Prison Officers and Their Work Routine in Brazilian Prisons

In this chapter, I aim to analyse some of the attributions of prison officers (in Brazil, called penal police officers) and their everyday life working in prisons. These contributions are a direct result of my own experiences and my relational place as both prison staff and researcher: prison officer and ethnographer. The focus is on outlining the daily duties of officers and demonstrating the impacts of the job on their lives, since they too, as well as prisoners, experience the hardships of prison. The current chapter is divided into four sections. The first outlines the context of the Brazilian prison system that shapes the role of the prison officer and the challenges they face. The second discusses challenges specific to work and research in Brazilian prisons from the relational place I occupy as a serving prison officer and sociologist/ethnographer. The third and fourth explore the attributions of officers in prison routine, demonstrating the difficulties of prison officer work in the face of the hardships that predominantly characterise Brazilian prisons.