FOR SAFETY AND SECURITY
SAFETY AND SECURITY IN THE FEDERAL BUREAU OF PRISONS
The Most Misused Phrase in Modern Corrections
By Gideon Lock, The Prisoner Philosopher
The order came before breakfast. “Seal the windows,” the captain said, his tone leaving no room for questions. “For safety and security.” By midmorning, a maintenance crew was outside the building, drills whining as they fastened steel bars across the windows to keep them from opening more than an inch. The air smelled faintly of dust and heated metal. By nightfall, every cell felt hotter, heavier. Men pressed wet towels against their faces just to breathe. No riot had occurred. No contraband had been found. The change came because someone higher up decided that open windows were a “risk.” There was no hearing, no warning—just an order, justified by four words that need no defense inside prison walls. For safety and security. It’s a phrase every prisoner knows by heart. It can justify nearly anything: a lockdown, a mail restriction, a canceled visit. It ends conversations before they begin.
The Language of Control
Outside these walls, “safety and security” sound like virtues. Inside, they’re often code for don’t ask why. The phrase appears hundreds of times in Bureau of Prisons policy statements. It gives staff discretion so broad that explanation becomes optional. When a warden cancels recreation, suspends classes, or eliminates religious services “for safety and security,” there is no review process—only compliance. Former correctional officer and writer Ted Conover, who worked at Sing Sing and later wrote Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, noted that in institutions built on control, talk of safety often becomes talk of power. Every directive, no matter how arbitrary, can be shielded behind those words. The result is what sociologists call administrative absolutism—a culture where authority no longer needs evidence, only repetition. Within this logic, to question the phrase is to challenge the entire structure of command.
The Revolving Door of Authority
Every prison has its own rhythm. Nothing throws it off like a change in command. When a new warden arrives, both staff and inmates brace for impact. In a culture obsessed with control, stability is mistaken for complacency—and every incoming administrator feels pressure to leave a mark. Wardens at federal institutions often rotate every few years, their transfers driven by promotions or political shifts. Each new regime comes with a slogan: Zero Tolerance for Contraband, Renewed Focus on Safety and Security, Institutional Reset. But under those banners, the same story plays out. Recreation schedules are rewritten. Mail limits change. Phone access tightens. Programs that once steadied the daily rhythm vanish overnight. Every new policy is explained as a “proactive step” toward safety—though few survive the next turnover. Custody staff often learn to wait it out. “Give it a year,” one veteran officer told me. “The next boss’ll undo it anyway.”
But prisoners don’t have that luxury. Each administrative shake‑up redraws the boundaries of their lives. A man who finally earned a work detail or class assignment can lose it with one memo. This constant instability breeds stress and uncertainty. Research in the Journal of Correctional Health Care has shown that long‑term deprivation of privileges—being cut off from programs, visits, and other stabilizing routines—produces elevated rates of depression, anxiety, and psychosomatic illness comparable to those seen in solitary confinement[3]. Uncertainty, not violence, becomes the daily threat.
French philosopher Michel Foucault once described prisons as “laboratories of power”—places where control is both the experiment and the outcome[8]. Administrative churn turns that experiment into a permanent state. When no rule stays stable long enough to build trust, obedience becomes the only survival skill left. And even staff aren’t immune. Officers privately admit that constant reform cycles make the job harder, not safer. Frequent policy changes create confusion and conflict; yet questioning orders risks discipline, so silence becomes its own survival skill. The phrase endures—repeated like scripture, etched into every directive. For safety and security. It means whatever the person in charge needs it to mean, at least until the next person arrives.
Punishing the Many for the Few
In prison, punishment travels faster than guilt. If one inmate hides contraband, an entire unit loses the yard. If a single fight breaks out, the whole compound goes on lockdown. If one person abuses email or phone privileges, new policies restrict how those systems can be used. Every memo, every restriction, carries the same justification: for safety and security. Administrators call it “unit accountability.” The United Nations calls it what it is—collective punishment. Under Rule 43 of the Nelson Mandela Rules, collective punishment is explicitly prohibited[1]. “No prisoner shall be sanctioned for an act or omission he or she has not personally committed”[1]. Yet in the U.S. correctional system, it remains routine practice.
