Criminal liability for correctional officer excessive use of force

Correctional officers and the use of force as an organizational behavior

“…My lived insight had limitations as I could not rely on naiveté when asking questions, something qualitative researchers have described as a methodological strength (Bucerius, 2013). But my connections allowed me to build rapport with officers when discussing sensitive topics such as use of force and helped me recruit managers, a notoriously risk‐adverse group (Rembert et al., 2023). Given my positionality, I interviewed 110 of the 131 participants.…”

“…Forty years later, Marquart's (1986a, 1986b) work remains the only account that details the mechanisms around how COs engage with use‐of‐force decisions (Rembert et al., 2023; see Symkovich, 2019, for a partial exception). Liebling (2000) famously assessed the prison officers of this period as “representing everything that is dangerous and unpalatable about the use of power” (p. 338), and contemporary observers often frame Marquart's account as an outdated, unsavory way of doing prison work, something standing in contrast to modern, bureaucratic institutions run under managerialist principles.…”

“…Such practices are absent in newer literature, which focuses on how prison staff carefully negotiate policy rules and regulations to maintain institutional control (Haggerty & Bucerius, 2021). Part of this gap is likely due to limited official data on use of force (Rembert et al., 2023), but research suggests shifts in how COs do their work play an equally substantial role. Liebling et al.…”

“…Framing CO use of force as an individual decision, one that actively violates the managerialist ethos of modern prisons, blinds us to two crucial points. First, excessive force against incarcerated people remains a common feature of prisons, so much so that recent work has described it as “an inevitable feature” of incarceration (Rembert et al., 2023). Describing these actions as deviant is accurate (Novisky et al., 2022), but it limits the scope of our analysis, and leaves us unable to recognize nuanced mechanisms officers use to engage with use‐of‐force decisions.…”

“…Describing these actions as deviant is accurate (Novisky et al., 2022), but it limits the scope of our analysis, and leaves us unable to recognize nuanced mechanisms officers use to engage with use‐of‐force decisions. In consequence, Marquart's (1986a) insightful but outdated research remains our only portrait of how COs justify problematic uses of force in their daily practice, something that complicates efforts to interrupt and prevent the mistreatment of incarcerated people (Rembert et al, 2023; Worley et al., 2022). Second, by framing use of force as only the responsibility of individual COs, prison administrators escape scrutiny about how organizational decisions shape coercion.…”