Humane Prisons

David Jones

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138448544
• eBook ISBN: 9781315345123
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Medical Theory, Practice & Reference

Based on the popular courses run by the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine in Oxford, and written by leading figures working in the field of evidence-based medicine, this workbook provides papers appropriate for the study of child health.

Chapter 1

Is there a future for humane imprisonment?

Hans Toch

To an observer from Mars, our prisons may look silly and ineffective. This fact need not surprise us because our prisons reflect our state of ignorance and our sense of impotence. We feel constrained to run the sorts of prisons we do because of our failure to understand most maladaptive and violent behaviour, and our inability to deal with it. Given our unconscious awareness of our deficits, we have largely fallen back on strategies of containment and control.

To be sure, there have been some occasions along the way in which we have improved our knowledge of violent offenders and our skill in dealing with them, and have been able to devise and operate different types of institutions. It would be nice to presume that such ventures would be bound to prosper and multiply, but this has often not been the case. Sadly, history is redolent with brave but ultimately unsuccessful experiments with enlightened and decent penological practices – many of these being ahead of their time and of ours. I think that it behoves us to consider these debacles with a dispirited yet open mind, so that we can hopefully learn from them.

The key question is: Why were so many admirable experiments so consistently short-lived? Some observers, of course, believe that this question is silly, because they define ‘humane imprisonment’ as an oxymoronic juxtaposition of incompatible objectives. Other observers prefer to see most past (and future) prison innovations as naive expressions of ivy-towered idealism, or as the unreplicable and predictably evanescent handiwork of one-off charismatic leaders. This latter charge may especially ring true because the chronologies frequently involve coinciding life cycles of interventions and their founders.

A very different type of contention has been that humane imprisonment by its nature offends public sensibilities, violating expectations and challenging cherished assumptions. Given this contingency, it becomes a mere matter of time for the resistances that the experiments invite to gel into an organised opposition. This chain of events tends to particularly appeal to sadder-but-wiser partisans of humane confinement, because it serves to explain their own failures, and those of their friends. It also happens to be another plausible narrative, in that many correctional interventions have unquestionably fallen victim to political forces carefully plotting their demise.

Aiming for the Achilles Heel

The environment of humane imprisonment can be compared to a besieging army, whose chances of prevailing are facilitated by vulnerabilities in its target. Those who operate humane prison programmes are consequently well advised to engage in continuous self-review and unsparing self-critiques. It is important to keep in mind that innocuous inconsistencies in programme design or imperfections in implementation are far from uncommon in pioneering interventions, as are occasional errors in judgment. But we need to recognise that such human failings and foibles become exploitable if they are ignored or swept under the rug. Assaults on pioneering enterprises have tended to highlight their shortcomings and make them salient, but these outcomes have been facilitated where programmes were awkwardly or stubbornly defended. Immodestly touted programmes can be made to look silly where attention is drawn to ways in which they fall short of their advertised perfection.

It is of course inviting for anyone who is ridiculed or skewered to blame his or her misfortune on others, such as whistleblowers who relay misinformation to ill-intentioned confederates. But publicised shortcomings have often come to light through the advent of critical incidents of the sort that are bound to occur when one is dealing with high-risk clients. Moreover, information leaks point to unresolved dissension or live disharmony in one’s ranks. An intervention that is truly innovative or distinctive cannot afford to be a house divided. If a programme does stand out it can expect scrutiny, and it must strive to earn the loyalty and dedication of its staff in order to weather its predictably turbulent environment. This means that the way such a programme is organised and the way it is run can be as important as its content. Most humane settings in corrections happen to be organised democratically, which gives them a head start in this regard: organisational theory tells us that one can best engender loyalty in an organisation through participative management and shared decision-making, so that staff (and inmates, in the case of prison programmes) can develop a sense of ownership and a feeling of having a stake in the welfare and survival of the community they have helped to shape.

