The contradictions of carceral care work Black correctional officers and prison reproduction in New York state

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While the origins and outcomes of mass incarceration in the US have been widely studied, the accompanying experiences of prison workforce integration have not. In the wake of the Prisoners’ Rights Movement, the Attica uprising in New York State, a key site of the struggle, sparked fervent calls for workforce integration that engendered unprecedented recruitment of Black men and women correctional officers (COs). Drawing on the life histories of Black COs, primarily recruited into corrections post-Attica, this article analyses how the race and gender dynamics of integration informed interactions between COs and incarcerated individuals. Black COs’ narratives revealed a shared, tacit understanding of the need to breach the ‘security mindset’, that is, the institutionally endorsed understanding of their role as solely one of control and discipline. Instead, Black COs balanced care and control by navigating what I term the (in)visible divide, a boundary they negotiated with Black incarcerated people through cautious support and solidarity shaped by race and gender, wedged between the gendered practice of carceral care work and authoritarian discipline. At times, shared racialized experiences, empathy, and sensitivity towards the Black incarcerated population formed relations of what I term carceral kinship, especially between Black women COs and incarcerated men. Overall, Black COs’ carceral care work functioned to reduce the ubiquitous threat of violence in prison and, occasionally, to promote rehabilitation. Thus, I show that the raced and gendered labour of Black COs was integral to reproducing mass incarceration and argue that their experiences should inform scholarship and policy.