoners, under their, responsibility to supervise their rapport with prisoners. Their ability to interact with them, makes a big difference in terms of prisoner experiences while imprisonment and potentially an impact on their rehabilitation
00:01:03 - But it's, there's also an important factor to look at mental health and mental wellbeing of correctional officers, because this was, an important area to look into. There's all sorts of occupational studies in sociology that examine burnout and the various stresses placed on certain occupations. But prison work or correctional work, has its own unique, of course, circumstances in securitized, environments. And I think that this project, it's a, it's a long,
00:01:36 - We're following them from their initial, training or, you know, here where they're in, they're in the correctional training program. This article focuses on those coming out of that program. But we're also conducting interviews, with correctional officers who've, who've been employed in, in federal facilities and, and follow up with often many of the same ones year after year to see how they're doing, what are their experiences, how do their experiences,
00:02:06 - and so this study looks, at one slice of that wider, wider project. One of the challenges, around the time when we wrote the paper, the transgender prisoner placement policy was relatively new. And a lot of what we were doing was trying to understand how it was causing an impact because, the concern, the concern that prevailed was that we could miss, we could confuse transphobia for lack of knowledge.
00:02:42 - in that space, if it was a lack of knowledge, and how people actually felt about it. Because that potentiality to be confused for other things in this ambiguous space, when pol you have to remember policy changes. it was a one week time zone where correctional service candidate released a report about biological placement. Our, our prime minister, Justin Trudeau, went to a town hall and changed it. And, and, you know, a couple days later we had a new policy

Shifting Dynamics Among Correctional Officers

00:03:13 - So, and we were right at in the cusp of that. So it was talking to people to understand where they were coming from and what they needed to know in order to serve the people they serve, including those in custody in a way that was meaningful and that wouldn't cause harm. Correctional officers, if we're looking back at the 1970s, were predominantly male, and then we had a movement to have more females in the organization. And then moving forward,
00:03:44 - women's institutions, more a 75, 25 split if you average 'em out. and, you know, and, and one of the things I wanna put forward that I've really found across this work, I, I should say we've found, sorry, is that, correctional officers enter with a rehabilitative orientation that is very strong. They wanna do the job because they feel they can change lives, and they build on their past experiences to understand different ways they can do that.
00:04:16 - on meeting people where they are and what they can do for that individual. Some of the early studies that we cited in the article, suggest the, the wide changes in terms of attitudes towards women working, for example, in male facilities. there was, there were similar and, trepidations or, or qualified support, for women in these facilities on the view that based on issues of fear, sheer
00:04:43 - and women, cos they would not be competent or able to handle situations. and many times prisons, nothing happens on a day-to-day basis, but then things, incidents can, can, can occur RA rapidly, and, and the risk to both prisoners and cos can, can, can elevate to very serious levels very quickly. So there were concerns of that, but those dissipated relatively quickly over time. And as sociologists we're interested in the social processes
00:05:14 - And so we drew on Anne sr's work on culture as a toolkit, this idea of settled and unsettled cultures. And here we have this transition initially where even women CEOs working in male facilities were seen as potential, you know, producing vulnerabilities and anxieties. And those dissipated over time relatively quickly, probably based on experiences of, of cos within those facilities who, in later research, underscored changing attitudes, for example, women,
00:05:49 - and rapport better than male cos I mean that some, that those are the views of some cos anyway. and I think this is an important thing because rapport communication, there's such core aspects of correctional work being able to communicate effectively. But what's interesting from our, for our purposes in this paper is to see how that trends, how that, you know, transferred away from those anxieties, if probably based upon subsequent generations

Methodologies in Long-Term Correctional Officer Study

00:06:21 - This is part of a broader study. So the, the larger study follows correctional officer recruits for 10 years post-deployment. And we use three methodologies annually, starting at baseline, and we follow up each year. So our first is, a survey that includes, psychological assessments like self-report assessments and mental health and wellness, as well as some more criminological assessments where we talk about organizational commitment and, and a variety of different nuance in that,
00:06:52 - the next methodology is the mini, and that's a psychological assessment that's about 15 minutes, half an hour. but it can give us understanding of prevalence of mental health disorders, and we can triangulate that with, the, the survey. And then our final assessment is qualitative interviews where we, go in depth and understand the context in forming those numbers. The qualitative nature of,
00:07:20 - and this speaks to our findings as well. I mean, it, it's pretty much a, a direct connection with what we're able to find based on the fact that we have a semi-structured interview. We have a set of questions that certainly we can compare across correctional officers, but then we can explore novel directions as they emerge and explore those, those things because each facility is so different and even within, like, you're looking at federal prisons, but the, you know, the level of, of, of security, the, even at the same level of security, sometimes there's very different, physical structures,
00:07:53 - But the qualitative design of the project is, is important. We do have, of course, the mini psychological assessments because we are primarily concerned here with, correctional officer wellbeing and resilience and, and, assessing that. But the qualitative design also allows us to, find elaboration on our questions rather than simply asking, for example, tell us about, you know, the, your view on, on new transgender prisoner management policies.
00:08:25 - we had elaborate statements. So rather than just okay, support or not support, we could see the different angles. And that actually came through in the paper. and maybe this is a good transition to talk about some of the findings. but the, the findings, were, we found largely positive support overall. We found correctional officers expressing views such as that in the title of the article, right? It's, you know, it's, we're both here to do a job,
00:08:55 - or it's none of my business and so forth. And a lot of the times these correctional officer recruits, had support on a general level. some of them offered though elaborate elaborations. And when we probed a little bit, we found qualified support. it's important to look at the context of the qualified support in the context of working in prisons because it's, you know, when we, when we look at the, the nature of, of concerns about the policy,

