The Management of Emotions in the Criminal Justice System

Abstract

Much of the research on emotions in the workplace focuses on the management of happiness and anger, neglecting sadness. This study examines criminal justice workers' (e.g., detectives, prosecutors, and victim services counselors) management of their own and victims' sadness, and the focus is on a particular group of victims, people who have lost a loved one to murder (bereaved victims). The data come from in-depth interviews with 19 Union County (pseudonym) criminal justice workers who worked on murder cases and a participant observation of murder cases in the Union County criminal justice system. Criminal justice workers expressed an interest in helping bereaved victims but a reluctance to connect closely with their grief. Workers' encounters with bereaved victims brought obligations to express sympathy and resolve the case, obligations that felt emotionally burdensome and diminished workers' status in the organization. Criminal justice workers used their status (e.g., status shield, organizational shield) to distance themselves from bereaved victims and emotion management strategies to suppress their and others' sadness. Self-emotion management strategies included avoidance and professional composure; interpersonal emotion management strategies included sympathy and information control. The data also suggest that emotion management in the criminal justice system is gendered; counselors who were predominantly female did the bulk of the system's emotion work, and they protected detectives and prosecutors who were predominantly male from this work. The likelihood that the criminal-justice culture could become more open to victims' sadness seems remote because, as in other industries, professionalism is equated with emotional composure, and allowing for emotional de-composure could increase distress and decrease productivity.