Anton Shelupanov of the Centre for Justice Innovation speaks with Jamie Bennett, a veteran prison administrator, about how to encourage more positive relationships between prison staff and inmates. At the time of the interview, Bennett was the Governor of a prison, Morton Hall, where 70 percent of inmates were foreign nationals and which created a unique set of challenges.
What are some of the most important developments you’ve seen in the last decade?
The way prison management has evolved in recent years has had both positive and negative aspects. Under new Labour, we saw an investment in services which reduce reoffending, such as an expansion in drugs treatment, education and offending behaviour programmes. This had a positive effect on the atmosphere in most prisons.
These changes created new types of professions and specialisms but also brought with it close monitoring and target setting. A new way of thinking emerged, a new kind of managerialism, a focus on targets, audits, and monitoring. Managers had to focus on managing change itself which is a somewhat different skill set to what they had before. Having more activity around reducing reoffending is positive but it’s important not to lose sight of the human context. Reducing reoffending is not about meeting targets, it is about changing the lives of individuals.
How do you encourage your staff not to lose sight of that human dimension?
My establishment, Morton Hall, had positive relationships between staff and prisoners. The staff here are compassionate and caring people. But according to the Measuring the Quality of Prison Life (MQPL) survey, there were areas which needed to be addressed; prisoners did not feel their needs were being met. We read the academic research of Sarah Taite in which she views prison work as care work, met with her and developed a training course for our staff. This, combined with improvements in services and facilities, resulted in significant improvement in the MQPL responses.
What challenges do you face at Morton Hall?
70 percent of our prisoners were foreign nationals, and we are situated in a county which is not diverse. We approached the situation based on Danny Dorling’s work on plural cities, which are cities those cities that are so diverse that everyone is in a minority group. A culture of plurality is essential in civic life and the same principle applied in our setting. It’s about making people feel safe and comfortable and encouraging prisoners to take on responsibility for their environment. We held community meetings which were led by prisoners where the best ways to improve the atmosphere were discussed. We also increased the number of prisoner representative roles (for example in health, catering, induction) and nurtured a celebration of diversity through promotional events. There was a particular issue when people first arrived in the establishment and didn’t speak English, and the provision of translation was not always consistent. Prisoners and staff worked together to make induction DVDs for new arrivals and this helped to improve their experience.
That’s interesting, that you got the prisoners involved in helping to address some problems in the facility. What does that say more generally about effective prison administration?
Of course not all prisons have the same culture and climate, and involving prisoners in improving the quality of prison life is more or less appropriate depending on the establishment. As practitioners, we need to focus on the craft of prison management. Alongside centralised controls it is important to develop a more local approach, where people who live and work in establishments and the communities in which these establishments are situated have a much greater say in policies applied to them. Success needs to be measured not only in outputs and centrally established targets – we need to set up an aspect of measures which are important to people in establishments and communities and which reflect a focus on restoration and re-entry.
What can practitioners do?
We need to become more adept at learning skills from other areas. For example, mediation provides a set of skills to deal with conflict, which would have wider benefits for culture and climate in establishments.
One issue with innovation is that some ideas which are innovative do not necessarily realise benefits. For example innovation is sometimes seen as being integral with information technology. Of course IT can have its benefits, for example in-cell telephony, and it could be very valuable, offering opportunities for improved quality-of-life and reduced cost. But some other technologies can be a solution in search of a problem – for example tagging in open prisons.
It’s important for practitioners to reconnect with a broader understanding of prisons as social institutions, and connect with other fields where much knowledge has been accumulated.