Transgender Correctional Officers in Prisons

00:09:27 - trans CEOs, for example, transgender cos and how that would impact working with prisoners and interacting with prisoners, it always comes back to that context of looking at what criminologists dubbed a total institution or a, or a securitized environment of a, of a, of a prison. So I think that that's highly relevant. now some of the, most of the recruits that we spoke with did not have direct experiences working, with trans CEOs, but some of them actually did.
00:09:57 - and suggested that, you know, in the prisons that they worked in, either at the provincial or territorial level, that they had experience in, they had, a fairly, accepting environment and, and one that they could support working with them. I think the number one thing was would seals needed to feel regardless of who that, they're working with, the other CEO, whether it's they're cisgendered, whether they're transgender, CEO, do they have each other's back?
00:10:31 - a lot of times the, the, the need to rely on one another, the need to coordinate things as a team took primacy over everything else. So that was the number one con, you know, issue. The qualifying support came from, from issues that did however, demonstrate among a, a, a, a fair minority, I would say, of the seals, not the majority, but, but, you know, a few of the interviews, qualified this in terms of things
00:11:02 - cisgendered cis normativity within the prisons, and wider society. And I think I'm, I want to get back to that point as well, a little bit later, but the qualifying support came from CEOs saying things like, in a correctional officer environment, I would feel safer working with a man. Now, clearly, you know, that's problematic on a number of levels and, and also demonstrates a, a cis normativity assumption of working with a cisgendered, male co.
00:11:32 - that co started transitioning. and, and there were other statements such as their qualified support, meaning, I have no problem working with trans cos so long as they're in less visible positions. So there was, you know, camera operators during an incident or working within, not, not, not, not necessarily responding, you know, in the way that would be more visible within the prison. and then that, that demonstrated, you know, the problematic nature of course, of those responses.
00:12:04 - demonstrated this unsettled culture. And this very much, very much similar too, that that anxiety regarding women CEOs working in male prisons in the eighties suggested that these are still issues in relation to the wider officer culture, which should be distinguished from, from prisoner culture. These are two separate, separate areas that, that we've been looking into. So that's an important aspect of our findings. One of the things that I often say, you know, I'm teaching courses also on youth crime,

Addressing Societal Issues in Criminal Justice

00:12:36 - I say, you know, the problems that we see in criminal justice, the problems in terms of prisoner management, rehabilitation, community reintegration, mental health and wellbeing, and all of these factors are resolved not in necessarily the criminal justice system. We're talking about changes to the wider society, changes that need to occur, on, on all sorts of sectors, in the wider culture. And, and I think one of the, the, the, you know, the sources Sikh's, argument here in the conclusion we quote
00:13:09 - lives in society, right, in the wider society before they become, criminalized, focusing on housing, jobs, social assistance, healthcare, these sort of factors, you know, these, these are important things to, to invest in in society that will inform what's going on in prison. Practically though, you know, there's also things within the prison environments that need to focus that, that need to be attended to, such as,
00:13:39 - I think this sample is particularly important because we're looking at people who are coming sometimes from not in, not having experience in corrections at all. Some fa some correctional officers coming from a wealth of family experiences, family habitus, if you like, sociologically, that have this experience in the military, this experience coming from that within corrections and bringing that culture. These, these things are not mutually exclusive. Military policing. The cultures
00:14:11 - and correctional cultures. and I think further research on training, how training can attend to this as well as of course, following up, correctional officers as they engage in in their real world daily activities in prisons is an important thing. you know, that's the best way to, to do that. And the, this project, the wider project is geared for that because it follows up correctional officers year after year. That longitudinal design, that ethnographic approach,
00:14:43 - or lack thereof as as we proceed. And the only thing I would add to that is I think it's a complex space where there's a need for a lot more training and, a lot more insight and understanding. And as people can become more aware of, of the different, of the realities of gender diversity and the vulnerabilities it causes, for some, not for all. And the vulnerabilities don't need to be the gender diverse person. It can be the people around them
00:15:30 - thing, doing the wrong thing. And we all know when our actions are under a spotlight or we feel they're under a spotlight, that's when we get all awkward, right? So, I, I think there's a lot that can be done to increase the comfort and understanding and to help everyone move forward in a space that is more conducive to, individuality.

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