Professor Alison Liebling, Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Director of the Prisons Research Centre, Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge — written evidence (PRI0032)

The Committee’s questions:

• Purpose of prisons
• Prisoner experiences (and what they can tell us about prison culture / leadership)
• International comparisons - how helpful is it to look at other jurisdictions
• Learning from best practice in England
• Leadership and the role of governors

I have carried out research in prisons continuously since 1986 (just before Fresh Start) and have witnessed, or evaluated, many of the changes and developments in prison cultures, staffing, leadership and management over that time, including seeing both improvement and decline.

1. Purpose

The current statement of purpose is appropriate and well-liked:

[His] Majesty's Prison Service serves the public by keeping in custody those committed by the courts. Our duty is to look after them with humanity and help them lead law-abiding and useful lives in custody and after release.

The problem is measuring the achievement of these goals (e.g. humanity) in practice.

The score for humanity (using the MQPL) needs to be around 3.24 for a prison to feel ‘survivable’. A score of 2.80 or lower indicates an extremely elevated risk of violence. What I call ‘concern for life and personhood’ is too low (Liebling, under review).

In a study exploring MQPL scores in 518 prison cases between 2009 and 2019, only 8.3 per cent of cases (43) of 518 reached the safe enough threshold (generating the lowest levels of violence) on humanity (Auty and Liebling 2023). The mean score for all surveyed prisons on humanity dipped significantly from 2013, reaching a low of 2.69 in 2017.

Outstanding prisons, which prisoners describe as ‘oases’, attract scores of 3.45-65.

The Indian Prison Services uses stronger language of personhood, rights, and limits to suffering:

The Supreme Court of India in its judgements on various aspects of prison administration, has laid down three broad principles regarding imprisonment and custody.

Firstly, a person in prison does not become a non-person. Secondly, a person in prison is entitled to all human rights within the limitations of imprisonment. Lastly, there is no justification for aggravating the suffering already inherent in the process of incarceration.

This language of personhood is significant.

Suffering (as measured by an MQPL item, ‘life in this prison involves a great deal of suffering’) is inversely related to positive change but positively related to suicide (range of agreement 64% - 23%):

Excessive, unintelligible, or gratuitous suffering does not lead to repentance but to a sense of victimhood, grievance, and moral corrosion. When punishment is ‘contemptuous’ - when it is disrespectful or when it treats offenders as incapable of reform - it undermines its own stated aims. It becomes an ‘obstacle to’ reform (Hoskins 2013: 8). Excessive and degrading punishments defy justice, but also have counterproductive effects, generating suffering and anger, fuelling a sense of injustice, and inhibiting repentance or moral growth (Liebling, under review).

‘Unbearable psychological suffering’ kills the human spirit and is not an appropriate aim of imprisonment. A study of euthanasia requests from prisoners in Belgium found that it can result from incoherent prison legislation as well as from aspects of the prison environment (Devynck 2021). Feeling regret is a more appropriate aspiration and may be more likely to come about in I-Thou prison climates (see below).

2. Prisoner experience

Synthesising my work on prison suicides, staff-prisoner relationships, and changing form of order in prisons over a number of years, I show that prisons with indifferent or aggressive I-It cultures generate distress, anger and violence among prisoners. Prisoners in these prisons are treated as ‘experienced objects’. Prisons with person-centred, I-Thou cultures facilitate personal development and growth. In these prisons, prisoners are treated as ‘experiencing subjects’. The best of these prisons, or wings, often have specialist functions (e.g. Rye Hill, Grendon), additional professional (e.g. psychological) support and training (e.g. PIPES, KUF training), or long histories of creative or positive work (e.g. Warren Hill). Others do not (e.g. Oakwood) but their regimes are hard earned and intentionally led.

Prisoners describe the differences between outstanding prisons and the rest as like the contrast between ‘oases’ and ‘deserts’. The oases are resonant and life-affirming. They are not lax or chaotic. Staff are doing the same job differently, with professional confidence, combining the confident use of authority with high engagement in the future potential of prisoners (Liebling 2023). The outcomes are significantly better.[1]

At the same time, changes to sentence lengths, to the administration of sentences, and attitudes towards risk, have created major losses to perceived legitimacy and hope system-wide. Better ‘flow’ through the sentence is needed. Creating an expert case management team to identify and assist over-categorised and stuck, post-tariff prisoners would relieve the system of many whose experience is unnecessarily damaging.

3. Learning from experience in England

Better understanding is needed of exceptional prisons, best practice, improvement trajectories (both for prisons and prisoners), and of the cost/staffing thresholds below which prisons become impossible to operate safely (e.g. following rebids). This needs to be established empirically.

