Challenging Prison Officers’ Discretion: “Good Reasons” to Treat Courteously Mafiosi1 in Custody in Italy

Abstract

Prison ethnography has long touched on the central role of prison officers’ discretion. Nowadays, a large number of sociologists and criminologists share the assumption that prison officers have de facto to resort to discretional decisions continuously to be able to translate the law into practice as they go about their job. This paper addresses the topic of prison officers’ discretion differently by adopting analytic autoethnography and Carolyn Ellis’ emotional recall. It outlines four officers’ “good reasons” for cooperating with mafiosi in custody—treating them with good manner—rather than showing neutrality as they would do with “ordinary” prisoners. The main good reasons that ground mafiosi–officers relationships are (1) reciprocal institutional recognition that Italian criminal justice and high-ranking mafia prisoners recognize one another; (2) mafioso capacity to help officers to “govern” fellow prisoners in practice; (3) the social embeddedness of the mafia both inside and outside prison; and, lastly, (4) prison officers’ fear of retaliation.