Forensic Psychologists

Prisons, Power, and Vulnerability

Jason Warr

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781839099625
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

This book explores how forensic psychology has come to inhabit a central unifying discursive presence in the life world of modern carceral institutions. Providing a sociological and qualitative account of forensic practitioner psychologists, the author looks both in, and alongside, the work of such practitioners to explore how they simultaneously occupy positions of power and vulnerability.

Focusing not only on how practitioners themselves come to embody a pervasive system of disciplinary expertise, but also on how they experience other forms of penal control, the book offers a novel and complete exploration of forensic psychology, the modern prison, and power.

This is an accessible text for prison practitioners, criminological and sociological researchers and forensic psychologists on the nature and reality of forensic psychological practice in the contemporary prisons of England and Wales.

Chapter 1

Introduction: Forensic Psychology and Her Majesty's Prison Service

The control of individuals, this sort of punitive penal control of individuals at the level of their potentialities, could not be performed by the judiciary itself; it was to be done by a series of authorities other than the judiciary … a whole network of institutions of surveillance and correction … the psychological, psychiatric, criminological, medical and pedagogical institutions for correction.

–Foucault (1994a, p. 57)

I think from a psychology point of view, working within a prison, you have got a range of role conflicts that you have not necessarily got in other institutions.

–Participant Forensic Psychologist

Prisons stand boldly as a totem of a state's control and dominance. Whilst the blue line of the police and the green shield of the military are also emblematic of a State's coercive potential, they still do not come close to the symbolic power of the stony morality of the prison. Those high walls and barely glimpsed barred windows shout a clear and profound message to all those who witness them. Here be power. Awful power. Yet that power is not singular. Within the prison there exists a confluence, a complex matrix, of differing forms of power designed to both restrain and constrain. Those in our society deemed to have breached the tenets of our social contract are consigned to these institutions. In England and Wales, with its neo-liberal political economy, we demand that the prison not only take these individuals and keep them away from us, the public, we also demand they remake those civic ghosts into conforming and contributing citizens. Labourers. It is within the confines of these penal monoliths that we, as a society, expect, or even demand, that prisoners be both punished and remade. Forensic psychologists have in the last two decades come to inhabit a central role in these conflicting processes. They are tasked, utilising a nascent and flawed disciplinary power, with both serving the punitive and disciplinary interests of the prisons in which they serve, and bringing about the reformation of prisoners that society demands. As a profession they have become both harbingers of change and adjuncts of penal power.

Examining how psychological power manifests within, and influences experience of, the carceral habitus allows us to gain a greater understanding of the prison as an entity and its role in our lives. However, forensic psychologists in prisons and their staff culture are overlooked in terms of contemporary prison sociology. Little is known about this specific subgroup of prison staff. Other staff groups such as prison officers (Crawley, 2004; Liebling, Price, & Shefer, 2011; Nylander, Lindberg, & Bruhn, 2011; Tait, 2011), prison governors/managers (Bennett, 2016; Bryons, 2008; Liebling & Crewe, 2013) and even prison health and drug workers (Kolind, Frank, Lindberg, & Tourunen, 2015; McDonald & Fallon, 2008; Walsh, 2009) have been subjected to an investigatory gaze the prison psychologist has not. There is a distinct lack of knowledge regarding their culture, how they interact with the wider institution, how they perform their multiple roles, how they experience the prison, and what role they play in prison's confluence of power. The aim of this book is to redress this particular lacuna of knowledge and to highlight how an examination of this staff population can tell us so much more about the contemporary prison.

Between 1992 and 2007, there was a significant increase in the demand for, and expansion of, psychological services within prisons in England and Wales. This established a psychological status quo within our modern prisons. As one prisoner in Crewe's (2009, p. 118) study of the prisoner social world noted ‘psychologists have taken over the prison in the last ten years’. Overwhelmingly, this psychological demand has been met by specialist forensic practitioners (Crighton & Towl, 2015; Towl, 2004). I bore witness to this expansion, and its consequence, first hand. As discussed in the Preface of this book in 1992, at the age of 17, I entered the prison system of England and Wales as an HMP sentenced prisoner. ¹ At that time, especially in Young Offender Institutions, the only psychologists you encountered were those who had a counselling, or a clinical, role. They were, from a prisoner's perspective, on your side. They were there to help. The very first conversation I had with a psychologist, in the dim and distant carceral past, was related to whether I was sleeping okay and if they could be of any assistance? At that time their power was minimal and reflective of other nonuniformed and health-related staff. What power they had derived from the coercive matrices of control produced by the institution itself and conferred on all those who wield keys. It was not unusual. However, the next 12 years saw psychological services shift from a minor institutional entity concerned with helping prisoners and providing the odd pretrial report to an entrenched and powerful discipline that influenced all aspects of the carceral life world.

