Doing Prison Work

Elaine M Crawley

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135991746
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book provides a much-needed sociological account of the social world of the English prison officer, making an original contribution to our understanding of the inner life of prisons in general and the working lives of prison officers in particular. As well as revealing how the job of the prison officer - and of the prison itself - is accomplished on a day-to-day basis, the book explores not only what prison officers do but also how they feel about their work.

In focusing on how prison officers feel about their work this book makes a number of interesting revelations - about the essentially domestic nature of much of the work they do, about the degree of emotional labour invested in it and about the performance nature of many of the day-to-day interactions between officers and prisoners. Finally, the book follows the prison officer home after work, showing how the prison can spill over into their home lives and family relationships.

Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in different types of prisons (including interviews with prison officers' wives and children as well as prison officers themselves), this book will be essential reading for all those with an interest in how prisons and organisations more generally operate in practice.

Chapter 1

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Setting the scene: the research in context

This chapter ‘sets the scene’ for the empirical chapters that follow. My discussion is divided into five main parts. In the first part I consider the long-standing problem of prison officer discontent, and the central issues around which this discontent revolves. Staff resentments and frustrations about their working conditions, status and purpose are particularly pertinent here. The second part notes the substantial and far-reaching changes to prison management, organisation, practices and regimes that have taken place over the past two decades in a drive towards ‘improving’ the service. The nature of some of the changes that have taken place, and the pace at which they have been introduced, have impacted significantly on the day-to-day working lives of prison officers, on their perceptions of themselves and their work role and on the occupational cultures of prisons. With regard to the latter, managers of the Prison Service, like managers in other organisations in both the public and private sectors, are making efforts to change uniformed staff cultures in an effort to improve service delivery. This part of the chapter also notes certain continuities within the organisation, focusing on aspects of the prison officers’ world that have remained constant for over a century, and which continue to shape action, emotion and culture at work. The third part discusses the performance of power in prisons. As I shall try to show throughout this book, the ways in which power is actually performed have important implications for how prison officers carry out mandated tasks, for officers’ relationships with prisoners and ultimately for the ‘legitimacy’ of prison regimes. Staff-prisoner interactions are moderated by the fact that power in prisons is a negotiated affair, with prison officers having much less power than is often pretended, and prisoners rather more. The degree to which an officer accepts this (the notion of shared decision-making is anathema to many prison officers) determines his choice of working ‘style’ or ‘credo’. In the fourth part of the chapter I explore cultures at work, drawing upon Skolnick's (1975) concept of the police ‘working personality’ in an attempt to identify similarities and contrasts between the occupational cultures of police beat officers and those of uniformed prison staff. Making such a comparison is helpful, because prison officers and police officers are the only blue-collar, predominantly working-class occupational groups in the criminal justice system. As such, one might expect there to be similarities in the ways that they think about their work. As I shall show, these similarities do exist, but there are also certain important differences, and these are largely determined by 1) the key function of each occupational group; and 2) the environments in which each occupational group works. In the final part I suggest that the prison should be read as an emotional arena. I apply Hochschild's (1983) concept of ‘emotional labour’ and Goffman's (1959) dramaturgical analysis of the structures of social encounters to explore the ways in which, in addition to being places for the confinement of law-breakers, prisons are highly domestic spaces in which prison officers must perform and manage emotion.