The role prison officers play in creating order in prisons, as well as bringing about change in prisoners, is underappreciated by policy leaders, if not by prisoners. Better training and working conditions are urgently required. Establishing the location and causes of high job satisfaction/retention would be helpful. Staff working in well operating enabling environments, for example, report high job satisfaction.

New prisons are too large, often fill too quickly, and bring huge operational challenges. The financial model does not allow staff recruitment to take place early enough in the process. There needs to be greater expertise developed in designing and opening new prisons, and on transitions between operators. There is insufficient learning from experience in private prisons, in part due to competition.

Further thinking about the role, organisation and funding of research in supporting best practice learning (something akin to the Research and Advisory Group on the Long-Term Prison System, 1984-1995) is needed.

4. Leadership

Outstanding Governors, Directors, Deputy Directors, and senior management teams are essential to well-operating prisons. They come in different guises. Everyone knows who they are. For example:

What I love about this prison is … I believe in the Governors in here. It’s the first time I’ve had that. I never felt human, in 20 years in other prisons. Here, I’ve got hope, emotions, a future. I feel human. (Prisoner, Rye Hill, March 2024, in Liebling under review; emphasis added)

The best governors have strength of character, humanity, good judgment, organisational flair, they use security as a means to constructive ends, and they are capable of taking tough decisions in the interests of safety. They tend to be ‘Loving Strict’ (Stewart 2023: 295). Some grow into the role, under skilled senior line managers, so where Governors or Directors are outstanding, they can often grow good successors.

An outstanding prison governor in Whitemoor 1, for example, worked out that in order to improve order and legitimacy in his traumatised prison following some high-profile escapes, he had to maximise both security and staff-prisoner relationships at the same time (excerpt below from Liebling, under review:):

Not ‘find a balance’ between them but realise the greatest achievable or workable amount of each. He was one of the best Governors in the organisation. The most effective officers in his prison were:

… very good at drawing boundaries. They can tell prisoners what to do without getting aggressive. It is a non-coercive style. They can challenge people in a non-threatening way. [Example officer] doesn’t allow prisoners to draw him across boundaries. He is quite consistent, very confident, his manner is non-threatening. He draws his lines quite firmly, but he is also good at calming situations down. He has good rapport. (Clinical psychologist, on officers, Whitemoor 1, fieldwork notes).

They were ‘calm’, ‘proactive’, could ‘manage situations’, said ‘no, face-to-face’, they ‘listened’, ‘talked’, sometimes had ‘a dry personality’, which prisoners ‘seemed to like’. They were ‘matter of fact’, ‘happy to be in and around prisoners, discussing issues – even heated ones’. They took responsibility, didn’t ‘raise his voice’, ‘brought them down in the right way’, and looked after people ‘without making a big thing of it’. They were ‘perceptive’, and ‘never had a bad day’. For example:

She is very levelling, talks to them well. She takes the sting out a situation – gives a kind of relief. She knows the wing. She’s optimistic - her disposition is cheerful. I have only seen it in a few staff in my time (Physical Education Instructor, on a colleague, fieldwork notes).

The Prison Service has been fortunate to have attracted these kinds of personalities or qualities into its organisation over many years. These able leaders tend to grow new outstanding leaders. The Prison Service needs to become the kind of organisation such staff want to work in (e.g. competent, creative, rewarding, values-driven). Looking at the number of applications for different Governing positions would be telling.

Directors in private sector prisons tend to be able to work with more flair and flexibility. They often leave the public sector in frustration.

There are too few outstanding Governors and several have been burned out by the impossible operating environment. Prisons are becoming too large for leaders to manage effectively.

References

Auty, K., Liebling, A. (2023) ‘What is a ‘good enough’ prison? An empirical analysis of key thresholds using prison moral quality data’, European Journal of Criminology, 21(5): 725-753.

Auty, K., & Liebling, A. (2020). ‘Exploring the Relationship between Prison Social Climate and Reoffending’. Justice Quarterly, 37 (2), 358-381.

Devynck C. (2021). Imprisonment and mental suffering. Euthanasia requests by prisoners [PhD in criminology]. Vrije Universiteit Brussel (unpublished)

Liebling, A. (manuscript under review) Aristotle’s Prison: A Search for Humanity and Justice

Liebling, A. (2023) ‘The moral value of authority: Reflections on the work of prison officers’ in H. Arnold, R. Ricciardelli and M. Hancock (Eds) Prison Officers: International Perspectives on Prison Officer Work Palgrave: 27-56.

Stewart, R. (2023) Politics on the Edge: A Memoir from Within Penguin.

Williams, R. and Liebling, A. (2022) ‘Do prisons cause radicalisation? Order, leadership, political charge and violence in two maximum security prisons’, British Journal of Criminology https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azab122

January 2025