The “Pains of Employment”? Connecting Air and Sound Quality to Correctional Officer Experiences of Health and Wellness in Prison Space

Abstract

This article highlights Canadian federal correctional officers’ (COs) sensory engagements with their workplace to reveal how, in particular, air quality and sound quality generate physical feelings that create health and wellness concerns. These “pains of employment” support calls to improve prison space. However, these sensations conflate with perceptions of space, which infer that prisoners, not infrastructure, create poor environments. Such perceptions seemingly influence COs’ approaches to prisoner management. Accordingly, the physical quality of prison air and sound not only shapes CO constructions of health and wellness, but also has the potential to influence how they discharge their role.