#15624 - Prisons And Parole - Criminology

CSPS Supervision 9 – Prisons and Parole

I. PRISONS

Crewe & Liebling – Reconfiguring Penal Power (2016)

Introduction

• Within high-security prisons in England and Wales in the late 1980s, there was considerable divergence in the strategies adopted to generate order, in the degree to which prisoners assented to these regimes, and in the social consequences of these different models of order.

• Most problematically, absolutist cynicism about the nature of penal power and order makes it impossible to identify which forms of penal authority are more oppressive, destructive, or unreasonable than others, with what consequences for the daily lives and well-being of prisoners.

• Our aim in this chapter is to describe changing forms of power in contemporary prisons in England and Wales, and the impact of these changes on staff culture, staff-prisoner relationships, and prison order. How are recent changes in the organization and balance of penal power manifested, with what consequences? How can they be conceptualized?

Penal power

• Different configurations of power are regarded by prisoners as more or less legitimate, and these evaluations have a direct impact on their behaviour, attitudes, and well-being.

• The assumption that prison staff are all-powerful is questionable.

  • Sykes (1958) highlighted the ‘defects in total power’ and ‘cracks in the [institutional] monolith’, in his study of a US maximum security prison, emphasizing the various ways in which the seemingly total power of prison officers was, in practice, compromised.

  • Some subsequent studies, such as McEvoy’s (2001) account of paramilitary imprisonment in Northern Ireland, are consistent with Sykes’ portrayal of the power balance between staff and prisoners.

  • In contrast, Mathiesen (1965) described prisoners within a medium-security, treatment-oriented correctional institution in Norway as feeling highly dependent on prison staff. Atomized and divided, from their position of weakness, they engaged in a form of ‘censoriousness’, in which they challenged prison staff not on the basis of an alternative value system, but for failing to correctly implement the rules of the institution.

• As Bottoms (2005) notes, these divergent descriptions in part reflect the lens through which power is observed. Sykes’ account in effect assumes the perspective of prison officers. Mathiesen writes from the position of the atomized and dependent prisoner.

Penal power and the weight of imprisonment

• In a recent article (Crewe et al. 2014a), we argued that the concept of the ‘weight’ of imprisonment had been under-theorized within penological research.

• The terminology and connotations of weight, alongside the tendency among penologists to see power as inherently suppressive and preventative, meant that little attention had been given to the ways in which different formations of penal power might be damaging or dangerous or, conversely, reasonable and supportive.

• Study by Crewe et al. (2014)

  • All of the five private sector prisons within our study were described by prisoners in terms that we summarized as ‘light’.

  • However, prisoners in the public sector prisons evaluated their overall quality of life more positively than those in three of the private sector prisons, in domains such as interpersonal treatment, as well as in relation to safety, policing, and staff professionalism.

  • In the less good private sector prisons, prisoners complained that interpersonal courtesy was less important to them than the forms of staff experience in the public sector that enabled their questions to be answered and their requests to be met.

  • While the very good private sector prisons were better than the public sector establishments in terms of overall quality of life for prisoners, they too exhibited some weaknesses with regard to matters such as policing and security. The public sector prisons delivered a well-oiled regime, in which prisoners generally felt safe, but did so without a great deal of care.

  • Many of these differences reflected different levels of staff experience

  • Our conclusion was that, to account for our findings, an axis ranging from ‘heavy’ to ‘light’ needed to be combined with one ranging from ‘absence’ to ‘presence’

  • The private sector prisons were located within this quadrant, with those that were particularly poor-performing in its far corner. In such establishments, deficits in the exercise of con dent authority meant that the wings were chaotic, ‘run’ as much by prisoners as by staff, with power owing from ‘below’ from prisoners onto staff, and from prisoner to prisoner, in relatively unregulated ways.

    • In contrast, the public sector prisons in our study sat in the ‘heavy-present’ quad- rant. Power was imposed onto prisoners by uniformed staff, often based on attitudes that were punitive or regressive, creating an atmosphere that was somewhat austere and oppressive.