A century of staff discontent

For much of the past hundred years the Prison Service of England and Wales has simmered with staff discontent. In the late 1800s that discontent was focused around certain key issues; these issues, as well as more general questions about prison regimes, were addressed by a number of major committees during the period 1880-95. I do not intend to rehearse, here, the full remit or findings of these committees as this has been done adequately elsewhere (see, for example, May 1979). Rather I want to focus on the key concerns that emerged from two major inquiries of the time, namely the Rosebery Committee of 1883 and (more particularly) the Gladstone Committee of 1894. Both are of significant historical importance in tracing the development of the modern Prison Service. The Rosebery Committee was the first to report on staff problems seemingly common to prison systems, and which had (and continue to have) a significant impact on the morale of uniformed staff, namely: 1) the apparent inability of central administrators and staff ‘in the field’ to communicate with each other; and 2) prison officers’ perceptions that the ‘authorities’ were more interested in the welfare of prisoners than in the welfare of staff. British prison officers are apparently not alone in these feelings: reports from America have also portrayed guards as feeling that ‘administrative and operational changes are tending to favour prisoners over staff and that every political or administrative intervention weakens the prison guard's position’ (Poole and Pogrebin 1987). The other committee of interest here, the Gladstone Committee, is perhaps the best known investigation into the history of the English prison system. The report of the Gladstone Committee had a significant and enduring impact in terms of both the purpose of the service and the uniformed officers’ role within it. The central significance of the Gladstone Report was that it placed the reform or rehabilitation of prisoners as a primary objective of the penal system, along with retribution and deterrence. As the rehabilitative task increased in importance, so the uncertainty and confusion of discipline staff about their ‘proper’ role in the prison increased. They were given more discretion in their dealing with prisoners, but at the same time the move towards the increased association of prisoners, which the report had initiated, made the task of controlling prisoners more complex. For the first time, discipline staff found that they had to seek conformity through systems of remission and other ‘privileges’ instead (May 1979:13; but see also Thomas 1972 for a fuller discussion of this process). This is a crucially important point for contemporary staff-prisoner relations, and one I shall return to below.

Prison officers’ dissatisfaction with their role and with their managers has been expressed practically in a series of industrial actions over the years, some of them serious, in terms of their disruption to regimes (see, for example, Fitzgerald and Sim 1982) and all of them rearticulating the concerns outlined above (see, for example, Thomas 1972; May 1979; Home Office 1985; Hay and Sparks 1991; Woolf 1991; POA 1991, 1996; and virtually any copy of Gatelodge, the magazine of the Prison Officers’ Association (POA)). By 1977, staff disputes had arisen over a number of local issues – in particular the increasing number of protests by prisoners. Of the various types of industrial action taken by the Prison Officers’ Association from that period onwards, some interfered with the administration of justice (e.g. the refusal to escort prisoners to and from courts and to allow lawyers, probation officers or police to visit prisoners); some interfered with the administration of prisons (e.g. the refusal to co-operate with civilian and welfare staff); and some of it directly interfered with prison regimes (thus denying prisoners’ statutory entitlements) such as late unlocking, bans on visits, education classes, bathing, laundry and association (Fitzgerald and Sim 1982: 122).

The concerns that led to these disputes seem remarkably persistent. Indeed, as I shall demonstrate throughout this book, many prison officers feel unvalued, undirected and unsure of their role; not a single officer who took part in my research felt that his or her manager attached any real value to ‘sharp end’ knowledge of prisons and prisoners. Few had ever been asked by their prison managers to provide input into the regimes in which uniformed staff work; as a result, there is, amongst prison officers, significant dissatisfaction with, and to some extent, alienation from the work itself. Increasing numbers of prison officers are also reporting work-related stress. From a management point of view, many of the strains within the service can be laid at the door of uniformed staff themselves. From this perspective, the problem of inadequate service delivery is largely a cultural one.

Continuity and change

Managing the prison service: problems of culture

The desire to change the culture of the Prison Service, on the grounds that it is preventing the service from moving forward, is made explicit in the 1997 Prison Service Review. This internal review of the service was launched in March 1997 against a background of rapid expansion (a result of an unprecedented growth in the prison population) and increasing pressures to become more effective (in both custodial and rehabilitative terms) and efficient (in terms of controlling costs). The review focuses on proposals for improving the delivery of prison services in accordance with the Prison Service's Statement of Purpose¹ (Prison Service 1997). According to this document, prison services will not improve unless the Prisons Board embarks on a programme of ‘cultural and behavioural change’ (ibid.: para. 10.1). To this end, the review team recommended that the Prisons Board carry out a ‘culture audit’ to identity current staff behaviours and styles (the ‘staff’ in question appear to be discipline rather than managerial) in order ‘to identify the distance to be travelled from where the Prison Service is now to where it needs to be’ (ibid.: 134). It was proposed that this audit could easily run alongside the staff survey due to commence in the autumn of 1997.²

