Prisons And Parole Notes

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.

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