The feeling of fear in daily work in prison surveillance and its impact on the subjectivity of penitentiary agents

Abstract

In this report of experience, we problematize the subjective experiences built up in the professional performance of prison agents who work in a closed prison unit in Paraná. We used references from the Psychodynamics of Work, Psychoanalysis and writings on Group Processes to provide workers with a weekly group space in which they were invited to talk and reflect on the daily work in the institutional intramural. From the understanding of the inseparability between work and subjective experiences, we welcome in the collective space reports about a daily prison that produces wear and unfolding of its institutional dimensions on the subjects themselves, as well as their family, affective and social relations. In analyzing the contents, it was possible to identify several aspects of how the prison institution produces impacts on the subjectivity of those who work there, among them, the feeling of fear. The conditions we outline are everyday, that is, they are not exceptions, and reflect the complex and contradictory links between working subjects and the prison institution.