Guards Gone Wild: A Self-Report Study of Correctional Officer Misconduct and the Effect of Institutional Deviance on “care” within the Texas Prison System

Abstract

Although the study of deviance has been prevalent in the criminal justice literature, there is very little discussion as to the types of deviant acts committed by correctional employees. This may be because prisons are what Goffman (1961) refers to as “total institutions” in his classic study of asylums. This study employed self-report questionnaires with 501 Texas prison employees. Based on the data, our findings indicate that respondents were likely to perceive high levels of institutional deviance during the course of their eight-hour shifts. Also, subjects who reported “feeling cared for” by at least someone in the prison agency tended to perceive more deviance than other respondents or vice versa. We discuss these findings and their implications in detail.