“Authorize, Justify, and Excuse”: Accountability and the Escalation of Force

Correctional facilities are coercive institutions where violence is anticipated and exercised. Correctional officers (COs) have a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, employing it to maintain control over prisoner behaviour. The study described here was a 9-week embedded ethnography of a Canadian provincial CO training program. The goal was to show how recruit training positions the use of physical control tactics as legitimate and reasonable mechanisms for reducing risk. Findings showed that CO training constructs narratives that absolve COs of responsibility for the force they use by compiling detailed documentation and by using pain to get compliance in camera-friendly ways.