Jailcraft: exploring atmospherics of security

Abstract

Drawing on a twelve-month immersive ethnography of prison officers in an English prison, we explore the relation between security work and atmosphere. We show how prison security hinges on officers becoming proficient in “atmospheric work”, or a bundle of practices purposively oriented at sensing and modulating atmospheres in situationally adaptive ways to prevent violence. Colloquially known as “jailcraft”, these practices involve sensing the prison’s atmosphere for signs of rising tension, amplifying atmospheric tension as a means of control, and dampening tension if actual violence is deemed imminent. Our conceptualization advances organization research that has tended to cast atmosphere as either a target-object of aesthetic work or as a diffuse affective background to sensemaking. We show empirically that these approaches miss something crucial, and especially in the world of security work. This is because here atmosphere is neither a backdrop nor an embellishment but actively sensed and “worked” in real time. This means that security workers’ “atmotechnic” interventions reveal a form of agentic atmospheric engagement that is strikingly purposive, yet curiously non-aesthetic in orientation.