The review team's proposed method of identifying (with a view to changing) particular staff cultures and styles is a curious one. It is difficult to see how the richness, diversity and complexity of the social world of the prison officer can be captured through the audit process – a process normally associated with the official examination of accounts. The rationale behind such a move however is common to many other large organisations wishing to improve their performance (I will return more specifically to the issue of culture in a moment). I do not intend here to provide yet another meditation on modern forms of management (cf. Pollitt 1993; Mclaughlin and Muncie 1994) nor an overview of penal policy and prison management and organisational change within the Prison Service itself. Rather my aim is to highlight those policy and organisational issues which are of most relevance to my own research interests and contribution, in order to explore the less discussed issue of what it means to undergo these changes from the point of view of uniformed staff. I turn first of all to the rise, and impact, of ‘managerialism’.

Management, measurement and accountability

Briefly put, managerialism can be described as ‘a set of beliefs and practices, at the core of which is the assumption that better management is an effective solvent for a wide range of economic and social ills’ (Pollit 1993: 1). At the broadest level, there are a number of principles which underpin this ideology, and at the centre is the view that management is ‘the fundamental co-ordinating force’ and that managers must be ‘free to manage’ (Clarke et al. 1994: 1). Prescriptive formulae on ‘how to be a good manager’ are numerous and varied, but they commonly include ‘the need to set clear objectives, allocate resources to ensure their achievement, control costs, motivate staff and improve efficiency’ (ibid.: 5). In short, the successful organisation must be efficient and effective, and it should be run as economically as possible.

Driven by the philosophy of the ‘three Es’, Prison Service management has radically changed (see Evans 1990; Liebling and Price 2001 for useful elaborations of the service's recent management history). Oriented primarily to cutting expenditure, the Prison Department has allowed (via the Civil Service Bill 1992) the devolution of budgets to the governors of individual establishments, devised a strategy of objectives and targets for the service – measured annually by ‘Key Performance Indicators’³ (KPIs) – and quantified service delivery through a standardised process of ‘regime monitoring’ (Jones 1993). So how had all this come about?

The move towards modernisation and managerialism within the Prison Service has its roots in the early 1980s, the period following the May Inquiry which was intended as a major review of the entire prison system. It was clear from the subsequent Report of the Inquiry (Home Office 1979) that the service not only had practical problems of budget management, but was also shot through with problems concerning the proper role of prisons (and by extension the proper role of prison officers). Within the Prison Department, concerns about poor management and escalating prison costs were already being expressed, not least because of the deteriorating industrial relations discussed above, increasing prisoner unrest and an ever-expanding staffing bill. In 1986, a report commissioned by the Home Office concluded – much to the chagrin of the POA – that officers were working excessive – and unnecessary amounts of overtime. According to this report, prisons could be run safely and efficiently if officers worked on average eight hours less but with revised shift systems and working practices. The government's response, in 1987, was a new scheme called ‘Fresh Start’⁴ under which prison officers were to work without overtime but with an improved basic salary. Fresh Start had a significant impact on the service. The impact of Fresh Start on pay and attendance alone was too great for many ‘old hands’, for whom, as one of my interviewees put it:

Fresh Start was like the tide coming in. The first wave got all the old-style officers who used to virtually live in the prison. They just couldn't cope; not only did they miss the overtime money and the company, they had to spend a lot more time at home than they'd ever been used to. (Long-serving senior officer)

Before Fresh Start, many prison officers’ wives brought up their children virtually single-handed. When overtime ceased, husbands and wives were thrown together and many found that they had grown apart:

because they were at work all the time, they were suddenly finding more time to be with their family, and, it's, it's a similar thing happens in the army; people are away and they come back and they're suddenly livin’ with their family all the time … It became a matter of getting to know somebody again. (Male officer, Lancaster Farms)

Some found that they barely knew their children:

Working massive amounts of overtime brought in the money, but the downside was you never saw your kids. I still don't know my eldest – it's damaged my relationship with him, actually. (Senior officer, Garth)

Four years later, on 1 April 1993, the Prison Service became an executive agency in a move designed to give the service greater independence and a clearer sense of purpose (see POA 1991; King and McDermott 1995; Prison Service 1995; Lewis 1997 for competing views of agency status). The creation of the Prison Service Agency also brought with it an attempt to measure the performance of the service in a quantitative way. As I indicated above, each of the service's goals is now supported by one or more KPIs and each year the Secretary of State sets out the key targets⁵ in respect of each KPI, measuring the achievements of the service against them.⁶ While some have criticised the emphasis⁷ of the KPIs, others claim that the system has really focused attention on improving performance (for a succinct and interesting discussion of this, see Bryans and Wilson 1998).

