To Örebro University

In this chapter, we discuss changes in how Swedish prison officers experience their working conditions based on the results of a nationwide survey that was carried out on two occasions. 2009 and 2019. During the time that has elapsed between the first and second survey, a lot has happened in Sweden that has impacted on Swedish policy relatiing to crime and punishment, and also the working conditions experienced by prison officers. Growing violence and criminality in society has led to a continious ongoing competition between different political parties and camps towards tougher measures against crime. In prolongations of this "punitive turn", prison officers work tasks has increasingly changed in the direction of monitoring and security work at the expense of rehabilitative and motivational efforts. The result of our comparison between two populations of prison officers points to a substantially changed prison climate. At the same time, the organisational culture has become more homogeneous, but this has happened at the expense of a degradation of the occupational role of prison officers towards pure guardin and security work. Prisoin officer turnover is currently high in Sweden. People with aspirations to work with motivational and rehabilitative measures no longer seem to seek careers within the prison system, and those with long work experience do not expect development towards such work tasks at this point either.

This article is about sport-based interventions as tools for social integration in segregated suburban areas. On the basis of a former research study of Midnight Football in a Swedish mid-size city, we discuss the potential of such activities to contribute to social integration in a broad sense. With established sociological concepts such as social capital, networks, and bonds as points of departure, we discuss the capacity of Midnight Football to contribute to social integration by being a link and a unifying force in the local community as well as a bridge-builder in relation to the surrounding society. Our main argument is that sport-based activities definitely have an important potential here. Locally, it can create fruitful relations and bonds between people belonging to sub-groups of different ethnic origin, religion, and culture, enhancing social density among citizens in a suburb. However, such a density can only be created by the help of other local actors. Further, if it is not combined with active efforts to build relations with the surrounding society at the same time it may be at risk of having effects of isolation, in terms of ‘us vs. them’ feelings towards the outer society. Therefore, a developed engagement from actors outside the suburb is pivotal. Such engagement cannot be developed by the sports movement and other voluntary organizations alone. It demands a return and re-establishment of public representatives and activities in the local community, activities aimed at working long term with building social capital among residents of the local community.

Kriminalvårdare är ett komplext yrke som dagligen hanterar intagna i fängelser, vilket innefattar att bemöta olika känslouttryck. Denna artikel handlar om hur detta emotionella arbete förändrats över tid. Den baseras på en jämförelse av data från två forskningsprojekt (2009 och 2019). Resultatet visar att kriminalvårdare upplever att det emotionella arbetet blivit mer påtagligt, och att den belastning och trötthet som följer av detta blivit större. Samtidigt upplever många små möjligheter till återhämtning från detta under arbetstiden.

Utvecklingen kan ses i ljuset av den ökade beläggningen men kan också kopplas till ideologiska och organisatoriska förändringar inom den svenska kriminalvården.

Prison officers is a complex occupation that deals with inmates at prisons daily, which includes encountering different emotional expressions. In this article we discuss how this emotional labour has changed over time. This is done by comparing data from two research projects (2009 and 2019). The results of such a comparison shows that prison officers feel that the emotional labour has become more tangible, and that the burden and fatigue that follows from this has become greater. At the same time, many prison officers experience few opportunities to recover from this type of strain during working hours. The development can be seen in the light of increased prison overcrowding but may also be linked to ideological and organizational changes within the Swedish Prison and Probation Services.

With increasing numbers of prisoners, research on Swedish prison officers’ perceptions of management and support at work is warranted. Previous studies have mainly used a variable-centered approach, identifying several individual and organizational factors that influence prison staff's evaluation of their job. The present study adopted a person-centered approach, exploring the heterogeneity in a Swedish national sample of prison officers. Based on an extensive survey of the quality of prison job, 10 key predictors for overall prison regime evaluation were identified. Following latent class analysis, three distinct subgroups were discerned from the entire sample. Remarkably, a sizable subgroup with a relatively negative evaluation of the prison regime was observed. While most background covariates did not associate with the subgroup membership, prison officers who experienced violent or threatening incidents tended to report a negative evaluation of the prison regime. Intra-organizational social support, communication and loyalty are highlighted as key components of overall regime evaluation. Our findings suggest that enhancing collegial, management, and supervision support and communicative skills may increase prison officers’ job satisfaction. Beyond the organizational level of prisons, we also discussed the challenges that the Swedish prison system faces, along with the portrayal by social media of a violence-dominated environment.