I witnessed first hand the growth in numbers, the expansion of role, and the embedding of this professional practice into the very fibre of the contemporary prison. By the time of my parole in 2004, they were no longer a benign entity. They had become a group of staff who wielded a great deal of unchecked power. Unchecked, because unlike with other prison staff who have formal systems of check and balance to mitigate their power, there is no recourse to the power of psychology in prisons, nor is there any avoiding it. It is pervasive. So pervasive that the very discourse of forensic psychology now infuses the very narrative habitus (Fleetwood, 2016) of prisoners and shapes all aspects of their identity performance (Warr, 2019). Psychological terms have come to infest the day-to-day language and points of reference that prisoners utilise to discuss their own carceral lives (I shall return to this point). However, their power is not only pervasive but is also profound. One example I have discussed elsewhere (see Warr, 2008) was where a forensic psychologist perceived a relationship between a personal officer and myself as unhealthy (the officer accepted that I may have been telling the truth over my continuing appeals against conviction) and thus the psychologist recommended that my personal officer be reassigned. This recommendation, this act deprived me the succour of a single person within those monstrous walls who thought I may be telling the truth. The power of that psychologist went so deep that it could affect the very relationships that I could have with other staff in the prison, and shaped my penal life for many years afterwards. Their power, in only a short number of years, had infiltrated every aspect of the prison so much so that on the say so of a forensic psychologist your relationships with other prisoners and with staff, your role and activities within the prison, and your very future could be disrupted and destroyed. Psychological pronouncements carry a great deal of symbolic weight and can have devastating and unescapable consequences for prisoners, especially indeterminately sentenced prisoners.

When it came to forensic psychologists and their power within the contemporary prison, my lived experience made me an ideal candidate to conduct the research that follows. It allowed me to identify questions that needed to be explored. However, we need to be careful when it comes to how much we privilege lived experience, or insider knowledge. Over the last decade, we have seen something of a fetishisation of lived experience. It has, in some regards, come to be elevated in such a way as that it, in and of itself, can confer expertise and authority. We see, especially within the criminal justice commentariat, a wealth of people trading upon their lived experience. Of course, lived experience can provide someone with unique insight into the criminal justice system (or whatever phenomena they happen to be discussing) but it is also a double-edged sword. As I discussed in the Preface, it can imbue someone with a profound bias that is difficult to overcome and which, if care is not taken, can cloud every judgement and pronouncement they make. Furthermore, whilst the individual with lived experience may be an expert on their own subjective experience, this does not necessarily mean that person has any great insight into the lived realities of others. This extrapolation from the subjective to the general is a particular inductive danger of the lived experience fetish. We must not make the mistake of assuming that lived experience, whilst profound and important, makes anyone an expert on the realities of others or the phenomenon that they discuss. It does not. We sometimes forget this in our rush and desperate need to hear the voices of those traditionally silenced within criminal justice discourse.

However, I soon discovered that my lived experience was not unique. In every prison in England and Wales that I visited I heard the same stories being told. So much so that it became a frequent lament, a constant of the modern prison, this tale of psychologists and their power. In some regards, the forensic psychologist has become the folk devil of the modern prison and many a wary prisoner has a cautionary tale of their encounter with these maleficent and mysterious creatures. An illustrative example of this is a young man whom I met at HMYOI Neverland. ² He had been convicted over a gang-related homicide in South London. A forensic psychologist had noted that despite doing all recommended offending behaviour courses, his risk remained high, and thus they should not progress to a lower category prison, due to the fact that he maintained a close connection, and friendships, with a number of co-defendants in the prison. ³ This maintenance of relationships was perceived as maintaining gang ties.