Promoting inclusiveness

Because pioneering programmes require solidarity in their ranks, they need to avoid anything that resembles a class or caste system. The staff of such programmes must therefore never be organised in a way that treats some as second-class citizens or makes others feel that they are relegated to the fringes of the operation. This caution sounds painfully elementary, but can be lost sight of when decisions are made about what to do with uniformed personnel, and about the role that one wants them to play. It is amazing how often it is forgotten that prison officers as a group tend to invite being unfairly stereotyped. And though many of the officers we might have encountered in mainstream prisons may have appeared hard-nosed or custody-oriented, we must realise that this would not be so because they were bom with a security-prone chromosome or custodial gene. We must keep in mind that if our prisons did not have prison officers, we would be forced to invent them. Uniformed staff happen to be the front-line of prisons on a 24/7 basis. While dedicated humanists like ourselves have ambled in and out of institutions on convenient weekday shifts, it is prison officers who have been faithfully manning the fort and have acted as our most reliable and multifarious resource.

As front-line staff, officers are by nature generalists, who acquire their job-orientation and skills through training and on-the-job involvement. Where we engender appropriate training and on-the-job involvements there is no reason why in humane (as opposed to traditional or inhumane) prisons, corrections officers cannot play a prized and prominent role. In fact, in treatment-oriented or community-oriented programmes, the officers’ role can be particularly enhanced and enriched. And while job enrichment is desirable both from the officers’ perspective and ours, there is no uniform direction it need take, so there is considerable room for humanistic variety. The enriched or enhanced attributes of the humane officers’ role are thus likely to vary from one progressive setting to another. However, some common denominators are also needed to survive. Prison officers could thus become more specialised in special programmes without relinquishing their ‘basic’ custodial functions and responsibilities.

The reliance on officers as front-line staff may also help us to build bridges to the remainder of the system. No matter how much top-down sponsorship a progressive programme may enjoy, it must still earn acceptance to legitimise its operation. In the process of defining itself and projecting its own identity, it must therefore try to acknowledge and accommodate goals of those elsewhere in the organisation. A new, innovative programme must take care not to overstate the significance of its uniqueness. If an intervention can do what other settings are not doing, it has a right to draw attention to this fact, and to hope that it will be valued by virtue of being both different and compatible, and of being able to contribute to the rest of the system because it can do what others cannot do or would rather not be doing.

Being a law unto oneself

The most frequent threats to the survival of humane settings do not derive from attacks on their core goals, but have to do with ancillary or tangential concerns, related to the way rules are made and privileges and penalties are dispensed. Innovative programmes have most often been disrupted or discontinued because of the allegation that they afforded their clients an unseemly privileged existence or exempted them from universally applicable rules. We can anticipate risk wherever a programme emphasises the discretionary nature of its decision-making, which in one fell swoop can irritate both prison administrators and critics from the left and the right. In the course of such jurisdictional controversies, the contribution a programme makes – which may be invaluable and substantial – can be overlooked or unattended to. Questions of boundaries between systems and subsystems frequently end up being couched in blunt and non-negotiable terms. It may of course be a truism that in the pursuit of organisational congruence it takes two to tango, but a prison entity must keep in mind that one cannot try to lead in a dance where one’s partner is an 800-pound gorilla. Sadder-and-wiser prison reformer Peter Scharf (the co-originator of an ill-fated inmate community), ruefully made this point when he observed that:

[Inmates] can only request privileges; they cannot demand the right to democratic participation. As long as the inmates accede to the administration’s wishes, everything runs smoothly. When there is a difference of opinion . . .the prison administration usually wins.

(Scharf, 1980, pp. 97-8).

With respect to therapeutic communities in prison, Scharf emphasised that:

The democracy of the prison therapeutic community is always a democracy within a larger correctional bureaucracy, ultimately subject to its laws, rules, jurisdictions and norms. In this context, the democracy of a prison therapeutic community is in a tenuous position, subject to powerful forces beyond its control. Such forces must be faced, because democratic participation represents a central element in the prison therapeutic community, both as an ideal in itself, and as a means toward social cohesion and group solidarity (p. 98).

Elliott Barker, who was a redoubtable pioneer in the therapeutic-community movement, made a similar cautionary observation, and listed the following version of this doctrine as one of his guiding principles:

The other side of the issue of receiving support up the line is to give support up the line. It is essential that the authority to whom the program innovator reports be kept totally informed of all matters that may potentially create difficulties. It is clear that the program innovator must earn the confidence of those by whom he is employed. This requires a working partnership in which the principal innovator is competent and conscientious with regard to the difficulties one can get an employer into, and the employer, on the other hand, is sufficiently mature to take reasonable risks, confident that the long-term benefits outweigh the inevitable short-term problems.