Frontline work is most often performed in direct encounters with clients. Several scholars have developed models and methods for analysing these encounters to explain the distinctive features of discretionary practices. Such an analysis must move between several layers of social reality, and therefore it requires the integration of several different types of data. In this article our main objective is to develop a ‘multi-level’ approach for understanding how discretionary practices grow in the interplay between conditions at institutional, as well as interactional and individual levels. We hope to contribute to an enhanced understanding of frontline work in today’s public sector. Our data comes from a group of officials in the Swedish Social Insurance Agency (SSIA) investigating the needs and rights of applicants to receive sickness compensation (sickness pension). It includes recorded phone conversations, qualitative interviews, and both administrative and regulative documents. In spite of being a strictly regulated business, and even in cases of very similar situational conditions, the analysis reveals important variations between officials in their approaches to clients, and in ways of acting in dilemmatic situations. Such variations are traced back to individual-level differences in moral dispositions and professional beliefs.

The concept of street-level bureaucracy is central to understanding public administration asit pinpoints the role of individual civil servants in the realisation of policy. Oneissue in need of further illumination is that of knowledge production and reproduction in street-level bureaucracies. This paperseeks to examine these issues by linking street-level bureaucracy with the theory of social representations. Social representations offer a social-psychological understanding of how individuals make sense of their reality in day-to-day interaction. The overarching aim of the paperis to suggest a theoretical synthesis of these two perspectives –a synthesis that connects interaction atstreet-level with common-sense knowledge, as well as knowledge generatedwithin organisationsand among professionals. The synthesis is demonstrated by presenting an analysis of social representations of unemployment among two groups of street-level bureaucrats.

A key theme in the research on bureaucratic encounters pertains to street-level bureaucrats' opportunities for responsiveness when discretion is constrained by the introduction of standardized service delivery regulations, such as information communication technology (ICT). This article contributes to existing scholarship by exploring how low-discretion officials at the Swedish Social Insurance Agency Customer Center manage competing demands of making decisions that are built on regulations and simultaneously responding to the situation at hand and individuals' needs. Analyzing real-time interactions using the conversation analytical concept of "offers of assistance" enables us to discover new aspects of interactional practices of responsiveness in standardized service encounters.

The emotional life in prisons has been described in popular literature in terms of horror and suffering, but the research literature on this topic is sparse and mostly produced in later decades. During this short time, emotion research concerning prisons has focussed on a prison reality under constant change and development. The development of prisons, which is influenced by increased security, technical monitoring, and risk governance but also by centralization, specialization, and efficiency demands, has deeply affected prison work. Not the least of these concerns is the emotional labour performed by the largest group of staff, the prison officers. How this labour is performed in each prison wing or unit is closely connected to the institutional framework, the subculture, and the relationships between officers and prisoners. The aim of this chapter is to describe and discuss the emotional labour of prison staff under today’s prevailing conditions of prison life and ongoing changes to prison systems. This is done with reference to research findings from several countries as well as data from our own Swedish research projects. Research and data on prison officer work will be analysed in the light of prison policy changes and organisational theory on the development of public organisations and by using the work of Hochschild and other social theorists.

Based on conversation analysis, this study investigates central practices in what is defined as a caring interview, in the context of welfare administration. Caring refers to (1) a helpful interviewing in reformulations of questions, taking interviewees' difficulties to answer into consideration; (2) a caring attitude in the framing of questions, showing understanding of clients' circumstances and (3) professional's enactment of expertise in assessments of clients' disabilities and care needs. Data include a corpus of 43 recorded interviews in which officials at the Swedish Social Insurance Agency interview clients who have applied for benefits. The study adds to research on interactional sensitivity, polar questions and epistemic stance in institutional interaction. The study shows how the interviewer prioritizes confirming polar questions, takes responsibilities of knowing into account and reduces the epistemic gap to the interviewee in practices of a caring interview. This makes the interviewing markedly different from standardized and bureaucratic interviewing.