Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the ways compassionate care operates in the everyday life of a prison. What does it enable for both prison staff and prisoners? How does compassionate care bridge the gap between recognition of structural violence and neoliberal responsibilization?

Paper long abstract:

Based on ethnographic research in a Swiss prison, this paper looks at staff in a Swiss prison engaging in compassionate care for prisoners “despite” the violent structure of incarceration, largely ineffectual in terms of re-socialisation and crime prevention. Meanwhile, punishment is dealt with as an impersonal matter-of-fact, imposed from the outside. Prison is punishment but nobody working within it considers themselves punishing.

As there is very limited space for staff to effect change on the circumstances of prisoners within rigid structures, “care takers” - no longer “wardens” - fall back on trying to help prisoners by helping them “to help themselves”. Often, self-help takes the form of adjusting their personal outlook on imprisonment, finding purpose and assuming responsibility. This carries a significant promise of hope and agency for both prisoners and staff in an otherwise mortifying setting. But in return for hope and agency, prisoners are not only made responsible for their criminal behaviour but also for their sentence, the success of their release, and even prison conditions themselves.

I argue that compassionate care is both a purveyor of meaningful human connections vital to surviving imprisonment, a tool to create meaning and purpose for both staff and prisoners, but it also fits into a neoliberal tendency towards responsibilisation of prisoners. Structural violence as a cause of imprisonment is recognised compassionately, but is left behind in a pragmatic attempt to make imprisonment bearable. In prisons, compassionate care can be simultaneously empowering, responsibilising and infantilising.