(Barker, 1980, p. 77)

The same caution was retrospectively voiced by Studt, Messinger and Wilson, in a book-length obituary entitled C-Unit: Search for Community in Prison (1968). In this book, the authors pointed out that ‘any successful resocialising community must give high priority to designing its relationship with the higher authorities who determine its fate’ (p. 278). C-Unit ultimately failed to achieve a mutually satisfactory relationship of this kind. In alluding to this failure, the authors laid the blame on correctional administrators, complaining that ‘the [C-unit] community was never permitted to design its institutions for control in congruence with the values espoused in its welfare institutions’ (p. 280). And with respect to the question of whose obligation it may have been to adjust or conform to whom, Studt, Messinger and Wilson (1968) unrepentedly declared that:

Evaluation…leads directly to questions about the ability of the larger systems in C-Unit’s environment to support the process they had authorized. It seems clear in retrospect that the major flaw in the original plan was to leave unspecified the implicit commitments of [the prison] and the Department of Corrections when they established a small subsystem charged with initiating organisational change . . . Throughout the life of the C-Unit program, upper administration appeared to assume that the Project, once authorized, could maintain the change process within the confines of its relatively tiny inmate-staff community without calling on its organisational environment for reciprocal changes. [The prison] and the Department of Corrections . . .were apparently totally unprepared for the fact that changing the role of the inmate in the C-Unit community would call for corresponding changes in the role performance of all employees in the system, including both the institution and the Department of Corrections, that directly affected the development of the C-Unit program (p. 285).

The devil may lie in problematic details

C-Unit ended up springing some demands on its environment that proved unacceptable to its sponsors, but even experiments that are carefully designed can overlook procedural details that in retrospect augur controversy. The following specification of goals, for example, which was promulgated in 1927, happens to hold a hint of what eventually became a problem. The preambular Statement (for the Norfolk Colony in Massachusetts) was a model of its kind, overwhelmingly enlightened and prescient, but in passing alluded to a modified approach to disciplinary sanctions – one that some eventually charged augured an invitation to anarchy, and others saw as an opening to abuses of power. The passage read:

Each man is looked upon as an individual with individual needs and problems and with latent possibilities for good to be given such consideration as will tend toward his ultimate recovery.

To this end administrative organisation and living conditions within the institution are made to approximate as nearly as may be in a prison the atmosphere and spirit of a normal community . . . and the forces of restraint and punishment, excepts as these may be used as a method of treatment or institutional discipline, are subordinate.

(Commons, 1940, p. 3)

The originator of the Norfolk Prison Colony, Howard Gill, was surprised when he encountered resistance from his subordinates in implementing his conception of therapeutic sanctions. The ambivalence of staff members, however, reached the point where in practice disciplinary enforcement in the prison often became unpredictably inconsistent. According to the official history of the Norfolk Colony:

It is customary in older prisons to rule that similar infractions will always have the same punishments. It is a justice that the men understand and prison authorities believe in. Mr. Gill waded into this placid water saying that uniformity was not synonymous with equality or justice. Punishment should be meted out to suit the criminal and not the crime, an attitude which the majority of the staff at Norfolk, even after six years, did not swallow. Thus we ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• About the editor
• About the Contributor
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Is there a future for humane imprisonment?
• 2 First impressions
• 3 Life inside
• 4 Psychopathological considerations of prison systems
• 5 How to create madness in prison
• 6 Resolving prisoner conflicts before they escalate into violence
• 7 Can there be ‘best practices’ in supermax?
• 8 The UK Prison Service Close Supervision Centres
• 9 Creating the elements of a humane prison system
• 10 Women’s imprisonment: how getting better is getting worse
• 11 Governing a humane prison
• 12 Clinical supervision for staff in a Therapeutic Community prison
• 13 Psychotherapy in prisons: a supervisor’s view
• 14 Peer-review and accreditation
• 15 Independent inspection of prisons
• 16 Humane prisons: are they worth it?
• Index