How many prison officers are ex‐military personnel? Estimating the proportion of armed forces leavers within the prison workforce of England and Wales
| Published date | 01 June 2022 |
| Author | Dominique Moran,Jennifer Turner |
| Date | 01 June 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/hojo.12450 |
Received: 7 April 2 021 Accepted: 11 June 2021
DOI: 10.1111/ho jo.12450
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
How many prison officers are ex-military
personnel? Estimating the proportion of armed
forces leavers within the prison workforce of
England and Wales
Dominique Moran1Jennifer Turner2
1Professor in Carceral Geography,School
of Geography,Earth and Environmental
Sciences, University of Birmingham
2Senior Research Scientist and Leader of
the Crime and Carcerality Research
Group, Carl von Ossietzky University of
Oldenburg, Germany
Correspondence
DominiqueMoran, Professor in Carceral
Geography,School of Geography,Earth
andEnvironmental Sciences, University of
Birmingham.
Email:d.moran@bham.ac.uk
Abstract
The prior employment history of prison officers has been
overlooked within academic literatures and, in contrast
with the prior military service of Veterans in Custody,
the significance of their military experience has been
almost completely disregarded. Since military service is
known to be predictive of subsequent professional per-
formance, this oversight, due in part to the lack of data,
is potentially very significant in understanding the con-
tribution made by ex-military personnel as prison staff.
This article presents novel empirical evidence from an
online survey of UK prison officers suggesting that at
least a quarter have military experience – a proportion
which has fallen over time but still far exceeds the pro-
portion of Veterans in the prisoner population. Based
on these novel data, the article suggests future avenues
of research to address the many unanswered questions
about whether and how military experience influences
prison work.
KEYWORDS
ex-military personnel, military, prior employment, prison officers
© 2021 The Howard League and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
148 wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/hojo HowardJ. Crim. Justice. 2022;61:148–166.
THE HOWARDJOURNAL OF CRIME AND JUSTICE 149
We know a great deal about the challenges faced by incarcerated ex-military personnel – fre-
quently termed ‘Veteransin Custody ’ (VICs) – and this is largely due to a widespread awarenessof
just how many such individuals are incarcerated. In England and Wales, a key report published
in 2014 found that VICs constituted around 7% of the prisoner population (HM Inspectorate of
Prisons, 2014), making them the single largest occupational group (Wainwrightet al., 2017,p.741).
This much-cited statistic justifiably underpinned extensive subsequent research which found that
the nature of their offences, the circumstances of their incarceration, the challenges they face in
prison, and their likelihood of reoffending all seem to be defined to a greateror lesser extent by this
prior military experience (e.g., Albertson, Banks & Murray, 2017; Albertson, Irving & Best, 2015;
Fossey et al., 2017; MacManus & Wood, 2017; Phillips, 2020). By comparison, and despite a now
extensive body of research into prison staff and prison management, we know very little about
how many prison staff are ex-military. Without a comparable percentage figure for occupational
groups, there has as yet been no comparable impetus for dedicated research into the potential
significance of prior military service for their experiences or performance – despite the fact that
research into post-military careers in general (e.g., Gordon & Newby Parham, 2019; Robertson &
Brott, 2013, 2014) suggests that military experience is highly predictiveof subsequent professional
performance. The performance of prison staff is widely acknowledged to be a very significant fac-
tor in the operation and management of prisons, their ‘moral performance’ (Liebling with Arnold,
2004), and their legitimacy (Liebling, 2011), so it follows that understanding the ways in which
previous military experience may influence how prison staff discharge their role is also key to
these concerns. And as Crewe, Bennett and Wahidin (2008) argue: ‘the study of prison staff can
tell us about conceptual issues beyond the realm of criminal justice, such as the nature of power,
punishment, order, inequality, care, discretion and resistance’ (p.2).
Accordingly, this article presents the first exploratory empirical data indicating the proportion
of the prison workforce of England and Wales who have had military experience, and how this
has changed over time. We present these findings as a first step towards addressing the broader
challenge of exploring the significance of prior military experience for prison officers’ professional
performance. In so doing, we also directly contribute to understandings of what Moran, Turner
and Arnold (2019, p.222) called the ‘prison-military complex’: a term describing ‘the multifaceted,
multiscalar,entrenched and polyvalent interrelationships between prison and the military’. Argu-
ing that scholars must pay attention to ’how and withwhat implications prison and the military are
associated with each other’ (p.222), they identify ex-military prison staff as a particularly under-
researched population exemplifying this ‘complex’.
In the article we first briefly summarise prior scholarship about prison officers, including the
dearth of research into their prior employment, and the limited prior research into those with
military experience, before describing the methodology deployed in the study,and discussing our
empirical data. Weconclude by setting out an agenda for future research based upon our findings;
research which could enhance understandings of the significance both of prison officers’ prior
employment in general, and of prior military service in particular.
1PRIOR EMPLOYMENT OF PRISON OFFICERS
Although by no means the only occupational types employed within prisons, prison officers are
usually by far the largest category of staff, and those who (distinct from prison educators, psy-
chologists, clinicians and drugs workers, for instance) spend the majority of their time transform-
ing prison policy and regulations into everyday practice in interaction with incarcerated persons
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