Imprisonment policy has become increasingly politicized since the mid-1960s, but we do not yet know the consequence of this shift for the professional orientations of prison workers. In this article, we use original surveys of prison officers in California and Minnesota to assess whether and how partisan identification and the politicization of crime policy predict officers’ conceptualizations of the purpose and function of prisons. Results show that individual partisanship is associated with officers’ attitudes, but this is conditional on state context. Along with deepening understandings about the determinants of street-level bureaucrats’ perspectives, this article advances knowledge about how the broader political environment might shape the attitudes of front-line workers. This is important because prison officers’ perspectives affect their workplace behaviour with consequences for staff–prisoner relationships, policy implementation and the routine operations of penal facilities.