The logic seems simple: punish everyone, and the group will police itself. In reality, it breeds resentment and despair. A 2023 study in the International Journal of Prison Health found that collective sanctions in Swiss prisons produced “feelings of injustice and disengagement” even among those who hadn’t broken rules[2]. Those feelings of injustice led to disengagement and did not reduce misconduct[2]. The same pattern appears across many facilities: prolonged lockdowns following isolated incidents often lead to more violence and disciplinary issues in the weeks that follow. “You can’t punish 500 people for one guy’s mistake and expect peace,” said one federal officer during my time inside. “All it does is light the fuse.”
Inside, that dynamic becomes daily life. When collective punishment hits, even the most constructive inmates—tutors, mentors, mental-health peers—feel erased. It sends the message that good conduct offers no protection, that individual accountability is meaningless. One prisoner I once mentored put it bluntly: “They teach us responsibility, but they punish us like a herd,” said a man who asked to be identified only as William Parker because he fears retaliation from staff. Psychologists describe that state as learned helplessness—when people stop trying to act differently because outcomes no longer depend on them. Once that threshold is crossed, behavior becomes reactive, impulsive, even self-destructive. Morale collapses. Hope turns inward until it curdles into apathy or rage.
And staff suffer too. Decades‑old research by the Office of Justice Programs found that high levels of occupational stress contribute to hypertension, ulcers, alcoholism and shortened life expectancy among correctional officers[11]. More recent reviews note that corrections staff experience elevated rates of post‑traumatic stress and suicide compared with other law‑enforcement personnel[12]. Group lockdowns and blanket restrictions intensify that strain. “We know it doesn’t work,” a colleague once whispered after a mass lockdown. “But it’s easier than explaining nuance.” From a moral perspective, collective punishment violates both justice and utility. It offends the principle that guilt must be individual, and it fails even on practical grounds—producing instability instead of safety. But in a bureaucracy obsessed with optics, it endures because it feels decisive. It shows “action,” even when that action deepens the problem.
The Numbers Game
Every prison keeps score. Not with trophies or headlines, but with numbers: incident reports, disciplinary “shots,” contraband finds, assault counts, lockdown hours. These metrics flow upward through regional offices to Washington, where they become bullet points in budget hearings and press releases about “institutional success.” A warden’s career can rise or fall on a single quarterly spreadsheet. If reported violence dips, the new policy works. If complaints drop, morale must be high. The math looks clean; the story sells.
Except the math lies. Institutional reporting often varies according to the discretion of those in charge. If a fight is recorded as a “verbal dispute,” the incident rate improves. If an officer breaks up a scuffle without writing it up, it never existed. Inside, everyone knows the game. One counselor might quietly resolve an assault so the unit “doesn’t look bad.” A lieutenant might tell staff to “write fewer 100‑series shots” before inspection week. Numbers replace narrative; charts replace truth. The phrase for safety and security smooths the transition, turning human pain into data points—and then erasing the data that doesn’t fit the story.
The Human Cost
By midsummer, the sealed windows turned the cells into ovens. The concrete walls radiated heat; sheets stuck to the skin. The fans mounted above the range pushed around air that felt no cooler than breath. The order—given weeks earlier—had been simple: seal them up for safety and security. Staff did return to take temperatures, but only at times when readings would be lowest—early mornings or on cooler days—creating a false record of compliance. No one measured the heat at its worst. In many U.S. prisons and jails, the phrase brings with it a literal climate crisis. Public reporting shows that nearly half of state prisons in the United States have partial or no air-conditioning[6]; in Texas, two-thirds of facilities are not fully air-conditioned and indoor temperatures regularly top 95 to 100 degrees Fahrenheit[7]. Research from MIT’s Environmental Solutions Initiative found that prisons with highly restricted movement, inadequate staffing and mental-health care are particularly vulnerable to extreme heat[5]. Yet no one in command came back to face what sealing the windows did to the men inside.
This is how deprivation accumulates: one small policy at a time. A microwave removed because someone burned a bag of popcorn—or abused it by heating liquid to throw on another person. A chapel closed because one fight broke out near the altar. A phone policy restricted because a single inmate misused his account. Each decision tiny enough to justify, all together large enough to crush daily life.
Psychologically, this constant erosion creates what clinical staff call chronic institutional stress. A study in the Journal of Correctional Health Care found that prisoners subjected to long‑term privilege deprivation experienced elevated rates of depression, anxiety, and psychosomatic illness comparable to those in solitary confinement[3]. The human mind, it turns out, does not distinguish much between physical isolation and social suffocation.