Given that 3 of the 5 co-defendants in the prison (one of whom he shared a cell with) were family members, the implications of such a report were clear. Maintaining his relationship with those family members meant that his perceived ‘risk’ would not reduce and he would not progress through the system. Family or freedom. Those were seemingly the choices being imposed upon him. His anger at that psychologist was immediately palpable and, given that soon after showing me this report he was moved from HMYOI Neverland to a high security prison in the North of England, would be long lasting. That move, predicated on that report, will add years to that young man's time in prison. His was not a lone tale. Why would this happen? Forget for a brief moment the (at best) cultural insensitivity or (at worst) naked racism inherent to the interpretation of the life of this young man. The reason is that the proclamations of forensic psychologists can condemn these prisoners to years of extra, or even permanent, incarceration. Given that there are currently about 10,000 indeterminately sentenced prisoners in England and Wales (Ministry of Justice, 2020), forensic psychologists wield a particular, pervasive and potent power over a significant number of our prisoners.

There is a considerable need for a grounded understanding on the role and influence of forensic psychologists in prison (see Crewe, 2007; Liebling, 2004). Their power over the future lives of prisoners means that forensic psychologists have, in the eyes of many prisoners and prison staff, come to be central to an absolutist yet partial nexus of soft power (Crewe, 2007, 2009). Indeed, some forensic psychologists themselves have expressed discomfort about the changing nature of their role, the demands placed upon them, their colleagues and indeed their profession (Brown, Shell, & Cole, 2015; Crighton & Towl, 2008). Witnessing the infestation of this power into the contemporary prison, and the effects that it has on so many, left a lasting impression on me and a desire to understand both the source of their power and the influence of this professional group. Coupled to this motivation was a growing awareness that although we had some understanding of other prison staff, and how they experienced power and the institution, this particular staff group were absent from the wider story. This struck me as a glaring omission, and one I hope to redress here.

The expansion in numbers of forensic psychologists employed within our prisons is an outcome of several interrelated factors. Firstly, since 1993, the number of people being committed to prison has almost doubled (Ministry of Justice, 2020) and the number of people serving indeterminate sentences has also increased in the wake of the Criminal Justice Act of 2003 (Cavadino, Dignan, Mair, & Bennett, 2019). These factors have created greater case-loads, and thus more bureaucracy, for psychology departments throughout Her Majesty's Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS). A further factor has been an overt commitment to the ideals of public protection that have come in the wake of the 2003 Criminal Justice Act and the report into the case of Anthony Rice, a paroled life sentenced prisoner who went on to kill whilst under probation supervision (HMIP, 2006). This shift, and the corresponding expectations of the Ministry of Justice, the Parole Board and the Prison Service authorities, has impacted directly upon psychologists employed in our prisons. The duties and procedures of risk-monitoring, risk-assessment, and programme delivery have now overtly supplemented existing responsibilities for the majority of psychologists employed in our prisons. In 2011, the development of an Offender Personality Disorder pathway (NOMS, 2015) involving both the Ministry of Justice and the Department of Health also involved some changes to psychological practice in prisons – especially the Psychologically Informed Planned Environments. These changes in ethos and practice have affected the nature and level of work faced by psychologists in prisons and have directly resulted in a new range of occupational, institutional, and individual pressures.

Fitzgibbon (2007), as well as Towl (2004), have noted the importance of understanding both the risk-assessment process that is central to modern penal practice (Litwack & Schlesinger, 1999; O'Malley, 2005) and the impact that it has on those who are responsible for administering it. It is inevitable that an increased and altered workload, set against the backdrop of a constrained and austerity focused prison, will impact on the occupational and professional lives of those psychologists who work there. Further to these issues is the continuing ‘bad press’ that psychologists working within the prison system of England and Wales and their ‘treatment industry’ receive through the national prisoner newspapers Inside Time and ConVerse.

