Fantasizing Control, Mourning Humanity: Theorizing incarceration through correctional officer memoirs

This thesis argues that the structural or 'systemic' defects of prisons and jails can be located in the experiences of correctional officers. Interpreting individual correctional officers' memoirs through the lens of ideology theory, I demonstrate that their experiences make manifest carceral institutions' foundations in racialized violence, precarity, and pacification. First, combining Marxist, abolitionist, and Afropessimist theories of the state, I posit that the relationship between correctional officers and the prisons and jails they staff is more complex than current empirical scholarship admits. Next, through a psychoanalytic reading of Kentucky correctional officer James Palmer's memoir, I suggest that prisons and jails offer their staff an ideology-fantasy of control, which helps them find meaning and purpose in the violent pacification of incarcerated people. Finally, I offer an affective reading of California correctional officer Jeffrey McCray's memoir, describing how his entrance into correctional work provides a model of how individuals take up the racialization and repression that permeate prisons and jails. Throughout, I argue that carceral institutions force their staff to operate within a flexible grid of structural barriers which preserve their agency but constrain its use.