The sadistic prison 'warder' is an all-too-familiar figure in the literary and cultural imagination of Britain and beyond. This distorted image continues to be informed by the stereotypically oppressive gaolers of old - trailing the figurative stench of the dungeon behind them. Even today, prison officers can, for instance, function as scapegoats to compensate for society's guilty conscience or as fictional vehicles to promote prison reform. This book seeks to redress this misrepresentation of the prison officer by drawing attention to counter-discursive examples: deploying and developing...