One of the more visible aspects of managerialism within the Prison Service has been the privatisation or ‘contracting out’ of prison management wherever service delivery was deemed to be poor. This ‘market-testing’⁸ of the prison estate has been an important strategy for exerting pressure on individual establishments to become more economical, effective and efficient, since those prisons that fail to do so can simply be contracted out. To put it simply, ‘the explicit promise of market testing is that the public sector, goaded by the presence of the private sector, can and will improve its performance’ (Harding 1997). Many of the prison officers who participated in my research were of the view that the threat of privatisation has improved the performance of public sector prisons, and that it represented the ‘kick in the pants’ the Prison Service deserved. Relatively high costs and inadequate facilities (the practice of ‘slopping out’ was still in place until the late 1990s) are of course the more visible indicators of inefficient and ineffective prisons. There are also many less visible factors to be addressed in the improvement of prison regimes, such as the attitudes and behaviours of prison staff. It was in this context of increasing pressures to improve service delivery that the Prison Service turned its attention to the impact of staff cultures.

Occupational cultures

It has become increasingly common to hear people talk about organisational and occupational ‘cultures’. Indeed, over the past two decades an impressive array of management books and articles on the subject have been published (see, e.g., Smircich 1983; McLean and Marshall 1988; Williams et al. 1993; Fineman and Gabriel 1996), each noting the impact of occupational cultures on the performance of organisations and corporations. As a result, top levels of management in private corporations such as Abbey National and Rank Xerox attempted to identify (with a view to changing) the cultures of their own organisations, primarily to implement reform (i.e. improve performance and increase profit) but also to address issues such as staff retention and morale. The changing of informal work cultures has now become a priority in many types of organisation, with managers in both the private and public sector implementing new initiatives in recruitment, training and staff appraisal in an attempt to achieve this.

So what, precisely is ‘culture’ in this context? Culture is not easy to define. In anthropology, culture refers to the ‘way of life’ of a society or community, including codes of manners, dress, language, rituals, norms of behaviour, stock of myths and stories, customs, rituals and systems of belief. Generally speaking, definitions of culture tend to deal primarily either with the way we act or the way we think (Williams et al. 1993: 14). Writing from an organisational perspective, Williams et al. note that between these two extremes, culture has also been defined in terms of both thought and behaviour. A working definition of ‘occupational culture’ could thus be ‘the commonly shared beliefs, values and characteristic patterns of behaviour that exist within an organisation’ (ibid.: 12). Put more simply, occupational culture could be described as ‘how things are done around here’. In his study of the British police, Holdaway (1983: 134) defines occupational culture as ’ … the officers’ construction of what constitutes (and should constitute) police work i.e. what police officers think they should be doing and how they think this can best be achieved’. This pattern of meanings is historically transmitted; as people interact the norms and practices of the organisation are lived out, enforced and reinforced. The culture of an organisation has the capacity to be both a force for stability and an impediment to change. At its most fundamental, culture serves to reduce uncertainty; we draw on cultural knowledge to establish what kinds of behaviour are acceptable and how...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Setting the scene: the research in context
• 2 Research methods
• 3 Learning the rules, managing feelings: becoming a prison officer
• 4 Them and us? How officers see prisoners
• 5 Emotion and performance: the presentation of self in prisons
• 6 When things go wrong: suicide and conflict
• 7 How prison officers see their work, themselves and each other
• 8 Bringing it all back home? Stories of husbands and wives
• 9 Conclusions: doing prison work
• Appendix
• References
• Index