prison guards
Prison staff who maintain order behind bars — and who sometimes abuse that power.
Prison guards — in Danish fængselsbetjente or fængselsvagter — are employees of prisons and correctional institutions whose primary task is to maintain security, order and discipline and to prevent escapes, violence and smuggling within the walls of the institution. They form a central part of the criminal justice system and carry out custodial sentences in practice following the decisions of the courts.
In the case of FBI informant Joe Moore's infiltration of the Ku Klux Klan, the prison guards were themselves the perpetrators: three employees of the Florida prison service, who were members of the KKK, planned in 2015 to kill a former inmate, a Black man, in revenge for a fight in prison. Moore, who had infiltrated the Klan for the FBI, exposed the plot, and the three were arrested and later convicted.
The case illustrates why prison guards as a group occupy a particular position in true crime: they hold power over inmates, have access to information about them, and share a loyalty to colleagues that can make abuse difficult to expose from within. When officers are themselves members of extremist networks, the prison becomes a place where the state cannot protect those it has deprived of liberty.
Internationally, the legal regulation of prison staff powers and responsibilities varies considerably from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. In the United States, correctional officers are subject to state legislation as well as federal standards and, unlike police officers, hold authority primarily within the geographical area of the prison and during the transport of inmates.
In the true crime genre, prison guards appear both as victims of violence and threats from inmates, as witnesses to abuse, and — as in the Florida case — as perpetrators who misuse their position. It is this duality between protector and threat that makes the term relevant in cases of abuse of power behind bars.