The almost constant negative rhetoric and vitriol contained within these pages, which often relates to the folk devil status I mentioned earlier, can be both incredibly personal and intense. Given the nature of psychological power in the prison and the numbers subject to it, this is perhaps understandable. However, at the time that this research began, many psychologists felt besieged by the negativity that was being directed towards them (Maruna, 2011; Warr, 2008). For every one of those stories reproduced in those papers, there is a personal referent – a forensic psychologist who is being excoriated. Many felt they were under personal attack. Many felt that their work was misunderstood, misrepresented, and much maligned. As one noted

I feel like they are deliberately trying to undermine not only what we do, but the skills and expertise we have, by attacking us personally and … that's not fair as we can't answer back.

Another noted that reading such stories in print made them feel ‘vulnerable’ and ‘got at’. This is a situation that has, in some senses, only been compounded as critiques of the ‘treatment industry’ have become more profound and vociferous. In October 2019, a former Director General of the Prison Service, Sir Martin Narey, publicly attacked the ‘treatment industry’ that had overtaken British prisons. ⁴ This garnered a great deal of backlash by forensic psychologists and others on varying social media sites.

However, there were other factors that seemed to play a significant part in this sense of vulnerability. Right at the start of this research, at a wine soaked social function, I was introduced to a former forensic psychologist who had recently left the Prison Service. After some awkward conversation (the person who introduced us said that I was ‘investigating you lot’ … thanks!) the psychologist explained that they had left the service after being stalked by a married uniformed officer. They noted that, although this was an extreme circumstance, it was nevertheless an extension of their wider experiences of the uniformed body. Experiences that were tainted with sexism, misogyny, bullying, and harassment. At the time I thought this was an extreme example. However, soon after, another former prison employed psychologist who I met at a conference, also relayed a number of negative and related experiences with uniformed members of staff, across a number of prisons, that had resulted in them also leaving the Prison Service for private practice. These experiences, which were rapidly corroborated by those I interviewed, made me aware that work place relationships, and the dynamics which underpinned them, were indeed one of the defining factors in how individuals perceived their role and professional life. They also played a significant part in an overarching ontological vulnerability that many psychologists felt.

This factor highlights that though wielders of incredible power these psychologists also felt vulnerable within the context of the prison. They seemed to occupy mutually exclusive positions – being both central to a wide reaching, pervasive, unchecked, and inescapable penal power whilst simultaneously being vulnerable and powerless. How can such a situation be explained? This question highlights the need to understand this population, their experiences, and how they manage their carceral employment in far greater depth than has hitherto been achieved. This question forms the foundation for this book.

Despite these concerns being both evident and a source of much discussion between practitioners, much of the literature surrounding forensic psychology, which is largely practitioner-authored, misses this. This extant, and increasingly exhaustive, literature tends to fall into two broad categories. The first focuses largely on the development, mechanics, and tools of risk-assessment, programme delivery, training, and creating rehabilitative ways of working (e.g., Clarke, Simmonds, & Wydall, 2004; Friendship, Blud, Erikson, & Travers, 2002; Mann, Howard, & Tew, 2018; Mann & Riches, 1999 etc.). Even a critical text like Bad Psychology: How Forensic Psychology Left Science Behind (Forde, 2018), which is an excoriating exploration of forensic psychology in the United Kingdom, largely falls into this category. The second comprises evidence-based investigations into both the efficacy of varying assessments, programmes, interventions, and the best practice for their delivery (Adler & Gray, 2010; Andrews & Bonta, 2003; Clarke et al., 2004; Friendship et al., 2002). What has been lacking from this academic discourse is any in-depth, sociological, and generative studies which focus upon the practitioners themselves, their role in the contemporary prison, their motivations, their perspective on their relationships with the prisoners whom they assess, and the impact of the environment and work on their emotional selves. Brown et al. (2015) in their book Forensic Psychology: Theory, Research, Policy and Practice and the Ministry of Justice's (2018) promotional videos exploring the experience of forensic psychological work in prisons come closest to addressing some of these issues. However, as the Brown text is introductory many of these issues are only afforded a brief examination and the MoJ videos are promotional and thus of limited value. Therefore, it remains the case that, in both the practitioner and wider psychological and criminological literature, the experiences of the psychologists themselves have had limited attention. There is still a need to understand how forensic psychologists in the employ of the Prison Service ⁵ experience their professional world.

Given this need, the core aim of the research was to explore the following questions: firstly, how is psychological power formulated, what...