• Forms of imprisonment that combine heaviness with absence are arguably its least legitimate variety.

Implications

• Our findings indicated the need to revisit the idea of ‘respect’ within prisons, and to broaden its definition beyond conventional understandings (Hulley et al. 2012)

• In our analysis, we formed two ‘respect’ dimensions: ‘interpersonal respect’, comprising honesty, trust, and fair- ness as well as courtesy, and ‘organizational respect’, which reflected levels of organizational competence and collective professionalism.

  • All of the prisons in our study scored more highly on the former measure than the latter, indicating that it is easier to achieve a ‘thin’ form of respect than to establish an organization that is responsive, fair in its expectations, and transparent in its decisions.

• A second contribution of our analysis—which follows from the first—was to emphasize the centrality of staff professionalism in shaping prisoner outcomes.

  • In the public sector prisons, the attitudes of staff towards prisoners were less caring, trusting, and rehabilitative, on the whole.

• Third, our findings resonated considerably with the emerging literature on self- legitimacy—power-holders’ recognition of, or confidence in, their own entitlement to power (Tankebe 2016).

  • Staff in the private sector were much more likely to express reservations about how to deploy their power than those in the public sector.

• Fourth, our analysis was an attempt to think through the different ways in which authority could be organized and experienced in general in contemporary prisons, and to reconsider the terms of penal power itself.

Penal power in transition

• In the years since we undertook fieldwork for the study that informed this argument, prisons have undergone significant transition. Much of this transformation has been driven by the combination of resource reductions and the spectre of private sector competition.

• Budget cuts have been savage, and have inevitably been felt most keenly in relation to staffing levels.

  • Since 2010–11, the National Offender Management Service has reduced its costs by nearly a quarter (NOMS 2015), resulting in a 30 per cent reduction in the number of public sector prison staff (Prison Reform Trust 2016), during which time the prison population has been relatively stable.

  • Prisons have moved from high-resource to low-resource institutions; public sector prisons increasingly resemble their private sector counterparts; and the terms and conditions of work within the two sectors are more closely aligned than ever.

• Study carried out by Liebling and Crewe from 2015-16 from 3 MQPL + research exercises in prisons in England and Wales.

  • In Prison A—a public sector, category C training prison—we found both staff and prisoners in despair. Many prisoners were too fearful, despondent, or frustrated with regime inconsistencies to leave the wings, in order to attend training or education.

    • At the same time, power was largely ‘absent’, both in terms of a lack of interactive engagement with prisoners, and an under-use of authority, with staff preferring to stay in and around wing offices (where they felt safe) rather than patrol and police the wings (where they felt vulnerable, and were bombarded with prisoner requests, partly as a result of the longer hours spent locked up).

  • Prison B—a modern local prison, run by a private company, mainly holding prisoners on remand or serving short sentences—exhibited different characteristics. Staff were very rarely to be found hiding in wing offices.

    • The nature of staff interaction with prisoners was such that the culture felt less absent than in Prison A, and considerably lighter.

  • Prison C, a Category B local prison was the best performing prison of the three. Discipline staff complained that they were too busy delivering the basic regime to do person-based work

    • Compared to these A and B, it had a greater proportion of experienced and knowledeable staff, in part because its geographic location meant that its pay was competitive within the local jobs market but also because the prison had served many distinct and specialist functions in its past, and the long-serving officer body had worked in many of these units or areas.

• It is telling that Prison B outperforms Prison A on ‘harmony dimensions’: here, heaviness, is manifested in lower scores for dimensions such as ‘respect/courtesy’, ‘staff–prisoner relationships’ and ‘humanity’. But it is also striking— and consistent with our theorization—that Prison C outscores Prison B on these dimensions.

  • That is to say, even when staff attitudes are somewhat ‘heavy’, the presence and professionalism of experienced...