I have sat in suicide‑watch cells with men who didn’t need more medication—they needed air, a sense of purpose, a reason to believe their suffering mattered. Many had been model inmates until a new “security enhancement” wiped out the routines that gave their days meaning. When programming disappears, hope thins. Despair, like heat, fills the empty space.
And that despair is contagious. When prisoners give up, staff absorb the fallout. Officers face shorter tempers, quicker fights, and the impossible task of enforcing rules they privately question. Studies show that correctional officers experience high levels of job stress, post‑traumatic stress symptoms and even elevated suicide rates[12]. “The inmates aren’t the only ones affected by the violence; the officers are too,” a seasoned guard once confided. Every time policy prioritizes image over empathy, everyone inside pays the price. Even the public, far from these walls, feels the ripple. A person released after years of deprivation—stripped of connection, trust, and emotional stability—returns to the community less equipped to function, more likely to relapse or reoffend. Safety denied behind the walls becomes safety lost outside them.
And so, despite the stated mission, every new layer of restriction ends up breeding the very instability it claims to prevent. The system becomes a snake devouring its own tail—tightening control in the name of security until it suffocates itself.
Reclaiming Safety and Security
The words themselves were never the problem. Safety. Security. They speak to human needs older than any prison: protection, order, belonging. But inside these walls, they’ve been hollowed out—stripped of meaning, wielded as instruments of fear instead of promises of care.
To reclaim them, we have to start where the harm began: in how we define control. The assumption that safety requires deprivation is wrong. Decades of research say the opposite. Studies show that prisons emphasizing education, meaningful work and consistent human contact see fewer violent incidents than those that rely primarily on restriction and segregation. A meta‑analysis by the RAND Corporation found that incarcerated people who participated in education programs had 43 percent lower odds of recidivating than those who did not, and were 13 percentage points more likely to find employment upon release[10]. Scholars at Erasmus University argue that focusing on surveillance and punishment undermines resocialization and humanity, and call for a long‑term security vision that balances safety with human dignity[9]. Comparative research from Leiden University reports that prisoners in Norway—where normalization, trust and rehabilitation are central—feel significantly safer than those in England and Wales[13], and Norway’s recidivism rate has fallen to roughly one‑third of U.S. levels since reforms prioritized dignity and normalization[14].
These findings all point to the same conclusion: trust works better than fear. When people have opportunities to learn, work and build relationships—and when they believe that rules are applied fairly—violence drops. Recidivism falls. Staff morale improves. Yet the dominant assumption inside many American prisons remains that deprivation equals safety. Changing that assumption will require not just new policies but new courage.
Some American institutions are beginning to rediscover this truth. Dialogue circles, peer mentorship programs, and educational initiatives have shown promise in reducing tension without resorting to blanket restrictions. What’s missing isn’t policy, it’s courage. It takes courage for a warden to say that compassion is not weakness, that restoring dignity enhances safety. It takes courage for an officer to speak up when a rule causes more harm than help. And it takes courage for the public to resist its reflex for vengeance and demand something better in its name.
Because what happens here is not confined here. Every person who leaves prison—staff or inmate—carries its lessons outward. If we teach that control matters more than conscience, that comfort is a luxury, that silence is safety, then those values leak into the world beyond the razor wire.
From a philosophical view, the choice before us isn’t between control and chaos—it’s between fear and wisdom. Systems built on fear will always tighten until they choke themselves. Systems guided by wisdom balance restraint with respect.
The Rule of St. Benedict, written fifteen centuries ago for monastic communities, offered advice modern prisons would do well to heed: “Let the abbot so temper all things that the strong have something to strive for and the weak nothing to run from”[16]. Translated into modern policy, that means designing institutions where strength is measured not by domination but by balance—where the weak are protected, and the strong are guided toward purpose.
True reform will begin only when for safety and security stops being a reflex and becomes a responsibility. When it ceases to mean “because I said so,” and begins to mean “because it is right.”
The Lesson in the Walls
Prisons mirror the societies that build them. Every policy, every justification, every silence reflects the values of the people outside the wire. If a nation believes fear keeps it safe, then fear will govern its institutions. If it believes in dignity, even for those who have fallen, then its prisons will one day reflect that belief.
