Managing Coexistence: A Comparison between Women and Men Prison Guards

Abstract

This paper aims to understand how prison guards perceive their relationship with prisoners, and to reveal whether their sex has any influence on their perception. For this purpose, we analyzed 1,525 self-administered online questionnaires, answered in 2014 and 2015 by a sample of prison guards in Minas Gerais (333 female and 1,192 male) and 23 semi-structured interviews with professionals that work in the Metropolitan Area of Belo Horizonte (13 men and 10 women), conducted between the years 2016 a 2018. The results indicate that sex does not have a significant influence on how prison guards perceive their work and interact with inmates, since there is a homogenization of experiences during their labor routine. There is an overemphasis on virility, a characteristic assumed also by women, given the understanding that the profession is eminently a masculine one, requiring the use of force and coercion to guarantee the obedience of the inmates. Because the attributes valued are associated with the male universe, in a traditional perspective of gender roles, men and women behave in the same way.