Inside, the phrase for safety and security is as common as the sound of keys. It appears on every memo, every announcement, every denial. It has become the mantra of a system that confuses control with protection. The words end conversations before they begin—an all-purpose justification that needs no evidence, only repetition. Invoked often enough, safety and security becomes a kind of administrative magic, capable of excusing almost anything: locked windows, revoked privileges, collective punishment. It silences dissent and shields authority, allowing the system to act without explanation, accountability, or even the pretense of dialogue.
But the lesson of these walls is simpler than the bureaucracy that defends them: safety built on suffering is never secure. In the years I’ve lived behind these fences, I’ve seen both cruelty and grace. I’ve seen officers share food during lockdowns when policy said they didn’t have to. I’ve seen men risk discipline to comfort another during grief. The system can take much from us—light, air, freedom—but not the instinct toward decency.
That remains the quiet rebellion that outlasts every order. If we ever hope to create real safety, we must widen our definition of it—to include stability, empathy, and a belief that even broken lives can be mended. Until that happens, “safety and security” will remain the most misused words in the modern correctional vocabulary.
Author’s Note
This essay was written by Gideon Lock (a pseudonym used within the Federal Bureau of Prisons) as part of The Prisoner Philosopher—an independent series exploring ethics, justice, and human dignity from behind bars. The project seeks to provoke honest dialogue about the culture of punishment and the meaning of moral responsibility in modern America. All institutional data and quotations are drawn from publicly available reports, verified studies, and documented first‑hand accounts. This work is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
Appendix – Updated Sources
[1] United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (2015) – Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (Nelson Mandela Rules), Rule 43: forbids collective punishment and sanctions for acts a prisoner did not commit.
[2] Rossegger et al., “Perceptions of Collective and Other Unjust Punishment in Swiss Prisons” (2023) – Study in the International Journal of Prison Health reporting that collective sanctions produced feelings of injustice and disengagement without reducing misconduct.
[3] Hales & Epps, “Psychological Impacts of Long‑Term Privilege Deprivation in Correctional Settings” (2021) – Journal of Correctional Health Care article finding that long‑term deprivation led to elevated depression, anxiety and psychosomatic illness.
[4] Wildeman & Andersen, “Psychological Distress in Solitary Confinement” (2020) – American Journal of Public Health study documenting high rates of depression, anxiety and guilt among inmates in solitary confinement.
[5] MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative (2024) – Report on extreme heat exposure in U.S. correctional facilities; identified nine facility‑level factors (restricted movement, inadequate staffing and mental‑health treatment, etc.) that heighten heat risk.
[6] Reuters (12 July 2024) – Article noting that nearly half of state prisons across 29 states have partial or no air‑conditioning and that the Bureau of Prisons would not provide its own data.
[7] Texas Tribune (2025) – Report showing that two‑thirds of Texas prisons are not fully air‑conditioned and that indoor temperatures regularly exceed 95–100 °F.
[8] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1977) – In the “Panopticism” chapter, Foucault calls prisons “laboratories of power”.
[9] Erasmus University Rotterdam (2024) – “Tackling Hardening in Prisons Requires a New Long‑Term Security Vision,” which argues that focusing on surveillance over resocialization undermines humanity and calls for a balance between security and dignity.
[10] RAND Corporation (2013) – Evaluating the Effectiveness of Correctional Education meta‑analysis showing that educational programs reduce recidivism by 43% and increase post‑release employment.
[11] Office of Justice Programs (1982) – “Reducing Staff and Inmate Stress in Correctional Institutions,” noting high occupational stress, illnesses and shortened life expectancy among correctional officers.
[12] Vera Institute of Justice (2018) – “Correctional Officer Wellness and Safety: Lessons from the Field,” highlighting elevated rates of PTSD, depression and suicide among corrections staff.
[13] University of Leiden (2024/2025) – “Feeling (Un)safe in Prison: A Comparative Analysis of Norway and England & Wales,” showing that Norwegian prisoners feel safer and trust their environment more.
[14] UCSF Magazine (2024) – Article noting that Norway’s recidivism rate fell to about 20% after reforms prioritizing dignity, education and normalization.
[15] Ted Conover (2000) – Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, a memoir illustrating how the language of safety can become a language of power.
[16] Rule of St. Benedict (6th century) – Chapter 64; a translation states that the abbot should temper all things so that “the strong have something to strive for and the weak nothing to run from”.
Originally published on Gideon Locke’s Substack
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